Why I turned down a two-book deal

This is a guest post by author Selina Barker on leaving the industry & falling in love with self-publishing.

This is a guest column by Selina Barker, life design coach, author of the book Burnt Out: The exhausted person's six-step guide to thriving in a fast-paced world and the Goodbye Hello journals. She is also the creator of the Audible series The Career Change Coach and co-host of the Project Love podcast.

In February I did something which from the outside might have seemed completely mad: I turned down a double book (or rather journal) deal with one of the UK’s biggest publishers and chose to self-publish instead.

I hadn’t won the lottery, I hadn’t got a better deal and I hadn’t gone mad… I don’t think. I did it because, after three years of being an author in the publishing industry, I was unhappy and disappointed with how it left me feeling. And frankly I was getting bored of hearing myself go on and on about how disappointed I was with my experience whilst simultaneously doing nothing about it. So, I did something about it. 

I decided to walk away.

So, what exactly led me to making this big decision?