I used to work for IBM doing all kinds of on-site break/fix stuff. While I deeply enjoyed the job, I had to drive all over the bottom half of South Carolina to reach our customers. The mileage money was nice for a while, but I felt as if I wasn't reaching my full potential. I got a couple of cyber security certifications from CompTIA, the Security+ and the Cyber Security Analyst+ certification, and got my very first cyber security job working for a local insurance company.
To say I was overjoyed was an understatement. I loved the cyber security field (still do!), and even though the work was hard, it was fascinating; I couldn't get enough of it. However… I wasn't properly trained on the job, and I was let go after a short three months. I had so many grand plans for the future, and for all of that to be ripped away? It really sucked.
I spent some time soul-searching. What did I want to do with my life? Who did I want to be? It took me a while to figure it out, but I knew that I wanted a career where my entire livelihood wasn't based on the whims of an employer.
I wrote short stories on and off throughout college, so I looked into what it took to be a full-time author. What I learned made it seem impossible, but surely tackling the impossible was better than letting my future be controlled by someone else, right? If other people could publish books, then I knew I could, too.
So I set off on writing my first novel. It took me a full year to write it and four months to revise it. While writing it, I read a ton of romantasy books to see what other authors were doing, and a lot of those books even helped me come up with awesome ideas to put in An Ember Rekindled. But there was a catch. Even though I kept coming up with all these awesome ideas and scenes to put in my book, when I changed something in one chapter, then I had to go through the rest of the book to ensure that everything lined up perfectly. I needed to include scenes earlier in the book setting up what I just added, then I had to add scenes later in the book as well.
Truly mind-boggling to keep it all sorted, but I got it done!
They say that a typical indie author sells at most 100 copies of their book in its lifetime; 250 if they're lucky. As of September 9, 2026, I have sold 1011 copies of my books with 160k kindle pages read. Only took me about a year and a half to hit 1k copies sold, and I do want to be clear that a good chunk of that was from a Bookbub Featured Deal.
That Bookbub Featured Deal launched my series. I only had one book out at the time, An Ember Rekindled, but it tripled my ratings on Amazon from 20 to 60, sold several hundred copies at 99 cents, and even got me a Podium Entertainment audiobook contract for my entire series. If you'd like to see how well the Bookbub Featured Deal went, you can read about it here.
By the time that I published An Ember Rekindled, I had done zero social media marketing. Zero ads. Zero visibility. I didn't even do an ARC campaign. Oh, and to top it all off, I launched the book right when I was getting on a plane to go see a friend, ended up getting sick, and had to fly home a few days later feeling super miserable. 0/10, would not recommend launching a book this way!
So after my 90 day kindle enrollment period was up, I put it up for free on Booksprout and got some really nice reviews. Then I dabbled in Amazon ads (went terribly) and then I tried Meta ads. While I did make some money, I never made more than I spent. I spent much too long waiting to see if that book would do anything, but hey, nobody really knew about it, so nobody really bought it.
It has been quite a journey getting this series going, but I have loved every moment of it. I have learned so much about this industry, and no other job has ever given such a sense of pride. I have always loved writing stories, but never on such a large scale. The Second Bond series was originally going to have three books, but I kept coming up with so many incredible ideas and plotlines that I couldn't fit them all into a trilogy. This series will have five books… and the adventure is just getting started.