This Book Saved Me

A Guest Post Exclusive

Hey friends,

I’m excited today to hand the mic to Andrea Jo DeWerd, client, friend, and all-around publishing pro, who today gets to add PUBLISHED AUTHOR to her name. Let’s say happy book birthday to WHAT WE SACRIFICE FOR MAGIG (nb I LOVE this book) and hear from Andrea about how she turned off her publishing-brain to find what writing could do for her instead of what she could do with it.

As a publishing professional writing a book, the hardest part for me was not thinking about the end-game. I had barely written 10,000 words of my first novel, What We Sacrifice for Magic, when I started thinking about who I wanted my agent to be (oh hey, Kate), or my editor, or which imprint I’d want to be published under. As a book marketer, I would procrastinate by writing a marketing strategy for the book, a long list of all the things I would want for my own marketing and publicity, a whole plan for building my platform, etc. I wrote a presentation I would never give at the now-defunct BookExpo America.

What got me past that was saying to myself, “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” 

I know exactly when I started writing this book because I was on a plane after my baby nephew’s first trip to our family cabin for the 4th of July in Spicer, MN. And he’s seven-and-a-half now! 

At that time,I was heartbroken and reeling from the loss of my beloved grandfather. I wanted to write a different book, about  his family and his experience with the American Dream as the son of a Dutch immigrant, but it was too much pressure. That story wasn’t mine to tell. Instead, I found healing in fiction, and a complete departure from reality.

Instead, I wrote about a family of witches in Minnesota in 1968, in a small town inspired by Spicer and Green Lake, where my family has celebrated  countless milestones since 1938. The magical Watry-Ridder family  contains whispers of my own experience—feeling like a stranger in your own family, wanting to live life on your own terms—but then they took on a life of their own. Turning to fantasy gave me the freedom to play with familiar family dynamics in a safe space. The story that emerged is one of a family who just wants the best for each other, of sisters, of first love, and of ultimately figuring out for yourself who you really are.

This book saved me. As I wrote, I moved from heartbreak into career burnout, unmoored as I was shuffled through one corporate publishing merger to another. My family went through what I can categorically call the worst years of our lives—all before the rest of the world fell apart in 2020. I started pulling the long, winding thread of concurring chronic illnesses. I would get one answer from a doctor after months, only to be sent down another rabbit hole, another diagnosis. But my writing, this fictional story, that was just for me.

I sat alone one evening in a hotel room in a blizzard in Minnesota in 2019 as my family was on the brink of disaster editing the first 30 pages of this book to submit to the Southampton Writers Conference. I knew I had to do this for myself. This book was the only thing I felt like I had any control over. I got my application in just before the midnight deadline and awoke to a negative twelve-degree day as my family faltered. But the book was moving forward, and I held out hope for the slightest glimmer of a future that had me back in control—of my career, of my health, of my family relationships, as much as one can ever have control in those situations.

And now today, on the other side, I’m grateful to the past me that kept writing through all those challenges, that I had something of my own to cling to. Fiction gave me a path through the storm. This book was just mine for the last seven-and-a-half-years, but today I release it into the world. It belongs to the readers now, and I’m excited for my next story, my next path forward.

Andrea Jo DeWerd is a publishing veteran and the founder of the book marketing and publishing consulting agency, the future of agency. What We Sacrifice for Magic is her first novel and is now available everywhere books are sold.

Guys, you need to read this book. You’re going to love it. Thank you Andrea for sharing this with us, and stay tuned for more guest posts from writers sharing what it’s like to to publish a book.

XOXOXOX,

Kate