Sky Bounce was almost picked up in the mid-1990’s by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. After writing the story, getting critiques from colleagues, and revising, I sent the manuscript unsolicited to about five publishers. (I had been submitting stories to publishers without success ever since high school.) A seasoned editor at Atheneum, Jean E. Karl, said Sky Bounce was good but needed work. She offered to reconsider it for publication if I revised. She and I corresponded for a year, during which time I gave her three revisions. After the third revision, she said she believed the story was now good enough to be published, but she had to get a consensus from the other editors and the editorial director at Atheneum. After waiting another year, I was told by Karl that the consensus was no. She said the reasons were that I was an unknown author and young adult fantasy was not something publishers were seeking because young adults were reading the adult fantasy books. (This was, of course, before the Harry Potter mania hit and the adults started reading the young people’s fantasy books.) It was the biggest disappointment of my life at the time.

In the year that I revised the book for Karl, I developed tendonitis in both wrists from typing all day at my job as a technical writer and typing all evening as I rewrote sections of Sky Bounce. I was driven to work on Sky Bounce because I had someone waiting for it and I wanted to have a career as an author more than anything, so I ignored the discomfort in my wrists until it became pain. It got so bad that the only thing I could do was take a very long break from typing. So by the time Karl told me she thought the story was good enough to be published, I had left my job as a technical writer and started working as a live-in nanny, taking a large pay cut. During the year that I waited for Atheneum’s decision, I took care of two wonderful kids, but the nanny position was more exhausting than my office job had been, so I didn’t do much new writing, although I had ideas for a Sky Bounce sequel and other stories. I pinned all my hopes on Atheneum, seeing publication as the key step toward earning a living as an author.

So the rejection devastated me. In two years of playing the carrot-and-stick game with Atheneum, I had injured my wrists, gotten my income slashed back, and been obliged to trade my own living space for lodging at my employers’ house during the week and my parents’ house during the weekend. But these sacrifices had not earned me publication, only a worse quality of life. I believed Sky Bounce was improved, though, so I promptly started sending query letters to other publishers and agents. Most told me not to send the manuscript, and the few who did want to read it ended up rejecting it. Ironically, the aspects they criticized were exactly the changes I’d made based on Karl’s advice. For example, they said it didn’t have enough richness of detail, but Karl had instructed me to go through it and cut out any details that weren’t absolutely necessary, and she’d been pleased with the result. I concluded that what makes a good book is all subjective, and as long as you’re an unpublished unknown, everyone will find something wrong with your work. Still, based on the feedback I was getting, it seemed that Sky Bounce was no better than it had been two years ago, and that was what really made me bitter.

I became very discouraged and depressed and sank glumly into the role of the temperamental artist, throwing away every single story I’d ever written, including all my copies of Sky Bounce and even the original files on disk. (Back then I had a word processor, so there were no copies left on a computer hard drive.) I gave the last copy of Sky Bounce to a lady as a gift. She was a woman of the highest status in a spiritual group that my family belonged to, and since her opinion counted a lot, I was hopeful that she’d give me some words of encouragement. I think she only read some of the first chapter, and English wasn’t even her first language, but her feedback was that I should pursue something other than writing. When she wasn’t around, I took the last copy of Sky Bounce back and angrily tossed it up a tree.

Luckily, that wasn’t the last copy after all. Once my rampage had subsided, my mother told me she had saved her copy of Sky Bounce. She gave the copy to me only after I promised not to throw it away. I set it aside and accepted a job as a technical editor because it didn’t require as much typing as technical writing did, although my wrists had healed. My experience with Atheneum had taken the fun out of book writing for me; it had made me feel like no matter how much I revised, nothing I wrote was ever good enough. So I didn’t have the heart to work on Sky Bounce anymore or write new books. I tried to forget about my dream of being an author and just focus on my day job, which often encroached on my evenings and weekends anyway.

But the writer in me still needed an outlet, so songs came to me, unbidden. I’d never had any interest in writing songs before, but now I did write them. I think it was the songwriting that led me back to book writing. Years passed, I wrote a self-help book for ridiculed kids and teens (which I eventually self-published), and I took Sky Bounce out of its drawer and started working on it again. I had a pattern of doing some revising, putting it away for a long time, then taking it out and revising some more. I came to realize that in my haste to get the book accepted by Atheneum, I had made some changes that were good for the book and some that were bad. So some of the revisions for Karl had to be undone.

I got critiques from colleagues and edited the book. The manuscript was ready to submit to publishers again, but by that time it had been about ten years since I’d started working on Sky Bounce. Most publishers didn’t even look at unsolicited manuscripts anymore, and agents seemed just as unapproachable: I’d contacted a bunch of them about my self-help book and they hadn’t been interested, despite the many positive reviews that book had accumulated. Young adult fantasy was back in favor, and who knew how long that would last? Submitting Sky Bounce to traditional publishers and agents again would mean a delay of more years. I decided that ten years had been long enough. The book was ready to go, and I wanted to get it out there, so I submitted it to Bookmice.com, a small e-publisher that could give it a fast turnaround. Bookmice accepted it for publication as an e-book and print-on-demand paperback, but before Bookmice got a chance to publish Sky Bounce, the company went out of business. So I decided to go with my last choice: self-publishing.

I put the book through another review cycle with colleagues, did final editing and proofreading, formatted the file, found an artist and worked closely with her as well as with the cover designer and printer, and oversaw the whole process down to the last detail, spending a large chunk of my savings on pre-production, printing, and marketing costs. I still had a day job, so I did these activities in the evenings and weekends, and I also took two weeks of vacation to devote to the project.

But my personal sacrifices are not why I believe Sky Bounce is worth reading. I think it’s worth reading because the assumptions that are often made about self-published books aren’t true about this book.

People assume that self-published books are stories that were not good enough to be picked up by traditional publishers. Sky Bounce was good enough to be published back in the mid-1990’s, and Karl said so. And I believe the story is better now.

People also assume that self-published books are written by authors who are too lazy to approach agents and publishers. When you have to do everything yourself, from publication to the time-consuming marketing that comes afterward, you are not being lazy. The easy route is having a publisher do all that for you while you start on a new book. The easy route is seeing your book get reviewed in the major review publications after your publisher has taken care of the publishing and marketing, not seeing your book get ignored by the major review publications after you’ve worked hard doing the publishing and marketing all by yourself.

Finally, people assume that self-published books are not put through the type of quality control process that traditionally published books undergo. As this personal account illustrates, Sky Bounce definitely went through a quality control process - one that nearly killed the book!

Deanna Miller - 12th May 2003