Two years ago, I tried a little experiment. I was lamenting the fact that I had several previously
published stories of novella and novelette length that had appeared years ago
but had long since dropped offline or out of print. They were some of the stories of which I am
most proud; what I consider truly representative of my best work up to that
point. I also hadn’t been writing too
many new short stories, other than the occasional piece of flash fiction, as I
had been engrossed in completing a couple of novels for the past few
years.
When someone would ask me for some of my work, I could of
course direct them to this blog, where there is a list with links to some of my
shorter work and flash pieces still online, but I really wanted those novellas
to be readily available when someone asked.
I could of course have republished them here on this blog, but I find
such a format lacks a good reading experience for prose fiction.
The other option, of course, was to self-publish them on a something like
Amazon’s Kindle or similar.
When I first got into writing professionally, about ten
years ago, self-publishing was still a bit taboo for many writers. There was still a great deal of vanity
presses in operation, tempered of course with legit self-publishing outfits
like CreateSpace or Lulu.com. Yes, self-publishing
then still had the mark of amateurism on it, and many of my fellow writer
friends felt that to go this route would be to mar one’s future chances at
traditional publication.
But things changed quite a bit over the next eight years,
driven very likely by Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing program, as well as other
entities like Smashwords, Nook, Apple Books and many more. Indie publishing, to use the more friendly
term, has now gone fully mainstream.
There are indie authors out there with huge followings who sell hundreds
of thousands of books a year, and there are many pro authors who are taking
note. Some traditionally published
writers are doing a sort of hybrid method wherein they sell some of their work
to mainstream publishers and release a few indie works as well, perhaps shorter
pieces set in the same world as their trad-published novels. Older authors are republishing their long out
of print back catalogs on Amazon, reaping a tidy profit from old manuscripts
that would otherwise languish in obscurity, available only in used paperback
form. Amazon has allowed writers to take
control of their work and their careers in a way that would have been unheard of
even ten years ago, and I for one feel that is a good thing.
So, with all this in mind, I decided to test the waters
of indie publishing. My goals were not
too grand. I simply wanted to have an
ongoing home for my own out of print work, with the tangential goals of learning
the whole self-publishing process, from the Kindle interface to editing to
cover creation. And yes, I could have paid
someone to do all of this for me, but one, where’s the fun in that, and two, I
didn’t want to drop a great deal of money into something that was basically an
experiment.
I started with four of my old novellas in the summer of
2018. I made line edits on them, and
also I couldn’t resist tweaking them here and there, as I like to think my skills
as a writer had improved since these were originally released, so why not make
them a little better? I also made my own
covers, which is also somewhat taboo among indie writers, as such is another
whole skill set from writing. But I do
have a little bit of design experience, so I went for it. Of course, my first attempts were abysmal, as
I will outline in another post. At this point
I did seek the aid of a few pro designers I know, as well as writer friends,
and I got some good pointers. I kept at
it, and while what I came up with probably wasn’t one hundred percent Barnes
& Noble shelf-worthy, I was satisfied with them.
The covers finished, I set about learning how to do
layouts for both the E-book and paperback forms of the books. While the vast majority of an indie author’s
sales are going to be E-book, I liked the idea of having a paperback available
as well. It made for an overall more professional
presence, and I like the idea of having a few nice paperback copies on hand to give
out to friends when they ask. And, while
I do read E-books from time to time, I still love the experience of kicking
back and reading a physical book.
I released those four books toward the end of that summer,
and initially, I did very little promoting or advertising. I just wanted to see how they would do on
their own. Of course they did very
little, sales wise. But they did sell a little
bit. Not much, mind you, maybe enough to
buy me an extra cup of coffee each month, and I’m not talking Starbucks. Probably more like Freeze Dried Taster’s
Choice, but hey, it was more than nothing.
Of the four books, the one called The Night Bigfoot Attacked Marville
TX, June 15, 1977 sold the best.
Apparently, there’s a sub-genre of Bigfoot fiction that attracts a niche
following, and this seemed to catch on with those folks. It sells a few more copies a month than the
other books, even though it’s more about the fascination with the legend of
Bigfoot, than an actual creature on the screen so to speak. (oops, spoiler alert!)
The next summer I released four more novellas, which
pretty much got all the old back catalog of my material out there. It was also around this time that I was
nearing the completion of the two novels that I’d been working on for the past
several years. And thus, I had a
decision to make. The novellas had almost
all been traditionally published—I’d been paid for them and the rights had
returned to me. Indie publishing these
books was really no big deal, as there wasn’t much else I could do with them, other
than perhaps submit them to a reprint anthology, though the market for previously
published works of novella length wasn’t that great. So indie pubbing them was really a no-brainer. But now, my novels. What to do, what to do?
The usual route for a writer at my stage of the game—that
is, someone with some short story sales but nothing more—is to try to find a
literary agent that will take on the novel(s) and market them to traditional
publishing houses. Other than a few small
presses, most trad-publishers won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts from a
writer at my level. And I have to admit,
as I was writing these books, I had fully planned to seek out an agent and go
the traditional route.
So what changed?
Well, first, there was my experience with indie pubbing
the novellas. I really enjoyed it. I loved the whole process, and the total
control that came with it. As I got
closer and closer to finishing the novels, I thought more and more about going
the indie route with them. Second, I did
investigate retaining an agent, and I reviewed hundreds of agent profiles. The problem was, my novels don’t fit into
neat little categories like these folks were seeking, and they were also a
departure from my previously published work, which was mostly Sci-Fi and
Fantasy. These new novels were
mainstream fiction, but neither fit into concise genre categories, other than
perhaps romance. And so transitioning from speculative fiction to a completely different genre probably wouldn't help my chances in going this route.
So this made up my mind for me. I do believe in these books, and I believe
there is a readership out there for them.
For this reason, I decided to go the indie route, as I now had experience
with such, and I found I liked it very much.
Unlike the novellas, which were basically old news, these novels are
new, original works, and I plan to market them as heavily as I can. I’m working on a professional website, so I’ll
have something other than this blog as a presence on the net, and I’m creating
a media kit and have plans to contact reviewers and organizations that might
have an interest in these works. It will
probably be an uphill battle—traditional publishers still have the most muscle
when it comes to marketing a writer’s work, but this is slowly changing. As evidenced by the hundreds of indie authors
who are having great success, there is a chance to succeed in this crowded
field. I actually think the quirky
uniqueness of these novels can be an asset for me, for when I put my reader hat
on, I’m always looking for something new and different. Hopefully, there are a great many more
readers out there who feel the same. I
just have to somehow boost my signal above the great noisy fugue that is all
the other millions of works vying for readers’ attention.
And so, after a great deal of editing and planning, I
released the two novels on Amazon this week, with plans to go wide onto other publishing
platforms shortly. I also released two
short story collections. One collects five
of the related fantasy novellas, as well as five previously unpublished short
stories, all of which are set in the same fantasy milieu. The other is a collection of forty odd short
stories, about half of which were previous published over the last ten years,
all unified by a central theme, though the stories themselves are quite diverse—many
are mainstream and literary fiction, but there’s also some fantasy and SF, as
that is the genre in which I cut my teeth, so to speak.
And now comes the hard part, spreading the word. It won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to
the challenge. Wish me luck, and check
back here from time to time. I’ll be sure
to update my progress as this little experiment continues.
