Yaryna Zdorova is a Ukrainian writer, literary editor at MEGOGO BOOKS, and the kind of person who wakes up at night with ideas for a marketing campaign. Her new novel is almost ready. The cover isn't done yet. And she already knows exactly how to sell it.
Yaryna Zdorova is a young Ukrainian writer, literary editor, copywriter and entrepreneur. She is the author of several novels and a poetry collection, and is currently preparing her new novel "Ne Miy Khrest" — Not My Cross — for publication, expected in bookshops within a month of this feature going live.
Her debut in long-form prose came with "Ty Moyimy Ochyma" — Through Your Eyes — which she published entirely independently, through self-publishing. Within a year, the book had appeared at some of Ukraine's most prominent literary festivals, debuted on stage alongside established authors, and introduced hundreds of readers to the realities of self-publishing from the inside.
"Writing the book is the easy part. Now sell it."
Yaryna's approach to writing and publishing is methodical, self-aware, and candid about the parts that nobody usually talks about. Her creative process is structured around distinct phases — drafting, distance, beta-reading, structural editing, preparation, and marketing — each governed by rules she has developed through experience rather than theory.
When she finishes a first draft, she doesn't read it immediately. She sends it to her two most trusted readers — her mother and her grandmother, representing two different generations present in the novel — and then closes the Google Doc and doesn't return to it for two to three months. The waiting, she says, is the part that hurts most. Messages from readers asking when the next book is coming in. Colleagues announcing pre-sales. Her own internal drive telling her that time is passing. And yet she waits, because what she needs is to return to the text as a reader, not as the person who wrote every comma.
The structural editing that follows — which she does herself — is about far more than grammar. It is about checking whether the logic of relationships between characters holds, whether the chronology is consistent, whether dialogue actually works, and above all whether the ending delivers what the rest of the book promises. The ending, she notes, is where it is easiest to fail. Starting a book is difficult. Finishing it in a way that doesn't disappoint the people who have followed you all the way there is a different kind of problem altogether.
For "Ne Miy Khrest," Yaryna describes psychological prose set in Kyiv, a story about betrayal, conscience, consequences and death.
The cover is being designed by her sister, an artist who illustrates all her books. The typography uses fonts created by Ukrainian designers. Every detail is chosen deliberately, and every detail is her responsibility alone — because self-publishing means exactly that: everything from the first sentence to the receipt from the printer lands on one desk.
She runs her own Instagram account, @yaryynka, where she shares the process openly — the struggles and the breakthroughs, book recommendations, advice for writers, and new voices in Ukrainian literature. The account is part of her marketing strategy, but also something more personal than that: a record of what it actually looks like to build a writing life in Ukraine, right now, with a day job and a deadline and a novel that needs to reach the people it was written for.
"If your book is already on shelves and nobody knows its name — you're already late. But it's not too late to fix it."
Yaryna also consults other writers on self-publishing, and she is straightforward about what the most common question is: how to sell. That, she says, is the part that takes the longest and is the most exhausting. You have to make a reader choose your book over a million other bestsellers. You have to talk about it everywhere — in social media, in publications, at events, in every conversation where it might belong. The marketing, she explains, should begin long before the book is finished. By the time it reaches the shelves, the audience should already be waiting.
What drives Yaryna is not just the desire to publish her own work, but a broader conviction about Ukrainian literature — that it is alive, brave, and deserves an audience far larger than it currently has, especially among young readers. Through her blog, her books, and her consultations, she is making that argument one story at a time.