Claire Fraise: 2023 Self-Published Book Awards Winner

As we met to discuss her winning novel, Claire Fraise said something that resonated with every part of her writing and publishing journey: “I just try to keep a curious mindset and to explore and to keep doing something to move myself in the direction where I want to be going. Even when it can feel challenging.”

After falling in love with dystopian YA fiction while reading series like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, she asked herself, “Why can’t I try writing one of my own?” For two years, she did nothing but think about her characters and write. Then she self-published that novel, titled Imperfect.

She was only 16 years old.

“What really attracted me to self-publishing was that I would be able to hold on to all of the ownership of this work that I’d spent so much time creating and that I had the final say and control over all aspects of production in that book,” she says.

With this ownership came challenges of all kinds, but also the wisdom that comes with overcoming them. “I have so much experience now marketing and doing design and learning how to interact with readers and be on social media and run ads and do all of these different things that fit into publishing,” she says. “That has been amazing, and I’m so glad that I’ve been able to have that.”

While she wrote Imperfect as a young adult, she continues to write young adult fiction now that she’s in her 20s. Fraise explains that she loves it because the stories tend to be more hopeful than stories written for adults. She says, “Even though they go through stuff, they still have that optimism … If they go and do things like confide in others and lean on others and ask for help, their situations can get better, and they can improve them. … It’s really fun as an author because I can put them through a lot of really horrible stuff, and they’re still managing to keep their fighting spirit.” But readers can rest easy knowing that everything Fraise writes will end with some kind of hopeful note—something else that she equates with YA literature.

They Stay by Claire Fraise

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Her next big project—what would become They Stay—would take a few more years to come to fruition. She wrote the early draft while in her freshman year of college, and candidly explains that it wasn’t a successful draft. “I knew after I wrote it that I was not going to do anything with this book,” she says with a laugh. “It was a mess.”

But instead of shutting that story in a proverbial drawer and forgetting about it, she continued to wonder about what it could be. “For the next year and a half, I couldn’t get those characters out of my head. Like, that girl who could see ghosts was really interesting to me. And I loved the friendship dynamic between that school bad boy and the nerdy kid. … So, I sat down one day, and I was like, How could I structure a book with these characters in a way that fixes all of the problems that I had before?”

That was the first question of many that drove her revisions. Rewriting can often be a frustrating and painful process, but Fraise focused on staying open and kept asking questions until a clear story outline presented itself. But then, another hurdle: “I had heard that if you publish a series, it’s a lot easier to gain traction when you’re just starting out in self-publishing … you can run ads [for] Book One, and your ads are more likely to be profitable … a certain percentage of [people] will go on to read Book Two and Three and Four, et cetera.

“I came up with a way to turn that book into a story with serious potential and to widen it … It was the product of me sitting down knowing that I wanted to write a series and making a bunch of tweaks and being really thoughtful about how I was going to construct it. Because I have a plotter’s brain, and I like tinkering with projects and moving things around and constructing them almost like I’m building a puzzle.”

Her love of puzzles makes sense; she’s a genre author, and solving puzzles is integral to the stories that she tells. “I don’t know how mystery and thriller writers can write mysteries without plotting them and figuring out how they go together because I used to get so overwhelmed trying to figure out what information was being revealed to the readers when,” she says with a laugh. “… a couple of years ago, I started outlining all my books using plot grids, which was super helpful because then I could see exactly what was happening in every single subplot over the course of the story, and then track what was happening in each chapter.”

All writers can learn from the way Fraise approaches these kinds of changes to her writing process. Even though she released the first four books in the They Stay series in three years, an incredible feat, she believes she still has a lot to learn and remains open to switching things up. “My goal is just to make every book that I publish a little bit better than the last one … If I tried to publish a book that was absolutely perfect, I would never publish anything!”

More recently, she began to consider entering competitions. She confessed that, from a business standpoint, having the social capital from a competition placement can be what tips the scales when a reader is considering whether they should purchase a self-published book. But beyond that, she says that what’s most important as a self-published author is that “you need to be curious and put yourself out there in a bunch of different little ways and experiment to try to see what works and what ends up sticking and what doesn’t end, because there are so many things that change all the time with self-publishing.” This willingness to put her work out there netted her grand prize in the 31st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for They Stay, which includes a $10,000 cash prize and a paid trip to the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Conference.

When asked what advice she would give to other writers, her response is instantaneous: “Be persistent. Keep your eye on your goal, and don’t expect things to happen all at once. Keep moving in the direction that you want to go in, keep trying things, and stay curious; learn as much as you can. But don’t put all the pressure on yourself to be an expert in everything overnight. Just go into it with a mindset of learning, keep an open mind, and keep showing up for your book and for your dream. Because that’s the only way it’s going to come true.”