Meet Me in the Margins

by Melissa Ferguson

I don’t have a literary agent. I haven’t spent years drafting proposals and querying agents and building up a competitive social platform. I don’t have thousands of people on my newsletter list, itching to hear from me every week and to buy my book the instant it’s out. I have nothing. Nothing. Except a manuscript. And nobody is going to want me like I am now.

Forget about the manuscript. Just the amount of time it takes to figure out how to make a website, get a website host, find and buy a domain name, create a newsletter mailing list, create a newsletter mailing-list template, and figure out how to “create a brand” when you don’t yet have anything to sell . . . It’s enough to make your brain explode.

And the question running through my mind in all of this is, How on earth am I supposed to be able to manage a website, run a bimonthly newsletter, talk daily on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, and still have time to actually write books? What are these insane expectations?