The Good Wolf of the North

Whenever I go to book signings or vendor events, I always meet at least a few other writers. Many of them are not yet published. They often tell me their plans to send out query letters to agents and publishing houses, to which I say, "Cool. I hope that works for you. If it doesn't you can always do what I did." I then shamelessly tell them that after querying 20 agents and getting a steady stream of "your book just isn't quite what we are looking for" letters in reply, I decided to self publish.  I've heard that you need to query 80 agents before you give up, and I've also heard you have a 1 in 1,000 chance of landing a literary agents. I don't like those numbers at all, and after getting rejected twenty consecutive times, I didn't doubt them either. About that time, self publishing started to sound like a pretty great way to bring my manuscript from the messy place of word documents on my computer to the realm of published fiction. No, I di