Notes From Labor of Love: Cassie Premo Steele

Nine Keys to Publishing Success

1-Regularity
You need to write on a regular basis. It could be something like a five- or 10-minute check-in in
your journal. I remember when my daughter was a baby, I had a babysitter who came to the
house for about 90 minutes every Friday, and I just went into my room and then hit the ground
running when I had that one hour. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s five minutes, several days a
week, or one hour, once a week, but you want to set up regularity for yourself.

2-Deepening
Deepening allows you then to develop it into something that can go out into the world. So part
of what you’re doing with the deepening is you’re allowing the work to become what it wants
to be. It’s no longer your story of what happened, it’s no longer strictly autobiographical, you’re
preparing it to go into the world.

3-Response
As a creative person you will be tapped into kind of waves of energy, or you might just call them
invitations. In the response key, I want you to think about maybe an invitation that you have
had where someone has said, would anyone like to submit something? That’s what happened
when I saw the call for writings about the 20th anniversary anthology for Literary Mama. So
when you come across that invitation, the third key to publishing is to respond to it.

4-Focus
In this stage, you have your manuscript that has been deepened and you think you know what
it’s about and you have a call for submissions. In this focus stage, what you want to do is to
bring those into harmony. So you leave your role as writer and begin to ask yourself, if I were
this publisher, if I were this blog host, if I were the director of this theater, what would I want?
What would the ideal submission look like?

5-Persistence
There are two levels to this. The first is to have a plan for finding an agent or a publisher and be
persistent about it. This takes a lot of energy because you are projecting yourself into the future
with visions of failure and success. So be gentle with yourself. The second level of persistence
will come into play when you’re working with your publisher. You want to stay calm and patient
and firm in your interactions about cover, edits, and other publishing details. Your job here is to
let go of the reins and be collaborative.

6-Publicity

You may not want to hear this, but even for authors who work with the big five publishers, you
will still have to take responsibility for social media, setting up readings, getting onto podcasts,
doing guest blog posts, etc. This is simply part of the author’s job when launching a book, and
the more you accept this as a key to your success, the easier it will be to embrace it creatively.

7-Intention
In my writing coaching, I teach the principle of service over ego. Many people see writing as a
way to stroke their ego, but if we are focused on ourselves, the writing process becomes very
painful. But when we move into a place of service, asking how our writing can be of service to
the world in some greater way, something calms down in us, we can get humble and flexible
and more patient.

8-Faith
Reconnect to your faith in yourself, in your writing, in the larger pattern of the world. The truth
is we are not in control, and things don’t usually work out as we imagine, but that doesn’t mean
that we aren’t part of a huge and magical world that actually does want us to succeed and use
our creativity to help the world make meaning and see the beauty in everything.

9-Support
Finally, reach out constantly to friends, healers, therapists, coaches, and spiritual mentors. You
can start here: the Literary Mama community is an incredibly nurturing place. As with being a
mother, no one thrives all alone, and as mothers and writers, we are all in this together.

~~~

Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology was released on January 26th, 2024. Edited by Amanda Jaros, this collaboration with Small Harbor Publishing celebrates Literary Mama‘s twenty years of publishing the best writing for and by mothers. We asked the contributors, all Literary Mama staffers from across the years, to share thoughts about their writing process, their inspiration, or their work in the book. We’ll share those musings here on the Literary Mama blog.

Read Cassie’s poem by purchasing Labor of Love, now available on Amazon.