'The one thing that saved me when my baby girl just WOULD NOT GO TO SLEEP.'

When I was 27, I had a baby girl.

I had a baby who wouldn’t sleep. Like, EVER. We found out (much later in the game) that she was waking up screaming every 20 minutes because she had allergies. The food we were feeding her, the stuff I was eating and passing through my milk, was poisoning her.

So. Sleep deprivation for a full year (and longer, but we’ll get to that another time). There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is a torture technique. Because it’s TORTUROUS. I was absolutely miserable and felt like this little baby and I were literally trapped in hell together. Nobody seemed to understand.

My husband was amazing and got up every single damn time with me to the screaming creature down the hall, but he didn’t have milk to feed her and he worked all day – so it was on me to get through and make my poor baby feel better (somehow). It was just me, and her, and the long nights that stretched out into oblivion.

I’d been off work since I was seven months pregnant, and by the time she was six months old, I was not only a sleep-deprived zombie, I was also bored! I’d always had something to do and now I was left feeling empty and unfulfilled. Despite the challenges I loved being a mother, but it wasn’t ENOUGH. It didn’t fill those spaces inside my soul that had always been there, muted by busywork and nights out. In those dark nights that dragged on, when it wasn’t even worth going to bed because I’d just have to wake up again in ten minutes to rock a distraught baby back to sleep, that whisper inside me turned into a scream.

I’d always written as a hobby, but in my entire adult life had managed one terrible, put-it-in-the-draw-and-never-look-at-it-again novel. I had all these  ideas and stories I wanted to tell, but for some reason, I hadn’t. I’d pushed my desires to be somebody greater way, way down, and buried them with work and life.

Suddenly, they would not stay buried. In those dark nights of my soul, I opened my laptop and started to write. A story about a girl who was kidnapped and imprisoned – does this sound similar to you? I was trapped, she was trapped, and writing her story helped me to resurface from a long period of darkness.

My baby was up SO GODDAMN OFTEN that I finished that book. I finished it in mere months and, buoyed by recent success stories like Amanda Hocking, taught myself how to format and upload a book to amazon. This was it. I was going to be a success! I’d written the book, after all, so what was left except for Tarantino to call me up and say he’d been waiting for a book like mine his entire career?

And then I sold a million copies of my book and we all lived happily ever after.

Except – wait – no, that’s not right.

I sold six copies.

SIX.

With the twelve dollars I’d amassed (let’s forget the editing and cover design costs for now), I bought myself a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and drank that f*cker dry. It was a momentous occasion, after all – how often do you release your first ever book into the world? But after the wine was drunk and the book had been out a couple weeks – the sales spiking to TWENTY COPIES, half from people I knew – I was annoyed. Where was my call from Hollywood? Where were my thousands of sales?

I didn’t get it.

I didn’t get where I was going wrong. I didn’t understand that it’s not OK to hold back because I was afraid of what someone might think if I went too dark or too “whatever” with the book. I didn’t understand that my cover wasn’t right, that my marketing images were amateur at best (and in reality – freaking awful), that my blurb was meh, that EVEN THOUGH I LOVED MY CONCEPT AND MY CHARACTERS IT WAS NOT ENOUGH.

So it became a piece of fluff. A vanilla book. A story that had to be told, because I had to fail, so that I could learn EXACTLY what it took to NOT fail again.

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Time passes. My book doesn’t sell. This dream of mine starts to become dusty and old. I put it on the shelf and try to be happy and satisfied with my life without success. I decide to give up my dream of writing.

Three weeks later I get the f*ck over myself and decide its time to go all in.

By now, it’s November 2013. My daughter’s a little older, but she still doesn’t like sleep very much. I’ve still got these hours stretching into the night where I have to be awake (or I get woken). I’ve got this fire inside me. I’m not SAD that I have to go to work three days a week and put my baby into care. I look at other authors who are selling thousands of books and I know I can do that if I just get stuff RIGHT.

I’M MAD. I’M ANGRY. I’M RAGING.

I. Want. People. To. Buy. My. Books.

The anger, the rage, is the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

Fuelled by frustration and a singular determination to succeed, I go back to the drawing board and I start fresh.

A new pen name. A secret one.
A new genre.
A whole new BRAND.
I don’t even know what I’m going to write about at first, until one day, the idea comes to me. I was never worried that I wouldn’t have an idea. I decided, very deliberately, that the right idea was going to come to me.

Within a week, it was there, falling into my head so fast and so fully-formed that I could barely keep up.

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Six weeks later, I published it.

Oh my God.

The book BLEW. UP.

I still remember the night it went live. We were at a family dinner. I had to log in to my Amazon dashboard on my phone screen and squint to see the numbers.

Twenty copies.

Fifty.

A hundred.

A thousand.

By the time it got into the thousands, I was sure some epic mistake had been made. The book had been out less than 24 hours and I’d already sold enough books to cover my part-time salary for the month.

I made seven thousand dollars that first month.

I released the second book.

I made thirty thousand the second.

A big-six publisher called me up and asked me to sign with them for a three-book deal that would net me multiple six-figures.

I went to my first book signing and took sixty copies of my book.

They sold out in two hours and I ended up signing t-shirts and e-readers for the rest of the afternoon.

I released the third book.

I signed with the publisher.

I retired my husband by the six-month mark.

I travelled the world, meeting readers and seeing places I’d never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would see.

And, somewhere in the middle of all the words, my baby learned to sleep.

Lili St Germain’s new book, Empire, is published by HarperCollins Australia and is available now.