Indie Author Advice: Sandy Rodriguez on Self-Publishing, Marketing, and Self-Doubt

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Sandy Rodriguez walked away from a career she loved, learned to live inside other writers’ voices, and wrote a small book to help the rest of us keep our footing. A conversation about words, work, and weathering the storm.

Choosing to Prevail

Some people leave a job because they hate it. Sandy Rodriguez did something far harder — she left one she loved. In this episode of my podcast I spoke with the award-winning author, journalist, and translator about the long, winding road that carried her from one of Latin America’s most influential newsrooms to a Los Angeles courthouse, and to a slim, quietly luminous book called Choose to Prevail. What follows are the talking points worth keeping, and beneath them you’ll find the video and audio versions of a conversation I found unexpectedly moving.

I came to this one with skin in the game. I spent years as a newspaper reporter myself, so when Sandy described the life — the always-on clock, the call that comes at three in the morning — I recognized every word. But where my road bent toward marketing, hers bent toward something stranger and more beautiful: the art of carrying other people’s words across the chasm between languages, and then, eventually, finding her own.

The newsroom that swallowed sixteen years

Sandy’s career began at Reforma, one of the most influential newspapers in Mexico and across Latin America, where she was hired as a co-editor for the fashion and food sections and then watched her responsibilities swell, month after month, until she was editorial coordinator over more than fifty supplements — small magazines nested inside the larger paper, spanning entertainment, the environment, business, the whole soft-news firmament. It was her passion and her joy. It was also, she told me, pursued at the expense of nearly everything else. Fourteen-hour days bled into sixteen, sometimes eighteen, and when you work in media you are never truly off the clock; a meal or a drive home can be interrupted at any second by an earthquake, an election, a shooting. She painted the absurdity in a single perfect image: a day she’d trimmed her own hair with scissors because there’d been no time for a stylist, talking with a colleague who turned up the sole of his shoe to show her the hole worn through it — two glamorous, well-paid people who could not find an hour to buy a pair of shoes or see their closest friends more than a few times a year.

What finally moved her was not exhaustion but grief. She lost her father, and then, shortly after, her younger brother, and the twin losses shook her to the core and made the arithmetic of her life suddenly unbearable. She wanted a path that would let her spend time with the people who mattered, so she traded the roar of Mexico City for the comparatively gentle pace of Los Angeles, and began, without quite knowing it yet, to reinvent herself.

Translation as method acting

In Los Angeles she fell first into literary translation, courtesy of the publishing contacts she’d gathered over the years, and she offered a piece of advice I’d never heard put quite so well: aim to translate books, because no major house pays to translate anything that hasn’t already proven itself a bestseller, which means you only ever work on material destined to succeed, with your name set beside brilliant authors on the credits page. But the part that lit her up was the craft itself, which she likened to method acting. A translator, like a method actor, has to inhabit the role — to slip inside the author’s skin and speak in their voice, whether that voice reaches for high-register poetry or low, blunt slang, for humor or acronyms or grief. You don’t carry the words across; you become the person who first spoke them.

The hardest things to ferry between languages, she said, are precisely the things that live in the seams of a tongue — poetry, and harder still, humor. She once worked on a little book of jokes and riddles built almost entirely on plays on words, the kind of thing that simply evaporates in translation, and the only honest solution was a workaround: keep the few jokes that could survive the crossing, and quietly replace the untranslatable ones with local equivalents that would actually land. Among the titles she carried over was a companion volume to the Conversations with God series, a lengthy, wide-ranging book she came to with fresh eyes — and, refreshingly, one that never hammered the same point flat, which set her thinking about why so many books do exactly that.

Why books grow heavy

Here Sandy offered one of those backstage truths that reframes something you’ve seen your whole life without understanding. Books pad themselves, she explained, partly because publishers set word-count requirements and writers dutifully fill them, but also for a reason hiding in plain sight on every shelf: the spine. A book sold in a physical store is, unless its author is genuinely famous, displayed spine-out, and that narrow strip has to carry the title, the author, the publisher, and enough design to catch a wandering eye — which means a fabulously concise little book, however perfect for the reader, can be a liability in the wild. As a translator with a low tolerance for filler, she found the whole arrangement faintly maddening, and it shaped the book she would eventually write.

