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Hey Rebekah!

Great questions. My personal opinion for some time has been that I think a number of writers feel a need to publish a lot sooner than they need to–or than it’s necessarily wise to do so. Truth be told, there’s no rush to get published and if the additional time allows you to better hone your craft and put together a smashing first novel, that’s time well spent. Daeus gets into this idea some in a post he did on the topic a while back on our blog: https://storyembers.org/are-you-publishing-your-book-too-soon/

You can definitely build a platform without social media as long as you have a website to direct people to so you can begin building a mailing list by offering subscribers some free digital bonus–whether an exclusive short story, a checklist, or something else you think your audience will like–whenever they subscribe to your newsletter. Email lists are one of the best marketing tools out there, so I would make sure you have that in place as you work on getting published on another sites (which is another solid practice!).

Brandon Sanderson wrote a number of books before he got the first one published–and many of his later books were ones he’d written earlier (although some of them were significantly revised pre-publication to better reflect where he was at that point as an author). Kara Swanson, who’s our marketing strategist here and who just published her first novel Dust with Enclave yesterday, also had written a number of books before she published Dust! In fact, she’d attribute some of her success in landing a literary agent & publisher to the diverse book concepts and works she had that she could shop around to them. Traditional publishing and self-publishing are certainly different venues, but there are definitely authors who have followed that approach!