Welcome!
Welcome to Sarah Fryer Writes! The main objectives of this website and the correlating social media sites are to document my journey of taking my book idea from rough draft to publishing and to generate some interest to sell the book down the road! I am hoping to write many more books along the way because the writing process for my 40,000-word manuscript reminded me of how much I love to write and how much I feel it should be a bigger part of my story.
I also love writing shorter works like blog posts, and this will be home for those going forward. Some posts will be related to this journey and others will be about life in general.
Below are some questions you may have with the answers. If you have any more, please put them in the comments and I’ll answer them too!
How often do I plan to post blog posts? I’m hoping to post an average of one per week.
Will the social media pages just be sharing these posts? The social media pages may share these posts at times (especially this first one to get it out there), but I plan to also do some fun posts on there about expectations to generate a little bit of interest in the topic.
What is my book about/what genre is it? My first book is about expectations and expecting God to move after facing many unmet expectations in this world. It is a nonfiction Christian book.
Will I stay with this genre long term? Only time will tell. I will say, I started writing a Christian fiction book last year, and I plan to finish it, but it has been a much slower process for me to get that rough draft anywhere. Nonfiction writing came a lot more naturally to me. I wrote the very rough draft for the Christian Nonfiction book in about seven weeks during summer break.
I always thought I’d write fiction, and definitely not Christian genre books. I am a Christian, but I’m aware that the genre limits my scope of reach. I was also worried I would have to go to seminary before I could feel okay writing about my experience as a Christian, but thankfully, I have read many other Christian works that have encouraged me. All that to say, when I decided to write a book to submit to a contest this summer, God laid this idea on my heart and following His ideas have worked out much better for me than my own, so we will see what He has for me going forward!
Where am I at in the process of my first book? I have a working title, all of my chapters with descriptions, a synopsis, a working author bio, and a 40,000-word rough draft. The next step is for me to read through it and do some editing. This part is tedious to me because reading your own work is rough. I’m usually too hard on myself but miss the little issues because I know what I was trying to say or know the story I am trying to tell. I hope I can resist the urge to cut the vulnerable parts because I know those are what people connect with the most. I think the next step after that will be trying to find beta readers to give general feedback or going straight to having an editor review it. I’m still figuring it out as I go.
How will I publish the book? I would love to go the traditional publishing route, but I’ve found through research that I would need a huge social media following before the big publishers would even look at my manuscript. Even a smaller publisher would need to see some type of interest, which is part of the reason I started this part of the journey. There are hybrid publishers that do much of the work for you, but you have to pay to have your book published this way. It’s more of a money investment where self-publishing is a bigger time investment. So, as of right now, I plan to try the traditional route for a little while after getting the manuscript ready. If that doesn’t work, I’ll weigh the hybrid and self-publishing options. I plan to blog and post on social media along the way.
I’m excited to see where this goes from here. Thank you for joining me on this journey!