We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Awa recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Sarah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Thinklings Books started out when my friends Deborah Natelson, Jeannie Ingraham, and I got together and formed a writing group. We called ourselves the Thinklings, in honor of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s group, the Inklings. We shared a love of fantasy books as well as a drive for great quality.
Over time, as we faced rejection after rejection from agents and publishers who declared our books were “great, but not for me,” we found ourselves agonizing about how messed-up the publishing industry had become. Why couldn’t good books get published? Why were so many bad books published just because their authors had big Twitter followings? We wished there were something we could do about the problem…and then we realized there was.
As a substantive/line editor, a proofreader, and a developmental editor, the three of us knew good writing when we saw it—and we knew how to make it even better. We had a lot of experience walking our clients through the publishing process—both traditional and self-publish—and we had contacts with marketing and design experts. We had some amazing unpublished books lined up and ready for production. We had, in fact, everything we needed to make a great publishing company. All that was left was to actually do it.
So we’re doing it.
Sarah, 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?
As I mentioned in my answer about the problem with the industry: It’s really tough to get published these days, even if your book is phenomenal. Thinklings Books is here to help share the load, as Samwise Gamgee would say! More publishers means more books get a chance. We’re passionate about helping great authors!
Thinking of that: If you’re one of our authors, it means you’re covered under an umbrella of quality, which is one of the pillars and core values of our brand. Deborah and I each have about a decade of editing experience, and we choose books that are fairly well polished (we’ve got a blog post on our site listing our eight quality standards). The books don’t have to be perfect; we will smooth out those rough edges, and at no cost to the author. Our authors never pay us; we pay them.
Our other core value is community. This flows through our empathy as authors, ourselves. We know firsthand that authors aren’t marketers. (Most aren’t, anyway.) And we shouldn’t have to be, but unfortunately there isn’t much choice these days, even if you’re traditionally published. Many of us writers are introverts, though, and just thinking about having to market our books sends chills down our spine and churns our stomach. While doing all the writing, publishing, marketing, and other tasks involved in self-publishing works for some authors, for lots of others it doesn’t. So Thinklings offers a hybrid option: We help our authors by doing some of the marketing, and we teach them, if need be, how to build and grow their own platform.
If I’m supposed to talk about myself personally here, one thing I’d like to highlight is that I’m a very introverted person, and in fact I recently found out I’m autistic. Marketing was a terrifying prospect to me too, until our former CMO, Jeannie (who’s worked in marketing for a dozen years), explained that all I had to do was be myself and gush about things I love. Authenticity is important, as well as attractive. Since I can talk for hours about any of my special interests, I figured marketing was kind of like that: just enthusing about some books that I really love and am proud of. I also tweet out a daily pun, since I absolutely love wordplay and puns! I never thought I’d get to use them in my job someday!
As for my writing (and reading) life, I prefer fantasy, and I’m currently writing the middle book in a trilogy about werewolves in college. The first book is called Hunter’s Moon and came out in 2020.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I used to work in customer service, for about a decade. It was horrible; I hated every second. I need to back up for this story, though, and explain how I got there….
In college, I majored in English because I was obsessed with books and reading. I didn’t have much of a plan or goal for my life after graduation; I guess I figured things would fall into place for me. I didn’t realize back then that I was autistic, but I knew that it was extremely hard for me to reach out to people and take initiative in anything. I had even skipped some class assignments that involved going out and talking to strangers because I was absolutely terrified of doing that. Yet I never talked to the professors about it, because I figured they wouldn’t understand or give me another option. (I was used to being frequently misunderstood and brushed off.) So I took a lower grade. I grew up thinking there was something very wrong with me, at least socially. … I’m so glad that I learned the truth, and I can accept and love myself for who I now know I am.
All that to say, I didn’t have people reach out to me and help me prepare for life after college, and I didn’t reach out to anyone either. No blame throwing: it was what it was. (For one thing, there wasn’t enough autism knowledge, awareness, or support in the early 2000s.) And so because of this lack of direction/preparation, and my terror of job interviews and general low view of myself, I ended up working fast food and then later at a movie theatre. Hardly anyone’s dream career! And I was, indeed, miserable and unfulfilled. But I didn’t think I could ever escape.