The stigma that’s nearly gone

When I asked her about self-publishing, Sandy argued that the industry is drifting steadily toward it, and that the old stigma is very nearly dead. She drew a careful line between the vanity publishing of the past — pay a printer, hold your book — and the predatory operators still circling today, the ones who promise to make you a bestselling, award-winning author for a few thousand dollars, or a few tens of thousands, in exchange for a package that’s rarely worth it. The truth she kept returning to is that quality belongs to no camp: you can self-publish something excellent and you can traditionally publish something terrible. What actually separates the two roads now has little to do with the writing and almost everything to do with the size of your platform. Publishing houses, like any business, hedge against loss, so they bet on the sure thing — the decades-beloved novelist, or the YouTuber with millions of followers who has never written a word but can move copies on name alone. She pointed to Rich Dad Poor Dad, self-published by a man she called a marketing genius, as proof of how far the other road can run.

Self-publishing, she said, suits three kinds of people especially well: the genuinely gifted writer who simply isn’t famous yet, the entrepreneur using a book to grow a business or widen their influence, and the creator who just wants to make something for the joy of it or for a small, niche audience. But she added a warning that doubles as the hinge of the whole conversation — before you write a word, you have to ask yourself the hard question of whether you care about the money or not, because the honest answer should steer your topic, your angle, your cover, and very nearly everything else.

The two percent

Then came the splash of cold water, and I pressed her on it because it deserves saying plainly. Neither self-published authors nor big-house authors tend to sell anywhere near as many copies as people imagine. By one statistic she’d encountered — and she was careful to call it perhaps a touch too grim — only around two percent of books carrying a proper catalog code ever sell more than a thousand copies. Most first-time writers assume they’ll clear that bar easily; most won’t. Publishing, she said, is very much like acting: not everyone is Brad Pitt, not everyone wins the Oscar, and the Dan Browns and Stephen Kings of the world are outliers, not the rule. I added the corollary from my own watching of writers’ careers — that even the eventual giants rarely sold much with their first books, and that momentum, when it comes, can take years to gather.

Banishing the muse

Sandy doesn’t believe in writer’s block, and journalism is the reason. When you write to a newsroom deadline you cannot afford to wait for the muse to descend; you set the clock and you finish, full stop. So when it came time to write her own book, she manufactured artificial deadlines to push herself forward — a discipline I asked her about directly, because I’d always found the daily-deadline reflex easy to apply to a news story and nearly impossible to apply to a book, where no editor stands over you demanding pages by five. Her answer was that the pandemic handed her the one window she might ever get. The courthouse where she now works as a full-time interpreter shut down for a couple of months, and she told herself it was now or never. The book had already lived in her head for two years, fully formed; all that remained was the act of putting it on the page, which she did in a headlong rush, finishing in the nick of time before the world reopened and called her back to work.

Your first draft is supposed to be terrible

The most generous thing Sandy said — and the thing I most want every writer who reads this to carry away — was her cure for self-doubt. We undermine ourselves, she said, by committing a basic error of comparison: we hold our own rough first draft up against someone else’s finished, published, exhaustively edited prose and conclude that we simply don’t measure up. But that’s a rigged contest. She’s seen the raw work of well-known writers and journalists, and plenty of it is ordinary, because everyone writes in a hurry sometimes, everyone is occasionally distracted, and a first draft is supposed to be terrible — that is its job. The remedy is unglamorous and freeing: write the bad draft no one will ever see, set it aside, reread it, cut the padding that keeps your writing from sparkling, fix the grammar, and then hand it to a second pair of eyes, a sharp-eyed friend if not a professional. And remember, she added, that even a beloved bestseller with thousands of glowing reviews also collects its share of one-star takedowns, because taste is various and no book pleases everyone — so a few harsh words should never dent your confidence in work you did honestly and well.

