Maisie M. Meyers

And it turned out if I wanted to read that book, I had to write it. (What a rip-off, am I right??)

It took YEARS, an editor, so many drafts, a metric ton of cake, and a mentorship later, but once I had my book baby in my hands and ready to go, I hit an unexpected roadblock when querying agents. A series of stomach-squidging replies.

I’m sorry but your book has:

• “Too much pain.” (But my villains eat pain, so…?)

• “Not enough pain.”

• “It’s too dark.”

• “It’s not dark enough.”

• “It’s too funny.” (Because I guess, chronically ill characters can’t have a sense of humor??)

• “It’s too different from what’s  out there right now to sell.”

Look, I get it—publishing is a tough business, and agents have to eat (because they can’t eat pain like my fae can). When submitting, they want you to produce recent comparable titles to show that your book will sell. And while there are some amazing traditionally published YA fantasy books with chronically ill main characters out there, there’s not nearly enough each year.

But here’s the thing:

•   According to the National Library of Medicine, 1 in 5 kids in the U.S. has a chronic illness or condition.

• The CDC says approximately 27% of children in the U.S. have a chronic condition, and 1 in 15 has multiple chronic conditions.

• And that’s just in the U.S. Globally, those numbers are harder to find, but I know there are teens, just like I was, in every country in the world.

So where are all the rest of the YA fantasy books for us?

That’s why I’m indie publishing—not to compete with traditional publishing, but to complement it. To prove that these stories sell, that there’s an audience waiting for bold, inclusive narratives featuring chronically ill and disabled teens. There’s room for morally complex characters who can’t always “push through” the pain and still deserve to be at the center of epic adventures. There’s room to flip tropes, play with them from a unique angle, and show that chronically ill and disabled people can be heroes—and main characters, and love interests, and everything else in between.

And if you’re here, reading this, then maybe you believe that too.

So, let’s do this together. Let’s prove there’s an audience for stories that are abso-fricken-lutely not “too much”.

📰Subscribe to the newsletter to join me on this wild indie-publishing adventure (I pinky promise it’s not a fae contract in disguise. Your books are safe from sticker goo😉).

I’ll be sharing step-by-step exactly what I’m doing to publish my book, A Little Less Invisible, with its messy, funny, unapologetically real, chronically ill main character. The good, the bad, and the “holy cheese and rice why did I do X like that??” publishing moments.

Let’s team up and show the world there’s more than enough room on the shelf for all of us.