Path to Publishing
What I Wish I Knew Sooner
As a bookkeeper, January is always the busiest time of year for me. It has only been now, as we approach what feels like our 365th day of January, that I have time again to write and focus on my books.
2026 is going to be an exciting year. My short horror story “The Gray Mare” will be published in A Wisconsin Harvest of Horror anthology and will be available March 3rd 2026! (stay tuned for details) Even more exciting, my debut novel, A New Witch in the Northwoods, will be available through Ten 16 Press this FALL 2026! It’s going to be whirlwind year and I am excited for all the adventures to come!
Gearing up for the year ahead and reflecting over the New Year on how all these things came to be, I wanted to share a few insights I have gained through my haphazard path to publishing in the hopes it might prove useful to those interesting in sharing their stories one day.
I have always been a writer. On and off throughout high school, and then college, and then through my first “real” job, I worked on a high fantasy trilogy that I finally decided was finished and ready to publish in 2017. I was a grant writer at the time for a horse rescue, so I quickly looked up “query letter” on the internet, found a tutorial on how to write a query letter and sent it out to a bunch of agents. I was certain the book would be picked up immediately and I would have a best seller in no time!
It turns out, when I looked up “query letter” the tutorial I found was for a non-fiction query, so I sent out my fantasy book to agents with a marketing plan and an author platform! No wonder no one responded to me! For the next several years, I continued to write other books and slowly, still via the internet, figure out what a query letter for a fantasy book should look like and learn more about the publishing industry.
My next finished manuscript after that was nearly 250,000 words! It took me several months to realize how incredibly long that was, especially for a debut author. Looking back now at how much I struggled to acquire good, useful knowledge about publishing a book, I can’t believe how much time I wasted. At the time, it didn’t feel like a struggle. It was fun and exciting and slowly, piece by piece, in an extremely haphazard way, I was learning more.
I finally started to see results and feel like I was “getting somewhere” as I writer when two things happened:
1. I started to treat writing as a job.
2. I joined a writers association.
Writing is work. Much like going to the gym, if you are consistent and put in the effort, you are going to start seeing the results. For many years before, I was haphazardly throwing my book around just wishing that someone would pick it up. My main strategy was basically hinging around luck. The second I started to approach my writing career with clear goals and intentions, when I started to properly educate myself, and set aside dedicated time to not only write, but also to learn and build up the business side of being an author, things started happening.
It took me until 2023 to join a writers association and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t think to join one sooner. Joining the Wisconsin Writers Association kickstarted my journey by providing all sorts of avenues to gain the writing and industry knowledge I had been painfully piecing together on my own for years before that. The access to virtual learning groups and in person conferences quickly stepped up my knowledge base.
My path to becoming a writer is one in which every time I take a step forwards, I look back and marvel that I thought the path had ended three steps ago. Just as soon as I thought I had it all figured out, I would learn something knew that made me realize I still knew very little about what I was trying to do! Thanks to all of the writing camps and conferences, monthly zoom meetings and seminars, I am starting to feel confident about what being a writer and having a published book means.
The biggest part of this journey was deciding what being a “writer” meant for me. Fairly quickly, I realized that I wanted this to be a career. I love writing and just when I think I’ve written enough stories, a new idea will come to me. Publishing one book and moving on with my life was not going to be an option for me. I decided I was in this for the long haul.
I also had to come to terms with the fact that being a writer also meant being a blogger, a marketer, a social media presence, and a business owner. The “publish a book that hits big and rakes in ton of money” is the previous, throw it around and cross your fingers type of approach that isn’t very realistic. You’ve got to put in the work, and that includes working on more than the story you are writing.
Realistically, I also came to understand that most writers are also editors, or teachers, or have ways to make steady income that are not related to their books. Of course, there are always going to be the JK Rowlings of the world, and an author always hopes that their book can gain that sort of popularity, but it helps to be realistic when first deciding if a writing career is one for you.
Writing is an art and, first and foremost, you have to love the art if you want to keep practicing it. Whether or not any of my stories get published, I realized that I would write them anyways. Making the decision to try and publish is simply the business end of things.
The path to publishing and becoming a writer is a winding trek up a mountain, or an overgrown trail in the jungle, or perhaps, even, a trackless wandering through an open desert, but if you just continue to take one step forward, and then another, you will reach the place you need to be. My journey has already been long and wandering, but it is just the beginning. Whereas before I was a starry-eyed traveler in crocs and bad shorts, now my backpack is fully stocked and I have learned the basic survival strategies to continue hiking forwards into the unknown.
~Elise Posledni
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Good luck on your writing journey! I've written seriously for the last 10 years after a 7 year hiatus trying to learn how to write a novel that never got finished. My first published novel, Electromagnetic Assault, https://brucelanday.com/books-and-writing/ a near future military political techno-thriller is releasing on April 7th. I'm going through another huge learning curve on publishing, social media, and marketing. Everyday is something new. My latest challenges includes getting book reviews and becoming a podcast guest on multiple podcasts. In May I'll be a speaker at the Lakefly Writers Conference in Oshkosh. In my professional life I ran training classes and was a speaker at a professional conference on data analytics. This will be the first time I'll be a conference speaker for a writing topic.
I see you're a fellow Wisconsin writer. I also think highly of Kim Suhr. I'm a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association and the Chicago Writers. Tap into these networks. Both are paying off for me now that I'm publishing. One of my top priorities now in between all the marking stuff is writing my next book.
Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far. If I can pass on one piece of advice I received from other professional authors, be relentless. Keep showing up and never quit. You'll get there, whatever "there" means to you.
All the best!
Wonderful advice, and applicable to many paths if life. I think you are amazing! Love you, girl!