On Art and Obsession...and Publishing: A Conversation with Writer Jane Hartsock

Load Bearing, a new novel by Jane Hartsock, is a really fun literary success story. That's true both because it's REALLY good and also because had Hartsock waited out the glacial pace of the traditional publishing machine, her beautiful book may never have made it to readers. Instead, she decided to self publish her book -- and before you scoff and turn up your nose, I can honestly tell you this novel is better written and more engaging than many of the traditionally published novels you'll read. 

Load Bearing is a thrilling literary mystery about a young woman named Hannah. Hannah is married to an older mansplainer workaholic named Michael. A job transfer requires the two to move with their young daughter from the east coast to Indianapolis, where they buy a fixer-upper/money pit home. Hannah dives into the renovation and soon becomes obsessed with the architect of the old house who killed himself a century earlier. What led this architect to his untimely demise?  What secrets can this old house reveal about the architect's life and his family? And how might those secrets and the architect's life ripple through the year's to inform Hannah's present moment? (Indeed, why is he appearing to her in sexy dreams?)  

The novel is about how it's just as easy to become obsessed with artist as it is art. Does an artist's biographical details ALWAYS hold clues to the mysteries within their art? Or should art always be separated from artist?

Load Bearing is not a book that had even remotely been on my radar until a friend recommended it. He actually sent it to me, and frankly, 99 out of 100 times, it would've sat on my shelf for a very long time, maybe forever. But I took a chance on it, and I LOVED it. I was so impressed with it, in fact, I wanted to find out more about this novel's path to publication as a self published book  So, I decided to ask if Hartsock might be interested in doing a short interview about her novel. We connected on Bluesky and she was gracious enough to answer a few questions via email. If you've ever wondered about the line between traditional and self publishing, or if you're looking for some top-shelf advice on writing, please read on! 

Greg Zimmerman: Our mutual friend who recommended your book mentioned that, for a variety of reasons, you decided to self publish this novel. Please tell us about this book’s path to publication.

Jane Hartsock: Hard to know where to start with this question. Maybe chronologically is the best path. I wrote a campus novel before Load Bearing that I let two very close (and very kind) friends read. I think a lot of writers have a first novel like that, that never sees the light of day, and the whole point is just to figure out whether they can write a novel. Anyway, that makes Load Bearing technically my second novel, but I approached it differently. 

I joined two writing groups and the Indiana Writers Center, attended the Midwest Writers Workshop conference, started reading about the publishing process, started reading about the craft of writing (my favorite craft books are Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story and Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This—both gifts from my mom), and wrote Load Bearing. My biggest concern with Load Bearing as I thought seriously about publishing it was whether I would embarrass myself, whether I wouldn’t know that it was actually bad. I decided to use the query process to help me figure that out. And my original thought was that if it didn’t get published by a traditional publisher, then that meant it probably wasn’t very good, and I would just think, Okay, I got that out of my system, but I have other talents and should move on. 

Then I entered the query trenches, and that process was nothing like what I’d imagined. I got a ton of rejections, of course, but I also got several requests for the full manuscript — generally a good sign. The feedback consistently was that the writing was very good (which had been my primary worry — that I was overestimating my writing ability) but that the book “wasn’t a good fit” for the agent’s list, which, as you know, is a euphemism for “I won’t be able to sell this to a publisher.” During that time, I had one agent who suggested the book would be better with alternating “interwoven” timelines —something like Unsheltered by Kingsolver, I suppose. I had another agent who specialized in Midwestern authors and had requested the full manuscript, but her partner died, and she shut down her shop before she could give me feedback. I then had an independent publisher that looked like it was very interested in the manuscript, but was moving at a snail’s pace through the last round of consideration… 

And then… [and I’m sorry to be melodramatic about all this] I had an abnormal mammogram, then an abnormal biopsy, an abnormal MRI, a recommendation for a bilateral mastectomy, and ultimately a diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ. By that point, I’d done enough reading about the publishing world to know that there was a lot stacked against me in getting Load Bearing published. As a 46-year-old woman, living in Indiana, writing a book set in Indiana, that engages the history of Indiana, and is in the women’s fiction/historical fiction genres, that book would have to be damn near Pulitzer Prize-worthy to get a traditional publisher. And it’s not. It’s good. I’m proud of it. It’s better than a lot of stuff that is traditionally published, but I understand the game. So, I just said "fuck it" and decided to publish it myself. My goal was to get it published prior to my mastectomy in May 2024. And I did. And I regret nothing! (That’s not entirely true; see below.)