A map, not a GPS

Choose to Prevail itself is a deliberately slim thing, meant to be read across a single afternoon, written for anyone caught in a dip of self-confidence. Sandy wanted readers to come away with two gifts — more faith in themselves and more faith in the future — drawn from a life that has known real setback, tragedy, and the disorientation of starting over in a strange place. Booksellers tend to file it under self-help, a label she has mixed feelings about, not least because the genre carries its own faint stigma. But she pushed back on the very category: if you look closely, almost any philosopher’s treatise is a self-help book, as are a great many religious texts and no small number of novels, since you can glean help from nearly anything worth reading. What she resisted most was the prescriptive, ivory-tower tone of the traditional self-help guru, the voice that announces from on high exactly what’s wrong with you and how to become more like the author. Her book aims instead to feel like a cup of coffee with a kind, patient friend — a description her readers echo again and again, and one the writer Eric Weiner used almost word for word in his praise of it. She offered the cleanest metaphor of the whole hour: a conventional self-help book is a GPS barking a single route, while hers is an old-fashioned paper map, laying out many possible roads and trusting you to choose where to travel next.

The marketing she chose not to do

As a former marketer I had to ask about the business of selling a book, and Sandy gave the textbook answer and then cheerfully confessed to ignoring it. The single most important step, she said, is one most writers skip: settle on a very specific, ideally niche audience before you write a single line — single parents who travel for work, say, or DJs who can’t figure out how to get paid fairly by promoters. Pick a niche tight enough and you’ll top its category fast, with little competition and a ready-made crowd to sell to, especially if you’ve spent the preceding months befriending exactly those people — the runner with bad knees finds you because you were already in the running leagues, already known to the chiropractors who recommend you. You begin marketing, in other words, before you begin writing. She didn’t do any of it, because making money was the last thing on her mind; she wrote the book for the pure pleasure of it and to offer the kind of comfort she’d once needed herself. And the irony is that the indifference paid its own strange dividend — the book found readers she never could have targeted, skewing toward younger men in media and finance, including a friend in investments who now gifts a copy to the first thousand people who join his sustainable-forestry venture, a tie-in no marketing plan on earth would have predicted.

Lemons into lemonade

My favorite story she told was about fear. Having driven for years in Mexico City, Sandy arrived in Los Angeles and found herself unable to merge onto a freeway, genuinely convinced she would die — a terror her L.A. friends found baffling, since to a driver raised in Mexico City’s gridlock the California freeways feel less like traffic than like a NASCAR straightaway. She broke the phobia with a piece of accidental wisdom that could stand as the whole book in miniature. Caught in a stretch of profound sadness after a personal setback, she reasoned that you cannot be terrified and heartbroken at the same time — the sorrow simply crowds the fear out — and so she chose that grieving window to practice the very thing that scared her, driving the freeways under the cover of her own grief until, by the time the sorrow lifted, the fear had quietly gone with it. Lemons into lemonade, as plainly as I’ve ever heard it told.

She closed with the counsel that gives her book its spine: be gentle with yourself. We assume the people around us lead charmed, frictionless lives — the beautiful car, the lovely home, the effortless talent — and we punish ourselves by comparison. But everyone, she insisted, is carrying something we cannot see: the debt behind the nice house, the illness behind the glowing health, the private terror behind the confident face on the stage. Average out anyone’s joys and sorrows across a whole life and most of us end up in roughly the same boat. No one is uniquely tortured, and there is real solace in knowing it.

About Sandy

Sandy Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico, raised in Philadelphia and Mexico City, and once took part in a fellowship program for international journalists at Seoul National University in South Korea before settling in Los Angeles, where she now works as a certified court interpreter and serves as editor of Heart of Hollywood Magazine. For roughly sixteen years she was an editorial coordinator at Reforma, one of the most influential publications in Latin America, and she is a member of ISLA, the International Society of Latino Authors. Her book, Choose to Prevail: Unexpected Insights to Help You Overcome Challenges, won the Gold Medal in the Best Health and Wellness Book category at the 2021 International Latino Book Awards — the largest Latino cultural awards event in the United States — and was also named a 2021 Readers’ Favorite Silver Medal Winner in the Non-Fiction Grief/Hardship genre.

 

Watch & Listen

You can experience the full conversation in Sandy’s own voice. Watch the video version on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Spotify, linked below.

Learn More About Sandy

Follow Sandy as an author and pick up a copy of Choose to Prevail — available as a paperback or ebook from major online retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble — through the links below.