Given that Because I Killed Him is a longer novel, we knew early on that pursuing traditional publishing would likely require significant word count reductions. Those kinds of cuts would have changed the story’s structure and limited our ability to develop the later books planned for the series. Rather than compromise the narrative, we chose not to query literary agents and instead moved forward with self-publishing from the beginning. Our hope is that if readers connect with the story and it continues to grow, there may one day be opportunities for traditional publishing to revisit the book on its own terms, length and all.