Why Self-Publishing Your Own Book is Essential (Hint: It's Related to The Little Mermaid)

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Since Juneteenth is coming up, y’all inspired me to celebrate this year by talking about how to support more Black women writers, or how to become one yourself.

So we’re gonna discuss how to publish your own book, and why recent blockbusters like Queen Charlotte and The Little Mermaid with Halle Bailey prove we need more Black women in writers’ rooms and in the book publishing industry.

Before I go into that…

I decided to make this a podcast video/episode because when you search Leading Like a Lady on Google, the podcast on iTunes shows up first, before this YouTube channel.

And I feel like I’ve been abandoning the podcast audience for too long while trying to grow this YouTube channel.

So I hope those of you watching or playing the audio on YouTube find as much value from this even if it’s an audio-only experience!

You can listen to this while you’re in the gym, grocery shopping, or cleaning up around the house and not worry that you’re missing something important on the screen. So thanks for your flexibility with this format.

Okay, let’s dive into it.

So what do Halle Bailey and the new Little Mermaid movie have to do with publishing your own book?

The portrayal of Black women in film and TV right now is a hot topic for positive and negative reasons.

The positive is that there is some desire to diversify, regardless of what the main motivation is. And even though I brought this up already in my Queen Charlotte video, I have to thank Fab Socialism on YouTube for making me realize that the same qualms I had about Queen Charlotte can be found in Disney’s rollout of The Little Mermaid.

And listen, I am not going to poo-poo on the parade Black women are throwing for Halle Bailey because I love her as an artist, and I do think she was an amazing choice for starring as Ariel if there was going to be a Black woman chosen for that role.

I do, however, see how this is a problematic perpetuation of Hollywood’s half-assed attempt to be fully inclusive and diverse in showing Black women on screen. 

I doubt that Disney would have considered casting a noticeably darker-skinned Black woman as Ariel, DESPITE all the arguments we’re having today about a mermaid being a fantastical creature (a.k.a. not a real thing).

Even as we use that as the reason why the race of Ariel shouldn’t matter, I can almost GUARANTEE that it wouldn’t be an argument used to defend a very Black, very dark-skinned mermaid in such a big global film. 

In THAT scenario, somehow people will find it harder to suspend disbelief, BLACK PEOPLE INCLUDED. So to that I say, I’m sorry and sad.

That all being said, there was an interesting point Rachel Lindsay brought up on the Higher Learning podcast she hosts with Van Lathan.

The Little Mermaid fairy tale was originally published in 1837 in Denmark (a very white country) by Hans Christian Andersen. However, as Rachel Lindsay points out in her commentary on another person’s criticism of the film, race representation shouldn’t be an argument at all in the film adaptation.

And that’s because racial constructs don’t (or shouldn’t) exists “under the water”. Or put it another way, she says (quote):

“There’s a difference between fantasy and fiction. [The Little Mermaid]  is a fantasy; it explores what’s impossible. Fiction explores what IS possible but is not true.”

This was a very long-winded way to say that casting Halle Bailey in “The Little Mermaid” isn’t as much of a big deal as it has been made to be. I can see why Black women want to celebrate it, but it’s not because (or shouldn’t be because) it’s some solution to the lack of Black women representation in Hollywood. It’s a nice gesture that allows a VERY brief relief from constantly seeing white faces in children’s films.

If Disney REALLY wanted to be progressive in the 21st Century movie industry, it’ll (a) stop relying on adaptations of literature written by ancient white Europeans, and (b) start looking for books written by Black authors (better yet BLACK WOMEN AUTHORS) to turn into blockbuster films. 

And you’ll notice it’s failing miserably to do that. And my guess is it’s because of the annoyingly persistent yet outdated argument that movies with a Black lead character do not break box office records, in the U.S. or internationally.

“Black Panther” should’ve broken that myth, given that it had both a dark-skinned Black man and a dark-skinned Black woman as lead characters, but I don’t want to go on a tangent.

So, long story short, I wanna help you. You, the listener, who clicked on this episode because you wanted to know how and why you should self-publish your own book.

#1 - There are as many prejudiced gatekeepers in the book publishing industry as there are in the filmmaking industry. A Forbes article I read predicts that book publishing is going to gross $49 billion USD in the next year and multiple media outlets like Netflix are looking for books to turn into original series. 

The New York Times could only approximate that at least 5% of authors publishing books between 1950 and 2018 were non-White authors. And only 11% of books published in 2018 alone were written by non-White authors. Even with the limited data they could find, that’s FAR too low. 

Random House is the largest book publisher in the world and the same NY Times article I just quoted states that the publisher released only 2 books by Black authors out of the 512 books it released between 1984 and 1990. And guess who was one of the authors?

Toni Morrison. And the book was Beloved.

After that, according to the NY Times, the number of Black authors published at Random House dropped some more. HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU DROP FROM JUST TWO BOOKS?

So, relying on the traditional route to publishing your story is a crapshoot. Risky and unlikely.

Is self-publishing any easier? Not necessarily, but it’s not impossible to do it in a way that gets the attention of Hollywood. I found at least three Black women - including a South African woman - who became bestsellers by self-publishing and securing contracts to license their books for films or TV series.

One of them is Thomishia Booker, a self-published author who secured a deal with Netflix for her children’s book Brown Boy Joy. (I couldn’t find how much the deal was worth, unfortunately.)

Then there’s Dudu Busani-Dube from South Africa, who self-published Zulu Wedding and had that book turned into a movie.

Finally, there’s Terah Edun who is a NY Times best-selling author through self-publishing. She sold over 500,000 books on her own (no publishing deal).

So why should you become one of them, even if there’s an uphill battle to do this independently?

Well, for all the reasons I brought up earlier. If we don’t bombard the industry with examples of talented Black women writers, the power brokers are going to continue to think there’s no market for seeing US on screen. And, if we’re the ones writing the stories from a conscientious point of view, we can be EXPLICIT about showing diverse Black girls and women, across the skin tone spectrum.

Now, how can you self-publish a book? That’s also difficult, I’m not going to lie to you. It costs money to protect your intellectual property, pay for marketing, and cover the cost of printing if you’re not just going to sell an eBook.

An online fundraiser to crowdfund your project is an option, but you gotta be creative on the Internet where there are billions of things going on every second.

That’s why I recently published an online course with the best fundraising ideas to get funding for a business, including a self-publishing business.

The class is called “Basics of Online Fundraisers & In-person Events for Business Funding” and it is posted on Skillshare. In the link for this podcast episode, both on YouTube and wherever else you’re listening, you’ll see a link for you to enroll and get one free month of Skillshare so you can access the class for one month and learn at your own pace.

Sign up ASAP, because I’m only making it available to the first 100 signups using that link! And there’s invaluable information there on getting started with your fundraising strategy, beyond just saying “GIVE ME MONEY!” 

I’ll walk you through how to segment your audience so you’re targeting the right people who’ll want to give you money, and I show examples of successful fundraising events I’ve organized for myself and my clients. One of my clients is a former NFL player Jeremiah Brown, and you can watch a clip of his testimonial on my YouTube channel.

That’s it for this episode! I hope my arguments made sense. I hope you’re inspired to keep writing, even when it feels hard. Because it’s worth it - we NEED your story, sis! And as always, I’ll continue providing as much information as I can to help you succeed in this journey.