Fast forward to 2013, when I was about ready to explode in a ball of rage at the next Karen to whine about pricy movie tickets—as if I could do anything about them. Facebook was well up and running at that point, and I had reconnected with a bunch of my college friends. This included Jeannie Ingraham, who’d been my roommate in senior year. I found out that she had been working as a marketer and a literary consultant, and now had a company called The Ghostwriting Agency. She knew I was a big grammar nerd, since I had proofread many papers for her in college, so she hired me as the proofreader.
It was a leap of faith, because I didn’t have enough replacement income yet (though I was married at this point), but I quit customer service in summer of 2013. And I have absolutely zero regrets. My mental health began to recover from near-rock-bottom, and I finally enjoyed what I did and got satisfaction from beautifying words that were going to be published.
That wasn’t the big pivot, although it was the beginning. I’ll try to wrap up quickly:
Through working for The Ghostwriting Agency, I met Deborah Natelson, and she and Jeannie and I formed a writers’ group called Thinklings. We critiqued, encouraged, and helped one another become much better writers. It was when Deborah and I each had a book finished and started trying to get published that we discovered how messed-up the publishing industry had become. It was Deborah’s idea to start our own publishing company, and we realized we had all the resources to do so and ought to do it—for ourselves and for others. So Thinklings Books was born in July 2019, and we burst onto the scene blazing with zeal and optimism….
And then came 2020, when the world shut down. Imagine starting a business at the worst possible time. Well, we sure felt like we had.
As of March 2020, Thinklings had only released our first two books (mine and Deborah’s). We had three more contracts signed and books in the publishing-prep process. But soon, we faced a COVID-related crisis and it looked like we would have to shut down already. I spent a day and a night crying, praying, and talking to wise loved ones.
Imagine finally finding your calling in life, although it took you completely by surprise—you’d never, ever thought you would be an entrepreneur or were cut out to be one—but then discovering that it fits you so wonderfully well that it becomes your One Thing you’d happily live the rest of your life for. And then, months after starting, facing the reality that it might die in its infancy.
You’d fight, wouldn’t you? But we were up against something much, much worse than Goliath, some heavy losses. And who knows when the economy and the world’s chaos will finally settle back down? It hasn’t yet, and it might never, in our lifetime.
I can’t explain what happened in my soul as I struggled with this decision about the company’s fate, but I came through that dark night knowing I had to keep going. I received strength and courage and tenacity from outside myself, just when I needed it—and maybe it’s my autistic resistance to change, but I couldn’t just find some other job. (For one thing, I still dread job interviews and don’t feel very hire-able. I also need to be able to do things my own way, in the safe and quiet space of my own home, which most jobs wouldn’t accommodate.)
So Thinklings is still here, and we’ve had to make lots of changes. This crisis, this pivot, has definitely shaped me into a much more proactive person. I’m slowly shedding my doubts and fears and reservations, learning to take initiative. I have a lot more responsibilities now, and I’ve had to learn SO much and try so many new things that used to scare me, but I have grown confident enough to meet the challenges head-on.
I hope this encourages someone to persevere and stretch yourself—you won’t know what amazing things you can do until you try!
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
(I’ll give a short answer to make up for my previous, super-long one!)
We use Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) to print our books. Right now, we’re staying exclusive with them, and I won’t get into all the technical details here about why. But one thing I’ll note is that “Amazon accounted for a whopping 83 percent of US e-book sales in 2018” (http://blog.janicehardy.com/2018/02/the-vexing-conundrum-of-amazon.html). That article has a lot of info that can help indie authors decide whether to go wide or stay exclusive.
We couldn’t have started Thinklings if we didn’t know how to use KDP. (Or we could have learned, and it would have delayed our launch.) Deborah, our CEO, already had many years of experience self-publishing her own books with KDP pre-Thinklings. She’s an expert formatter and knows all of KDP’s quirks and how to deal with them. Of course, like any website, it has evolved over time, but she’s got the brains to catch up quickly.
It’s very fortunate that our printer is also our vendor. We’re not directly involved in the manufacturing process, although I would love to tour an Amazon printing press one day and see how it all works!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sarahmawa.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahAwaAuthor/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/authorsarahawa
- Other: https://www.thinklingsbooks.com/