A Special Book Launch Edition
It is finally here! After seven years, two English and creative writing graduate degrees, and many, many drafts, my first novel, How One Becomes Sarah Mead, is out!
I want to talk to you about having an accessible book launch but first, a bit of housekeeping:
You can learn more about How One Becomes Sarah Mead here.
You can learn why I decided to self-publish after years of my only goal being traditional publishing here.
You can watch the trailer for the book here.
And most importantly, you can buy it here. (Paperback will be available soon if that’s your preference)
How One Becomes Sarah Mead explores many aspects of my identity that I rarely bring up publicly. Being queer and transgender and a Muslim revert and the way all three of these intersect. It also explores what it is to live through a trauma and exist as both a romantic partner and a caregiver. Writing about them in fiction gave me a place to put them and explore them in a safe manner without all the identity policing and criticism that too often come when I try to discuss these topics in real life. I hope that people enjoy it but also that their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by it.
An Accessible Book Launch
For a very long time, I wanted nothing to do with self-publishing. There’s the stigma of self-publishing that says “real” publishers didn’t want your book because it’s not good enough, there are sometimes very badly designed covers (I know we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers but I’m a very visual person and I also judge video games by their graphics, so…) and there’s all the marketing and promotion and promo content creation you have to do on your own. But I quickly learned the social expectations surrounding traditional publishing were absolutely incompatible with my brain.
What I’ve learned about self-publishing since deciding on it has been invaluable though. I get to be in control of every aspect of my novel. This may come back to haunt me, as I still don’t understand how commas work and had to put my full faith in the two editors I hired, but that’s a problem for another day. But the control self-publishing allowed also allowed me to really flex my creativity and approach everything with my mind on accessibility without having to fight or argue about why it mattered. I got to create a book trailer and learned how to create short videos in the process and published it with captions (it will soon have audio description for blind viewers courtesy of adcomrade.wordpress.com as well).
I explored how to produce an audiobook on a tiny budget with Descript, as I mentioned in the first edition of this newsletter. I was able to work with and pay exactly who I wanted to create my cover, resulting in a cover I love that feels perfect for my novel. And every praise/blurb image I made from what my early readers had to say were posted with alt text. I got to push my creativity and have a path to publication that I can be proud of because accessibility and inclusion didn’t come as an afterthought for any part of it.
The best part of all of this was the fact that I wasn’t able to do all of it only because I work in accessibility. Everything I did is possible without any technical knowledge of accessibility at all. One need only have the desire to create an inclusive experience and all the tools to accomplish it are right there waiting for you.
The tools and apps I used include:
Subtitle Edit (available for free)
Wondershare Filmora X video editor (paid and free versions available)
Descript (paid and free versions available)
Alt text on Twitter (available to all users when posting images)
Social Audio Description (more info available here.)
I’ll be back with the regular monthly edition of Can I Do That? next week with lots of exciting news to share!