Talismans Goes Indie

I suppose it’s time for a long overdue update. Find a comfy chair because we might be here a minute. There have been a lot of huge changes over the last several months for the Talismans of Teregrin Series and me as an author.

So…I’ll start at the beginning.

In January of this year, I parted ways with my publisher. I can’t really go into why, but we both felt that the switch was the best option for me to accomplish my vision for the books. Up until this point, I’d never put becoming a fully indie, self-published author on the table for a few reasons.

1.) Self-publishing is unbelievably expensive. Quality editing comes at a cost, as does exceptional cover art. Many self-published authors also invest in formatting software, premium packages with sites like Canva, and ads on various platforms. I did not have the funding support for such an endeavor.

2.) Self-publishing means you handle everything yourself. While the creative control can be fun, figuring out which publishing gods you must appease to get your books set up and processed can be incredibly stressful. You decide on your retailers and how to get ISBNs. You’re responsible for formatting everything and listing on the retailer sites correctly. And if you’re working with other people (editors and artists, for instance), you may be constantly checking in to make sure they’re on schedule. I had no interest in running everything behind the scenes. I just wanted to write and was okay with promoting.

3.) Self-publishing doesn’t provide the same sense of external validation you get when an agent or a publishing house offer to sign you. That’s not to say there isn’t any. Aside from a strong sense of internal belief in your book, great indie authors employ beta readers and editors who can also offer praise and support that validates an author’s story. Ultimately, though, I wanted a team behind me that had some stake in the success of my books.

However, things change.

After three years with my small press, I was no longer in the exact same situation. So, as our discussions turned toward the possibility of taking my books indie, I analyzed the feasibility. At the time, four of the five books had already been published, and the fifth book had just gone through sub edits. So, as far as republishing the books went, I would have considerably less to do. The first four books could be tweaked to reflect the change in ownership and reuploaded. They didn’t need any further editing, simply new covers.

At this point, I’d also amassed a decent number of reviews and gathered a faithful audience, so the validation and support would be there for me to finish the project. When I learned I could work with KDP to transfer my reviews to the new listings, the prospect felt less like a huge leap and more like picking up where I left off. But, spoiler alert, it was still a huge leap because one very important thing remained unchanged about my situation.

I still didn’t have the funding.

To go indie, I would need to come up with five book covers, when one alone is often a considerable expense. I also needed to put the finale through copy edits because, while I taught English and grammar for seven years, I fully believe in the value of outside eyes on a manuscript. Over the last year, my previous editor had helped me fix up the fourth book, though she had moved on to another job, and she agreed to help me finish the fifth book, to my great relief, as long as she could go at a slower pace. But that still left me in a pickle for the covers.

I’m vehemently against generative AI, especially in creative spaces, so it was important to me that a real, human artist would design the covers. On top of that, the themes within the Talismans of Teregrin Series made that desire an absolute necessity.

In the series, Gemma and Oliver face the prospect of losing their humanity while on the isolated Island of Agemo. The laboratory that gifted them with experimental powers supposedly wants to turn them into super soldiers without human inhibitions, and the device they use to accomplish that result involves burning off a person’s humanizing emotions, such as love, empathy, and compassion. And therein lies an important theme that our true strength and power come from our ability to feel, something AI can never do. And this ability to feel emotion, especially empathy, is what unites us as people.

Aside from asking for an investment, I had one other thought. If the covers in and of themselves would be of worth to an artist, then we both could get something out of their creation. However, the only kind of artist who would find value in such a thing would be an unestablished one, someone who had the skills but needed the opportunity. Someone who wanted an art career as much as I wanted a writing one. Someone who would benefit from professional samples for a portfolio and my own recommendation and reference letter for art school or an employer.

As I said before, I taught middle school and high school for seven years.

During that time, I had more than one student wow me with artistic abilities I couldn’t begin to fathom. Real teens had the skills, but how many had ever had an opportunity like this? The idea hit me like a freight train. It excited me in ways I could never explain. Because, just like human art goes so well with my themes about humanity and emotion, ordinary teens rising to the occasion to do extraordinary things fits the core of what Talismans is.

Who better to send the message that you can do hard things (without AI) to my young adult audience than real teens?

One of my closest friends from college was an art major who went on to become an art teacher, so I reached out to ask about the possibility. To my delight, she got as excited about the idea as I did, simply advising that I switch to covers that featured objects, rather than people, something I already wanted to do, as symbols better capture the heart of my stories. We put a plan in motion. I came up with the symbols I felt would best represent each of the five books, and then her art students submitted however many they finished over the next month. While the project was an assignment, the decision to let me use their art was the students’ choice. At the end of the month, I picked my favorites from four different artists and formally requested the use of their sketches, and they all signed a release agreeing to the opportunity.

There was just one problem. These sketches were not covers. I still needed a graphic designer or cover artist to turn them into covers.

Enter: my brother, a math professor at a liberal arts university in Michigan. He suggested that someone in the graphic design program might need to fulfill a final project requirement. And he was right. Matthew Tollar, a senior, took the project and has done a phenomenal job.

Working with a college student meant an artist with the skills I needed but not the experience. It meant accepting a slower schedule as he balanced his classes and other responsibilities, and it also meant providing him with the necessary resources and figuring out how things worked together, since I’m new to this too! It took a lot of trial and error to decide on fonts, placement, imagery, colors…but he was absolutely exceptional at repeatedly tweaking each draft until we got it right. My author friend Ani Birch (Iggy’s Voyage Trilogy, MG Fantasy), who does a lot of art herself, was beyond instrumental in helping us figure out many of those tweaks.

It took about five months to get here, but the end results were worth the wait. The teens have been so excited to see the final products, and in some ways, that has been more meaningful to me than finally seeing the covers I always dreamed of for these books I love so much. As I’m writing this post, the first four books are once again available in e-book with their new covers. I still have some issues with the paperback versions, but I will post another update once those have been resolved. The finale has a tentative publishing date near the end of June.

Thank you for your support for me, this series, and the teens who have helped me bring it back to life:

The talismans ~ The Talismans of Teregrin ~ Brynn, 17 years old

Fire and ice ~ The Firebreather’s Curse ~ Bethany, 17 years old

Test tubes ~ The Menace of the Morphers ~ Ava, 17 years old

Trackers ~ The Door of Hope or Peril ~ Shelley, 16 years old

The stopwatch ~ The Trials of Agemo ~ Bethany, 17 years old