Within three years, my position was replaced with AI three times.

 

In all of these positions, I built systems with numbers to demonstrate efficacy and overall business growth. I was replaced, each time, by a mechanism able to duplicate the output without any of the understanding behind why. It took the third loss to realize what these employers did not want. A real person with a real soul.

Once I built their systems or trained their machines with a formula, I was compartmentalized as an expense rather than a critical thinking asset. All three of these positions were in marketing. Marketing without passion or love of the work stopped me cold in my tracks.

I am wildly creative and have a superpower for pattern recognition. KPIs and cold, raw data are more than arbitrary numbers to me. When read in context of one another, they tell me a story of how a product reaches their audience. Add a full-body passion for everything I touch, and you find a person who pays for themselves.

In 2026, I walked into the Bram Stoker Awards Conference freshly fired and with nothing to pitch, sell, or offer to the community who carried me through my darkest times. I even lacked the motivation to try. After years of placing my own work as a published author on the backburner for a benefits package I had very little of myself left at all. In all honesty, I was done competing for people’s time, attention, network, money, and regard. So I refused to perform my usual secretly transactional conversations.

With nothing to gain, I found my greatest talent. Giving.

I stepped out of a posture of performance and simply gave every person I encountered 100% of MY time, MY attention, MY network, MY regard, and in cases my money.

The patterns I recognized behind their performance smiles and between their lines of rehearsed speeches, absolutely broke me.

Every single person had layers of things they were going through. Not abstractly. Specifically, acutely, in their bodies. At the same time as existing in rooms full of the same community they loved more than their comfort zone, every person was quietly terrified of not belonging. Godmothers and Godfathers who built the platforms on which they stood were no exception.

The greatest common, unspoken fear was that the work they'd made from the most intimate, undefended places in themselves would be dismissed or overlooked or simply never found. Talented voices in writing fought against their own nature to socialize and make the right connections in order to be seen, when they would much rather be read. 

I came home asking myself where my skills and love of people and their stories fit to solve this problem of disconnection without relying on the industry monopoly players for success. This led me to discussions with small publishers and indie bookstore owners. I began doing research into the disconnect of horror availability in stores and what I found was a gaping hole. 

US horror sales were up 18% year over year, with 2024 marking the biggest volume since 2009. Readers are hungry for something to feel. And yet, walking into independent bookstores, you'd barely know we exist. 

Our best and brightest stories are published through small horror publishing houses because we’ve always been the illegitimate genre children of scifi and fantasy. However, those same small houses publishing the weird, the daring, the marginalized voices actually pushing the genre forward are invisible on platforms that booksellers use to discover and order titles. There was no dedicated catalog, no regional sales rep, no advocate, no one building a bridge between the publishers making the most exciting work in horror and the stores that would sell our stories if they only knew we existed. 

The available solution lives at the individual publisher’s expense which, frankly, is cost prohibitive. To have a catalogue hosted by sites like Edelweiss, a small press who rarely pays themselves, must invest tens of thousands in this visibility on top of paying someone to manage store relationships and order tracking. 

This is when the concept of The Morrigan Indie Book Rep developed without precedent.