We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sabrie King a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sabrie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

I walked the Camino de Santiago with no intention of writing a book about it. My journey was to be all mine, to be kept neatly and tightly locked up in the journal I carried on my back with the rest of my life for a month and a half, then put on a shelf lined up in a row with the rest of my journals. But to my much delighted surprise, this was not what was meant to be.

I shared my journey through photos and small stories as I hiked and spent nights in tiny villages. With each passing day, friends continued to follow and want more. They asked to know specific details about what I went through, physically and emotionally. They offered advice on how to get through tough times, telling their stories along with mine in great shows of empathy.

The more I shared on social media, the more my followers, new friends and old, encouraged me to share more.

Fast forward almost a year when a friend told me to read Rupi Kaur’s book The Sun and her Flowers… this is when my idea gained traction and started down the road to execution.

My readers wanted more of my journey. My followers wanted to hear more stories of where I walked and how. My friends wanted to know how I was doing and were curious about the healing journey on which I had found myself.

So following Kaur’s inspiration, I wrote poem after poem, delving deep into my feelings with rawness and truth. I incorporated them in between my daily journal entries and decided I had a book on my hands.

Wanting to be in congruence with the Camino spirit as I put it together, I traveled back to Spain and spent a week doing so. And from the pages of my journal, my book Waking Up on the Camino: all i know so far was born.

Sabrie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a (mildly) normal mother of 3 college-age kids living in Jacksonville, working a side hustle in a locally owned and beloved restaurant, fueling and funding my dream to write and publish books. This has been a dream of mine since I was a child, and the year of 2024 saw the spark of this dream ignite with the publication of my first book, a memoir of my journey along the Camino de Santiago.

I continue to write and create content on social media (almost) daily, in hopes of partnering with a business who’s in line with my energy. My goal in 2025 is to build my content creation and book publications to further my career in this direction.

I dabble in photography. I adore travel and discovering new places. I aim to inspire others to explore more, both the world around them and the universe within them.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I had known more about book formatting applications before writing my manuscript. It just would’ve saved some time. I spent so much of my days off sending query letters to book formatters and researching applications, and nearly spent $8000 with one company who said they’d “do it all” for me. (I have a good friend to thank for steering me away from this.) Shortly after that conversation with my friend, I learned that book formatting isn’t that hard, it just takes a little time and dedication. And when you’re working on a project you love – your own book! – you have (I had) no problem spending the extra time making sure the font is just right and the pages are aligned the way you want them. There’s a little more that goes into formatting but, really, it’s not that hard.

I found an application called Atticus – the “Ultimate Tool for Authors” – with preset templates that you can work with and change to your liking. AND they’re so supportive. I had an issue with line spacing and wrote them an email. I received a response the next day helping me with my issue and solving my problem. I would highly recommend any self-publisher to try out Atticus before spending hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, for someone else to do it.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being a creative is seeing your work in print and receiving feedback that it’s touched someone. I don’t think it gets any better than that.

The creative process is quite laborious and, honestly, painful at times. I’ll agree with those who’ve come before me and say it’s comparable to birthing a child, minus the obvious. When you create something, you literally bring it from the universe around you and within you and produce it in a form that others can see. A transference of energy from one state to another. It requires a lot of energy on the creator’s part that moves between all realms – the emotional, the spiritual, and the physical – to be finally laid down in front of others in 3D form. And that process and end result is, I’d say, the most rewarding as a writer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sabrieking.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabrieking_/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrie-king-09176a52/
• Other: https://sabrieking.substack.com/

Image Credits

All photos taken by Sabrie King.