The self-published novelist: Mary Pat Hyland’s independent success

Mary Pat Hyland

As a child, Mary Pat Hyland spent her summers on her grandparents’ house with a wrap around porch listening to cicadas hum in tall elm trees. The Queen Anne home with bay windows and oak stairways holds many of Hyland’s fond memories and her Irish-American family history.

Nestled in the small village of Penn Yan, N.Y, The House with the Wrap Around Porch will be Hyland’s first saga story based on her memories growing up there. The novel follows three generations from the 1920s to the present.

“It’s not autobiographical but there are incidents that occurred [there] in my family over the years,” said Hyland, a self-published author of five books. The story is set on the 20-mile long Y-shaped Keuka Lake, where the origins of the Finger Lakes wine industry began.

The saga begins with 18-year-old Jimmy O’Donoghue  who experiences a tragic incident on Keuka Lake. Jimmy goes into shock and regains his life when through Mame, 22, who moves across the street from his house with the wrap around porch.

Later, the story tells the lives of their six granddaughters whose experiences echo that of their parents and grandparents. Oh how we love to see history repeat itself, especially in family generations. There is something mystical, and a bit haunting about it. Hyland, on Binghamton, N.Y., is almost finished with the second draft, at more than 100,000 words.

“When this is published I have to tell my sisters, this is not you,” laughed Hyland, who has three sisters. “The thing I love about writing characters… they just take you places where you never expected.” One of the granddaughters joins the Peace Corp in El Salvador, during the 60s, which Hyland didn’t plan on.

Hyland began writing the story in 2011 for the NaNoWriMo, an annual writing event held every November, when participants write for a month with the goal to finish a 50,000-word novel.

An award-winning journalist, Hyland’s books have enjoyed incredible success and each were self-published through Create Space. In 2012, her parody on Dante’s Inferno, 3/17, in which four traditional Irish musicians travel through nine hellish circles of American-style St Patty’s Day festivities, landed the number one spot on Amazon France’s English Language Kindle Humor Books.

Before she turned to self-publishing, Hyland tried the traditional route to spark interest in her first novel, The Cyber Miracles. “I sent out tons of query letters and a lot of the responses I got were so canned,” she said. “To me it sounded like nobody had even opened up my letter.” 

Then in July 2007, Hyland met an author at a party who had self-published his book. She left her journalism career and, a month later, she published The Cyber Miracles, which she’d been working on for more than a decade. The novel turned into the Maeve Kenny Series, about a 30-something female who flees a successful career in Queens, N.Y. for her upstate roots where a magical turn of events brings a new love with challenges.

Mary Pat Hyland’s family home in Penn Yan, N.Y. Credit: Mary Pat Hyland

In 2012, The Cyber Miracles ranked number 11 on Amazon Germany’s Top 100 Bestseller List for Humor.

“The hard part about self-publishing is that you wear so many hats,” Hyland said.” You are not only the writer but you have to do the marketing. You have to know how to do social media in the right way. You have to give [readers] a sense of who you are as a person, and that makes them curious about the book you’re writing.”

The House with the Wrap Around Porch will involve a restaurant, so Hyland, who is also a cook, simultaneously maintains a cooking blog. She has more than 150 cook books and challenged herself to use each cook book at least once this year. A Cuban sandwich recipe substituted pickles with chopped green olives, raisins, shallots, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. “It sounds weird, but wow was that good,” Hyland said.

Hyland hopes to publish the book by the end of March. She still visits her grandparents’ house in Penn Yan; the house will be 100 years old this year. “My sister and I used to joke about how difficult life is, and we just wanted to give everything up and go live at the house with the wrap around porch.”

Hyland’s books are available through Kindle, Nook, Smash Words, and Sony Code eReader.