The Long Road of Self-Publishing

Posted by NOOK Press × August 19, 2014 

YA author and blogger Lorca Damon shares her perspective on self-publishing and how it can (sometimes) be about more than just selling books. Her experience as a parent inspired and informed the writing of her book, Knowing Autism. But the path to writing the book she knew she had needed as a parent wasn’t always an easy journey…


The Long Road of Self-Publishing
When I found out my daughter is severely autistic, I did what any normal person would do: I raced to the bookstore for information. Unfortunately, the book I wanted wasn’t there, mostly because it had never been written. I didn’t need a reference book to understanding the theory or history of autism, and the only personal memoirs were pie-in-the-sky stories from people who had the wealth to hire their own teams of therapists to work with their children in their homes. I live in rural Alabama, and we just got a Publix grocery store this year; it’s a pretty safe bet that we didn’t have the kinds of therapies that were listed in those books.

So I wrote my own book for parents based on information I learned in the first few years of my daughter’s life. It was filled with step-by-step instructions on how we handled potty training, how we introduced new foods into her very limited diet, and even how we took vacations. It discussed the things that did and did not work. Sure, I vented a lot of frustration, too, but I hope I also armed people with information and a little bit of humor.

I never even queried the book to agents or publishers because it was so unlike anything that the industry was producing at the time. When self-publishing opened the doors to whole new types of writing, I threw my book up on all the platforms and waited to see if anyone bought it.
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