If you’ve been with me a while, you might remember my rave review of The Caged Graves by Dianne K. Salerni. My friend was gushing about it at work one day and offered to let me borrow her library copy. I loved it! I have always loved Gothic stories that combine romance and mystery, and that’s what you’re getting if you choose to pick this one up. It’s YA in nature and content, but it reads like adult historical fiction so it’s a great crossover story for all ages. I saw The Caged Graves fall off the market a few years ago and always wondered what happened. I decided to write to Dianne and see where it went. To my delight, she decided to self publish it after getting her rights back when her old publisher was acquired and it went live on Amazon this month!
It’s my pleasure to welcome Dianne to the blog today to share a little bit about her experiences with self publishing throughout her career. I love learning about how authors get started, and I had fun to get to know Dianne a little better!
Dianne K. Salerni’s Journey with Self Publishing
This month I was delighted to upload The Caged Graves to Amazon Kindle. The Caged Graves was my second novel, originally published by Clarion Books in 2013. It went out of print a few years ago, and when the rights returned to me, I decided to self-publish it. What many people don’t know is this isn’t my first foray into self-publishing.
My career as an author began with a self-published novel titled High Spirits: A Tale of Ghostly Rapping and Romance which launched in May of 2007, several months before Amazon introduced their first Kindle. E-books weren’t yet a thing when High Spirits came out. Self-publishing at that time meant paying a company to create print-on-demand copies of your manuscript. It was costly, and it also meant accepting the black cloud that clung to self-publishing. We called ourselves “Indie Authors,” but people still tended to back away slowly when they found out how our works came to exist.
In spite of that stigma, my book did well enough to catch the attention of Sourcebooks. They were launching a new YA imprint, Sourcebooks Fire, and they offered a deal to re-publish High Spirits with a new edit and a new title. Subsequently, We Hear the Dead released in 2010. I became a traditionally published author, and most of the time I told people We Hear the Dead was my first book because self-publishing had such a bad reputation.
Nowadays, self-publishing is easy, free, and a lot more respected than it used to be. It’s time to stop hiding my firstborn, High Spirits. I know now that it was too wordy, and the We Hear the Dead version is better thanks to the guidance of a professional editor. But it existed, and I might not be an author today without it.
DIANNE K SALERNI is the author of YA and middle grade fiction, including The Caged Graves, The Eighth Day, and The Carrefour Curse. She enjoys creepy cemeteries, ghost hunting classes, climbing ancient pyramids, and serving the feline overlords at her local animal shelter.
The Caged Graves by Dianne K. Salerni
Self-published on March 13, 2026 (originally published by Clarion Books on May 14, 2013)
Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery
Pages: 251
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“In Catawissa, sometimes the dead don’t stay where you put them.”
The year is 1867, and seventeen-year-old Verity Boone is returning to her birthplace in Catawissa, Pennsylvania after fifteen years away. She is excited to meet her betrothed, a young man she knows only through his charming letters, and only slightly apprehensive about reuniting with a father she barely remembers. Verity expects the transition from the city life of Worcester, Massachusetts, where she was raised by distant relatives after the death of her mother, to the rural farmlands of Catawissa will be a challenge. But she did not anticipate just how distant and aloof her father would be, how unwelcoming his house, and she did not expect her future husband, Nate, to be as bumbling in person as he was eloquent on paper. Did he even write the letters himself?
Even worse awaits her in the town cemetery where Verity finds the graves of her mother and an aunt she never knew isolated from the rest, in unsanctified ground, and surrounded by iron cages. No one, not even her father, will tell her the full story behind this shameful interment, and everyone admonishes her to leave well enough alone and focus on her upcoming marriage. But Verity stubbornly pursues the truth, which leads her into troubling aspects of local history, including a legendary treasure in gold coins and gruesome “incidents” in the cemetery.
If Verity isn’t careful, she might end up in a grave of her own.
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