My first year as a self-published debut novelist

A lot of ups, downs, and sideways jiggles

A year ago I was a physician with a manuscript. Now I can call myself a novelist, but the word still sounds strange. This first year has simultaneously felt like five years and five minutes.

The launch

The Regression Strain set sail in May 2025 — a medical thriller set on a transatlantic cruise ship, where a bioengineered virus strips passengers of their impulse control and leaves one overwhelmed physician to stop it before the ship reaches New York. The book took seven years from idea to publication, in the middle of which was a pandemic that made me shelve it entirely. I was convinced nobody would want to read about a medical crisis on a cruise ship during an actual pandemic. But I was also using that fear as a convenient excuse to avoid the truly scary prospect of putting my work out there. I eventually talked myself back into it, with encouragement and guidance from many.

So now the book exists in the world, available to strangers, subject to their opinions. The first reviews trickled in. I still remember the thrill of seeing the first review appear by the title on Amazon. That first review is a Big Deal because 1 is infinitely larger than zero. I relished each milestone:

• 2 reviews (twice as much as 1!)

• 5

• 10 (double digits!)

• Dare I hope for more?

I check the count too often. I need to stop. Try to stop, or least tone it down.

Awards

I entered a number of book award competitions in 2025, because it felt like a legitimate way to get the book in front of readers and judges who take fiction seriously.

The novel won the Gold Medal in the General Thriller category at the Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Contest. It took first place in the thriller category at the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. It was named Medical Thriller of the Year by BestThrillers and won Best Adventure in the BookShelfie Awards.

It also picked up second-place honors at BookFest in both the Medical Thriller and Dystopian categories, an Honorable Mention at the Independent Publishers of New England awards, and second place in the Bestsellers World Reviewers Choice Awards.

I share this because each of those recognitions represents someone reading the book and finding something decent in it. That’s worth remembering when I envy the success of other authors or harbor doubts about writing a second book.

The marketing reality

Everybody told me this about self-publishing a debut novel: the writing is the easy part.

I didn’t believe it at first, but now I do.

The awards and whatever sales accumulated in year one are the fruit of a season of intense sowing. I ran ads, joined promotional campaigns, entered contests, built a website, and started on Instagram — all while seeing patients, teaching residents, and keeping up with academic responsibilities.

I often wonder whether the frenetic pace of that kind of marketing and publicity is sustainable. Of course, it isn’t, not at that intensity. I need to find a rhythm that fits with my life.

I don’t have a secret formula for balancing my day job and creative writing. Some weeks, there is just no writing at all.

The writing life

Ah, but when I can write . . . I wish I could say it’s an energizing escape from the real world. Sometimes it’s that, but sometimes it’s lot of head-banging.

The second book is underway. At one point I thought it would be a novella, but now it’s on track to be a full-length novel of 60,000 to 80,000 words. I’ll share more about the concept in future posts.

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—Kevin