The last time I updated you here, Who We Remain had just made the leap from worldbuilding into beta readers. At the time, I thought I was approaching the finish line.

This was adorable of me.

Since then, the book has gone through more drafts, a never-ending amount of edits, and two full rounds of beta readers. At one point I entered the query trenches, which mostly involved sending emails and then pretending I wasn’t refreshing my inbox every six minutes. The feedback was good, the form rejections nervewrecking.

And somewhere in that process I had a realization.

A bold dystopian about politics and power might not benefit from politely asking permission to exist.

So I stopped querying.

I’m publishing it myself.

This is the part where things got… busy.

Because when you go indie, there is no mysterious publishing house team handling things behind the curtain. The curtain lifts and it’s just you standing there holding twelve different hats.

So the current staff working on Who We Remain looks like this:

Author: me

Editor: also me

Illustrator: still me

Formatting department: unfortunately me

Marketing team: a caffeine-fueled version of me

Which means the last stretch of this process has included: • More editing • Wrestling with paperback formatting • Learning Affinity Publisher • Making the ebook behave in Kindle Create • Cover design • Interior illustrations • Exporting the same file 400 times because one letter moved half a millimeter

Indie publishing is very glamorous.

The good news is we are officially moving into the ARC reader stage, which means early readers will soon get their hands on the book.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, head over to the contact page and click “I am interested in future beta reading opportunities.” That’ll put you on the list.

And in the meantime, the book is now available for preorder.

Which is exciting, slightly terrifying, but mostly exciting.

More updates soon. I promise they’ll probably involve fewer margin adjustments. Probably.

Until the next plot twist,

Teresa