Yeah.

So I wrote, so the first book that I finished writing was The Best Book Boyfriend, and I sent out to some agents and I was hoping that I would, you know, I got a few manuscript requests and, um, I was feeling really, really excited about it, and then that kind of didn't go anywhere.

And then I looked at a lot of the authors, this is the research part, I looked at the, lot of the authors who I enjoy reading, romance authors, American authors mostly, and I looked at, oh, who's their publisher? Who's their agent? And that's when I realized, oh, a lot of these people are self-publishing.

And before that I didn't really know much about self-publishing, and my impression of it was, I always say like I thought it was like an old man in the pub who's written a book about trains, and he's bought a thousand copies and they're going damp in his garage, and would you like to buy one? Um, that's what I thought self-publishing was.

And when I realized it's actually a huge part of the romance industry, I started to look into how to do it.

So then I wrote a novella kind of as an experiment to learn how to, you know, format a book and upload it to Amazon and start that whole process myself, and I found it so much easier than I ever thought it would be.

For me, that's where the control comes in because I'm in charge of my own deadlines, my schedule, my timelines, and when I'm gonna release, how often I'm gonna release, um, the decision-making around like the cover and the design, and it's me who's commissioning the artwork and doing all of the, um, promo and things.

But what was happening before that moment? What was, how were you building things before that moment happened that really kind of escalated things for you?