MY PUBLISHING JOURNEY: Janell Strube

Have you ever wondered how authors get their start?

How do they get agents?

How do they get published?

Is it luck? Talent? Drive?

This segment is an attempt to answer the one question: How did your book become a book?

Today's Featured Author:

JANELL STRUBE

Home - Janell Strube

Author of

Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution

What has been your experience with literary agents and/or traditional publishing? Is that a path you explored?

I did try looking for a literary agent. I spent hours researching agents and their preferences so that I would market to the right ones and spent more hours tailoring my query to each of them. I used Query Tracker to improve my response rate, and to query to those who only use that solution. Still, I got about 15 Nos and never heard from the rest.

When you started this journey, how many queries did you send? Or how long did it take you to find Acorn?

I gave myself a little more than a year of looking for literary agents and then switched to looking for a hybrid solution.

How did you find Acorn Publishing?

Ironically, I had known about Acorn from the beginning. In 2017, I attended the La Jolla Writer's Festival and heard (Jessica?) give her pitch about her book being mischaracterized, and how they had created their own company. So... this was a seed waiting to hatch.

What made you decide to publish through Acorn Publishing?

Their really instant response and love for my book. Plus, they are local to Southern California, and I felt that I knew and could trust them (versus some of the stories you read online).

What has been your favorite part of the publishing journey?

It sounds silly, but coming up with promotional materials I just loved - and I love handing out my bookmark and talking about my book. Most emotional moment - taking my ARC copy out of the Amazon mailer. I'm just so excited to finally have a book coming out. (That's three emotions, but all facets of my favorite part).

Was there anything about the process you didn't expect?

The amount of time you need to put into the process. This is not new, and this is not something that is unique for an author, whether traditionally or hybrid or self-published. I got the checklist and knew immediately I had a full-time job on top of my full-time job. But I am getting help wherever I can for this part.

Did you hit any snags along the way, and if so, how did you overcome them?

My day job has been unexpectedly intense this year and required a lot more hours and travel than I had planned. OK, I'm not complaining about a surprise trip to Tokyo, but this has meant that I'm worried about not getting things done for my book and the launch. So, I've asked for help. I hired a publicist, and I am probably going to hire someone to help do my social media posting for the last month - this relieved a lot of stress.

After publication, what marketing tactics worked best for you?

I'm not there yet, but will explore BookBub, Amazon, Facebook, and Goodreads promotions.

Looking back, what lessons have you learned?

I love that Acorn has a timeline, and a manageable process and they give you the checklist up front so once you get the hang of it, you can follow along. At a certain point, I just made sure to be on top of all the emails and do what they suggested. This is a great process.

If you could go back in time, what's one thing you would tell your earlier self about publishing?

Forget looking for an agent - go straight to publishing - you waste so much time. I'm going to caveat that however to say that you must have a pristine book, and you must spend the time, effort, and money to get it right - spelling, grammar, punctuation, everything. There isn't anything worse than picking up a book where this hasn't happened.

Any advice for aspiring authors just starting to explore writing?

Learn your craft. If you don't feel confident in your language skills, take classes. Take writing classes, visit writers' festivals, learn and practice.

Any advice for those about to begin the search for a publisher or an agent?

Get some professional advice on your book. There's a line between you can find an agent because they are only focusing on certain markets, and your book does not fall into that, and a book that is not ready to be published because it needs work. Of course, there are perfectionists among us (myself included), who will worry their book to death when it was ready all along.

Are you currently working on any new projects? What are your goals moving forward?

Two projects - a memoir in its second complete draft. And the second book about the French Revolution, pulling out one of the characters who appears in Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution.

What are a few of your favorite books?

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (and no, I did NOT watch the movie), The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy and Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. As a teenager, I wanted to write books like North and South by John Jakes, Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.  I have at least 30 books by current authors in my to be read pile, but what I’ve recently gobbled up are It’s Okay Not to Look for the Meaning of Life: A Zen Monk’s Guide to Living Stress-Free One Day at a Time by Jikisai Minami – I kind of need to read parts of this every day – and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow.

What was it like seeing your published book for the first time?

Very emotional. My voice was shaking. The seed of Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution was planted in an art history class in 1985. I could never have imagined where life would take me to make this book come to life.

Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution

In a world where women are seen but rarely heard, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard refuses to be silenced.

The daughter of Parisian shopkeepers, Adélaïde dreams not of marriage or titles but of earning a place among the masters of French art. With Queen Marie Antoinette on the throne and a spirit of change in the air, anything seems possible. But as revolution brews and powerful forces conspire to deny her success, Adélaïde faces an impossible choice: protect her life or fight for a legacy that will outlast her.

Inspired by the true story of one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is a sweeping, evocative portrait of ambition, courage, and resilience in the face of history’s fiercest storm.

About the author

Janell Strube makes a mean barbecue sauce. She’s also a world traveler, a baker, and a bicyclist. But when she writes, her identity as an adoptee often steers her attention to topics of alienation, erased history, and displacement.

In 2024, a personal essay of hers was published in the anthology Adoption and Suicidality. Her work has also appeared in Shaking the Tree: brazen. short. memoir and A Year in Ink. Her short memoir, “Taking my Blonde Daughter to a Black Lives Matter Rally,” was selected for the 2020 San Diego Memoir Showcase, an annual live storytelling event.

While much of her writing is personal, she enjoys the freedom that comes with crafting fiction. Her desire to learn about forgotten female artists who shaped the French revolutionary period motivated her to write Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution.

When not crunching numbers as a tax executive for a hotel chain, she can be found hanging out with Shiloh the Wheaten and plotting her second book.

Coming January 13, 2026