Greg Zimmerman: What have been the biggest challenges and what have you learned along the way?

Jane Hartsock: The primary challenges have been financial and pragmatic. 

It costs a lot of money to self-publish a novel. My biggest expenses were a developmental editor and numerous beta readers. Both costs were indispensable and absolutely worth it, but I have lots of thoughts about the way traditional publishing favors a very narrow kind of story (coastal, young MC, voicey, plot-driven), and self-publishing favors a very narrow kind of author (namely one with the time and money to spend on writing and publishing a novel). This is probably not good for readers, who are incredibly diverse in their tastes at a time when there’s not much diversity in traditional publishing and finding what you like among self-published authors can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

Anyway, from a pragmatic perspective, I didn’t really know what I was doing, so to keep things easy, I used the Amazon publishing package—free formatting, free ISBN, upload to Amazon, done and done. 

For all future novels, I will use a formatting software (I prefer Vellum), buy the ISBNs separately, and upload to multiple publishing outlets (Ingram, Amazon, and Smashwords, chiefly). The developmental editors and betas stay, though. They’re so incredibly valuable.

A secondary challenge is marketing. I don’t have the reach I would have with traditional publishing, and I hate (HATE) marketing my own book. It is so, as the kids say, cringe. It is, far and away, my least favorite part of being self-published, and I am terrible at it. 

On the upside, there’s a lot about self-publishing that is pretty liberating, from my rampant use of the f-word, to my inflexibility on the Oxford comma, I can do what I want. And the book is mine. For better or for worse. Every word, every decision is mine. And I love that. So, it’s a balance.

Greg Zimmerman: For writers in different fields who KNOW they have a story to tell, what’s your best advice to get started, to keep writing, and tell their stories?

Jane Hartsock: A lot of the cliché advice already out there turns out to be really true. Words on the page—just put words on the page. You can’t edit a blank page. 

Write the kind of book you want to read. Don’t chase the publishing trends because they change faster than you can write. Or faster than I can, anyway. Just write your book. 

Get a good writing group and go even if you don’t have something to submit—critiquing others makes you a better writer. 

Treat it seriously. Set time aside every day to write. For me, I write from ~9-10 p.m. every night and in chunks on the weekend.

Read a ton, not only in the genre you’re writing in, but at least in that.  

Figure out what works for you and then do it over and over again. I don’t write from an outline—I make notes about “episodes” in a word doc and write toward those. So, something as short as “Hannah finds Decker photos in attic.” They’re basically just ideas. I also edit as I’m writing. So I write till I get stuck, then go back to the beginning of the work in progress (WIP) and start editing until I’m unstuck. I make playlists to go with my WIPs that I listen to in the car and that help me think about the book I’m working on. I jot notes in my phone. Some of what I do is verboten (I do so love my adverbs). Some is pretty standard. Find what works for you. The most important thing is, obviously, just keep writing. 

I will also say that I think there are stages to writing the way there are stages to grief. There’s that initial compulsion—that “I’m gonna…” This, for me, was followed by just a crashing wave of insecurity—"I think I might be really bad at this; I might also be a little bit crazy.” Then you kind of get over that and are like, “Welp. I might as well finish this dumpster fire.” And then you finally reach a point of acceptance. For me, it was a realization that I am not an astonishingly good writer. But I’m good enough, and I like doing it. So, I’m going to keep doing it. Now, when I hit those stages, I know them. So it’s like, “Oh! This is the I-might-be-crazy stage. I’m not. Just keep going.”

Greg Zimmerman: I can’t wait to read what you do next! No pressure or anything but what’s next for you? 

Jane Hartsock: I’m working on a “beach read” that I hope to publish in March. It’s set in Chicago where I lived for about twelve years. It’s supposed to be just a fun, enjoyable book for my friends to read on Spring Break—though I won’t be mad if others want to read it, too. That book is in its final round of revisions, and I’m pretty sure I’ll hit my deadline. 

My colleague Colin Halverson and I just finished a biography of the first person to complete an English translation of the Ebers Papyrus. We’ve started querying that, and it’s out with several agents at the moment. 

I’ve got an extremely rough draft of a prequel to Load Bearing that is the story of Andrew and Eleanor Decker’s marriage. That one is giving me a lot of trouble, and I’ve set it aside. 

My newest WIP is set in Indianapolis again—mystery/psychological suspense. I’ve been using it to procrastinate on the Decker prequel.

And I’ve gotten several requests for a Load Bearing prequel that concerns just Hannah, so I’m giving that some thought.