The Saddest Sentence

by Kathy Izard

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Almost fifteen years ago, I made a New Year’s Eve resolution that in the coming year I would write something longer than an email. It was too bold to dream that I might write a whole book, so I kept my ambitions small, believing I might settle for a few chapters.

But a funny thing happened on my way to chasing that book dream: I discovered I loved writing. It wasn’t just the storytelling, it was the crafting of an actual book. What is the best way to tell the story? How do you develop an arc in nonfiction when you can’t just make up scenes? Which pieces of the story should you include and which are just taking up space on the page?

What I didn’t yet understand was that once I finished my manuscript, the most difficult part was yet to begin: publishing. Finding an agent, building a platform, and writing proposals — all were more complicated tasks than writing the actual book. At one point, it seemed too daunting and I remember thinking every aspiring author’s saddest sentence: “I will never get a book deal.” So I put the manuscript away even though the dream stayed in the back of my mind.

Eventually, I dragged the pages back out and began asking new questions. How do you get your words in the world without an agent or a Big Five book deal? What’s a hybrid publisher? How do you independently publish a good book with no typos?  It turns out there are so many answers to those questions and so many ways to make your book dream a reality. My mistake was believing that I needed permission from a traditional publisher to continue. Yes, a book contract from a traditional publisher is one way to become a published author, but it is far from the only way.

I have now published five books (two with book contracts, three without) and met so many authors who, like me, almost quit. All of us have stories of rejection and frustration from a system that is a business — which means publishing houses need writers who will make them money. Sometimes this means a fantastic, well-crafted story wins the book contract lottery. More often these days, it means someone who already has thousands of followers from their movie-star face or viral TikTok video gets a book deal even though they use a ghostwriter.

But if you stay with it long enough, you realize your readers don’t care how you published. I have never once been asked at a book signing, “Who was your publisher?” What readers care about are your words, how they made them feel, and what you are writing next. They don’t care how you published; they care that you did because it meant your ideas reached them and your words mattered.

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