Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.
Thanks to Heather Vickery | Joy Warrior for the intro!
What if you knew exactly what you were supposed to do with your life, and the hardest part was just waiting long enough to do it?
Kern Carter made the decision to be a writer when he was eight years old. He read a book called The Orphan Boy and something clicked into place.
He self-published his first two novels, learned the craft the hard way, collected rejections, and kept going anyway, because for Kern, being an author wasn’t the end of his aspirations. Being a traditionally published author was.
In this conversation, Kern talks about what it really takes to grow as a writer, why self-publishing was one of the best decisions he ever made, and what the publishing industry actually responds to, because it’s probably not what you think.
Highlights
Rejection is part of the education.
Most people treat rejection like a stop sign. Kern treats it like a step in the process. He collected them and kept writing anyway.
He even put himself back through school because an agent took the time to tell him everything he was doing wrong. Instead of ignoring the advice, he leaned into it.
“The very first agent I sent the book out to read the first three chapters, loved it, [so I] sent him the rest of the book. And he signed me in three days.”
Nothing changed except the quality of his writing. That’s it. No new connections. No better timing. No lucky break. Just someone honest enough to tell him he wasn’t good enough yet.
Sometimes progress requires rejection.
The romantic image and the real one.
There’s an image people carry around of what a writer’s life looks like. A lake house. A typewriter. A glass of hard liquor.
But romance and reality have to coexist if you’re going to make writing a career.
“If you do take writing as a career and not a hobby, then it’s a job. So you have deadlines and you have rejections and you have clients and you have editors and you have publishers, agents, and you have to budget and you have to manage your time and manage your money.”
The passion is what gets you in. The discipline is what keeps you there. Knowing the difference between writing from love and writing from commitment is one of the most important things a working author can figure out.
Don’t compare your chapter one to someone else’s chapter ten.
Publishing has a way of making you feel behind. Someone debuts at nineteen and the book takes off. Someone signs with a major publisher on their first query. If you’re not careful, those stories stop being inspiring and start feeling like evidence that something is wrong with you.
“Being very careful not to compare yourself, because… a good portion of it comes down to timing. You don’t know what trend the industry’s on. You don’t know what people’s reading habits are gonna be when you put out your book.”
Timing is real. Luck is real. Neither of them are in your control. What is in your control is the quality of what you’re writing and the decision to keep going. Focus on your path. Build your endurance. Write enough books until things start working out.
Self-publishing taught him everything traditional publishing assumed he already knew.
Before Penguin. Before Scholastic. Before the agent and the book deals, there were two self-published novels and a crash course in what it actually means to be an author in the world.
“Self-publishing gave me an idea of what it felt like to have a readership, even though it was super tiny. It still gave me an idea of what it meant to satisfy a reader, what it meant to communicate with a reader, how to take criticism, how to market to a specific audience.”
Self-publishing didn’t slow him down. It built him up. He learned how to connect with readers before he had a publisher doing it for him. So when traditional publishing came calling, he wasn’t starting from scratch. He was arriving prepared.
Quality is the only thing that cuts through the noise.
The saturation was already intense before AI. Now it’s something else entirely. And in that environment, the only thing that reliably separates one book from the next is whether the book is genuinely good.
“The main way to separate yourself is through quality. If there’s a surefire way, and I think the foundational way, is to write something that is undeniable. So captivating that people feel like they have to read it.”
Word of mouth is still the most powerful force in publishing. Not ads, algorithms, or a perfectly timed launch campaign. Books move when someone tells people to go read a book. And the only way to earn that is to write something captivating.
That takes time and honesty about where you are in the craft. It takes the willingness to keep getting better even when you think your work is good enough.
Community is what got him across the finish line.
Kern had the manuscript and agent interest. What he didn’t have was the confidence to send his book out. That came when a fellow Canadian author, Fawn Parker, read his first three chapters and told him it was time to send it out.
“She gave me the confidence to really just push it and put that book out. And that’s how I got my first publishing deal.”
All it took was one conversation with someone who believed in the work enough to tell him.
Publishing can isolate you but community brings you back to yourself.
Your title is marketing. Your cover is marketing. Everything is marketing.
When Kern wrote Is There a Boy Like Me? he was intentional about every single word of the title. He wanted the word boy in there. He wanted a specific reader to pick it up off a shelf and feel like it was written for them.
“Parents were sending me screenshots on social media, DMs with their son holding up the book saying he saw the book in the store and it felt like it was him. He saw himself just on the cover, on the title.”
That’s not an accident. That’s craft applied to marketing. For an author without a massive platform, every element of the book is doing promotional work. The title, the cover, the first line, the back cover copy all pull the right reader in.
Being intentional about all of it, from the very beginning, is what gives an unknown author a fighting chance.
Start talking about your book before you think you should.
Kern has three books coming out in consecutive seasons and he’s been talking about them all year. He doesn’t need a publicist tell him to do it. He understands that readers need time to hear about something, sit with it, forget it, hear about it again, and eventually decide to buy it.
“As soon as you have the idea of it, you should market. As soon as you’ve written something, people should know that you’re writing a book when you’re writing the book. It is really, really, really hard to get a reader.”
There is no such thing as too early. There is only too late. The authors who sell books are the ones who treated marketing like part of the creative process not an afterthought that happens after the manuscript is done.
Start now. Talk about it now. Let people into the process. By the time the book is out, they’ll already feel like they’ve been waiting for it.
Closing Reflection
Kern Carter has been at this since he was eight years old. Five books done, three more on the way. And he feels like he’s just now hitting his stride.
Your work compounds. Every book makes the next one better. The gap between where you are and where you want to be doesn’t mean your work is bad. It’s just the distance you haven’t covered yet.
“I feel like I’m just getting to my best writing right now. These next three books, regardless of reception, are the best three books I’ve written.”
Nobody told him to keep going. He just did.
If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.
Thank you Becky Mollenkamp, Shana Like Dana, and many others for tuning into my live video with Kern Carter!
