Standing With You, Not Over You: My Path from Nursing to Publishing

Where Two Worlds Meet

The letters RN behind my name make me first and foremost a patient advocate. It's expected you might scratch your head when I tell you that my career is as a nurse but much of my free time is spent helping authors publish their works.

How did I get here? On accident.

A Moment That Changed Me

In my nursing career, I’ve wheeled countless patients into operating rooms, but one will stay with me forever. He was in his 30s, terrified, and begging me, “Don’t let me die,” as we rushed him in for an emergent aortic aneurysm repair. Every person in that room was focused on exactly that, but the variables were vast and unpredictable. The only honest answer I could give was, “We’re going to do everything in our power to get you through this.”

He survived that first surgery. Weeks later, complications brought him back. He was too sick to speak, yet as I wheeled him in again, he whispered, “I’m so glad it’s you.” He didn’t make it out of that second operation.

Those words have haunted me and fueled me in equal measure. Nurses — all healthcare workers, really — carry an almost reflexive inability to say, “we can’t,” even when experience teaches us that sometimes our role isn’t to save someone, but to walk with them through something no one should face alone.

That instinct to learn, advocate, and walk beside someone through the unknown followed me into publishing without me even realizing it.  This is where my nursing background collided in synchrony with my publishing work. 

Falling Into Publishing—The Rabbit Hole I Never Saw Coming

I accidentally fell into publishing when I innocently volunteered to learn “a few things” that seemed “easy enough”, to help a friend who was about to accomplish a bucket list item.  Little did I know the rabbit hole I was about to go down. 

I went from simply trying to learn Amazon’s self-publishing platform, to understanding how to best format manuscripts, what size book is best for each genre, what fonts to use, how to bring our cover idea to life because, shocker, it must wrap perfectly around the whole darn book!  Just when I thought that was the end of my learning, there came the inevitable, ok, we can’t just post it on Amazon and expect random people to find it.  Oh my gosh, we need a whole different format to put the publication out in eBook form and what about a website and a marketing strategy and a copyright and an ISBN (which, sure, Amazon will give you a free one but even that requires an understanding of what you are signing up for!), and the list goes on. 

Once I spent my nights burning the midnight oil learning what felt like everything, soup to nuts, I couldn’t fathom not putting my new skills to use helping others.  Could anyone who is tech savvy and willing to dedicate countless hours to learning and investing in the right software, publish their own work…absolutely.  But for those who do not possess the skills and/or time, I could not overlook the good I could do with the hours I had already dedicated to learning these skills.  Somewhere between the publishing guides and the copyright manuals, I realized I wasn’t just learning a process, I was learning how to give someone else their voice.

Why So Many Authors Need a Guide

Get on any self-publishing social media page and you’ll quickly see there are so many hardworking, honest authors who have yet to publish because the process and skills to do so are almost as overwhelming as trying to find an honest publisher whose first priority is to help you make your dreams come true, not to take your profits.

Nurses and honest small publishers share so many similar characteristics, but ultimately it goes back to the, albeit cliché, saying of “we want to help people”. As someone well equipped to navigate learning the world of self-publishing, it took months of education through video courses, manual reading, so so much fine print, and all the patience for failure, to have a grasp on the process, technical requirements, and the time that goes into publishing.  Nursing and publishing both meet at the intersection of “quiet heroism” if done correctly.  One clinical, one creative, both add a contribution to another’s life that cannot be defined by money. 

If You're Writing, I See You

Nursing has taught me, time and again, to advocate fiercely.  Dipping my toes into publishing has taught me that stories need advocates too.  Just like patients, authors often enter a system they don’t understand, full of jargon, risk, and people who don’t always have their best interest at heart.  If you are an author, I see you.  If you decide to seek assistance in the self-publishing world, might I recommend you first request information regarding the publisher’s mission if it is not readily available.  If you’re writing, keep going.  Your story matters more than you think.