Friday, January 17, 2014

Turning Indie

Original Cover From 2009
One of those things "experts" like to say and then lower-level traditionally published authors smugly point to so they can feel superior is that a lot of self-published authors published before they were ready and if they had just stuck with it longer they would be better off.  And maybe that is the case for some.  It wasn't the case for me.

I spent about 5 years trying to play the agent game.  I read a lot of good authors and perfected "the craft" as best I could and studied how to write queries and all that good stuff.  I think out of all those years I got one partial to show for it.  But still I didn't turn to self-publishing because I was frustrated by those rejections.

That happened in 2009 after I played the agent query game once more, this time with my literary novel Where You Belong.  I had spent months in 2008 feverishly writing the first draft and then more months feverishly rewriting it again, only this time in first-person.  When I finished, I knew I had something special.  I knew this was my masterpiece, my Mona Lisa or statue of David or whatever classic piece of art you want to use.

I hashed out more query letters and sent a bunch off.  And got nothing.  I mean not even a partial.  Maybe if I had got a partial or a full I'd have never self-published it because at least then I could say someone had read it and thought it wasn't any good.  But it was rejected something like 50 times (some via actual no's and others just ignoring me) without anyone reading a single bloody page!  That was when I decided to self-publish, because this one was too good to sit in "the drawer" and collect dust.

I don't regret that decision because at least this way people have gotten to read the book.  If you look it up on Amazon it has 12 reviews averaging 4 stars, so I take that as a sign I have some slight idea what I'm doing.  If I do have one regret I wish I'd have self-published another book first just so I could have gotten the bugs out before this one.  As it was, it was quite a learning experience, especially since this was 2009 and self-publishing for Kindle and Smashwords and all that was still relatively new.

A traditionally published author who recently self-published a book said he'd rather traditionally publish.  Well sure, fella, we'd all rather traditionally publish.  But this is an industry that uses a submission process where rejection is the default, evidenced by those form rejections they send out.  The odds are hugely stacked against the author because let's face it, it's a subjective process.  The human element comes into play a lot.  You might have a well-written book and a great query but if the person reading it has a hangover or a bad cold or something she might give it a glance and then reject it.  Or maybe that Wednesday when your query pops up she's decided today she wants to read stories about vampires, but then two months later after you've changed all your werewolves to vampires, she decides she really wants books about golems now.  So your book might be perfectly fine; it's just that it wasn't read by the right person at the right time.

Am I saying that everyone who gets rejected should self-publish?  No.  Sometimes all that rejection does mean you're terrible and need to either keep working at it or find a new hobby.  But sometimes you know something is too good to keep hidden and when you get to one of those then you should definitely self-publish it.

Incidentally, I stopped playing the agent game at all in 2012.  That was when I got published by two different small publishers and realized those are largely a waste of time.  The one was just a complete debacle all the way around:  they didn't provide any editing, they tossed together a crummy cover, they missed deadlines, and they've provided almost no marketing.  The other one did a much better job (except maybe with the cover) but what I realized is they're too small and new to have any marketing reach.  So the decision I reached is that I can do as good of a job as "professionals" especially after almost 5 years and my marketing is as good or better than theirs, so why give them 60% or so when I can do a comparable job and get 100%?  It's still not much either way, but those extra nickels and dimes add up in the long run.  Unless you're really lucky you probably won't make a lot of money at this, but a lot of months I get a free tank of gas from my writing income and that ain't bad.

10 comments:

  1. Here's hoping for lucky! And marketing is tough. People that are good at it really have a leg up. And that's why I've tried to focus my queries towards publishers that have some presence in genre fields that I want to play in. And even now, some of the big ones are starting to open up ebook only imprints which are no different than the small presses you mentioned above. So that's starting to get trickier now too.

    It's a modern day gold rush. The folks getting rich aren't the prospectors, but the folks selling the pick-axes. I'm not sure how that metaphor applies, you'll just have to use your imagination to make it fit.

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  2. With the price of gas that must be nice to have the extra money.
    Just make sure you buy it from Sunoco my mom still gets checks from dad's retirement. ;)

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  3. I've heard similar stories from my brother Pat. It's definitely a new world out there for authors.

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  4. It's a brutal business we've chosen. I worked with an agent for over a year to polish my novel, at which point she said I'd changed the "voice" of my main character and she was no longer interested in representing me. I showed her that I hadn't changed a single word spoken by the main character but she insisted I had, and rejected my manuscript. I remember walking to the bathroom and throwing up.

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  5. It's the opposite these days. Authors are getting agents or publishers based on sales from their self-published books. Some keep their e-books rights, but give them the paperbook rights. It's funny how these people show up when they smell money.

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  6. I had no idea you'd been self-publishing so long!

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  7. You really are very good at design and editing, and marketing, for that matter -- Planet 99 I think is very smart.

    There are stories upon stories of people who get rejected or passed over -- as I read this I was thinking of Aaron Rodgers getting passed over by 24 NFL teams, let alone Tom Brady, who was what, a 6th-round draft pick? Which means even the Patriots skipped him 5 times. And there's those stories about people sending out queries for stuff like "The Old Man And The Sea."

    You hit the nail on the head, though, when you said you knew you had something special, and that you wanted people to see it and the reviews speak for themselves -- that's not an easy thing, getting to 12 reviews. If you work hard at something (like we all know you do) then you can recognize quality, and it's just a matter of finding an audience for that quality.

    I wonder why your small publishers didnt get your books into bookstores. To me, that's the only advantage remaining for traditional publishers: the marketing impact of being in an actual bookstore. Of course, they won't be around all that much longer. I really do think that publishers are going to be like record companies: MUST less relevant 10 years from now. Can you even name a major record label? Once Louis CK decided he didn't need broadcasting and Radiohead, Beyonce, and that one group whose name I can't think of but who was like an adult-contemporary U2, why can't I think of their name, they made "Fix You..." COLDPLAY -- once Coldplay and all those others decided they didn't need record labels, the deal changed.

    And once bookstores are dead, publishers will die, too.

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  8. You really are very good at design and editing, and marketing, for that matter -- Planet 99 I think is very smart.

    There are stories upon stories of people who get rejected or passed over -- as I read this I was thinking of Aaron Rodgers getting passed over by 24 NFL teams, let alone Tom Brady, who was what, a 6th-round draft pick? Which means even the Patriots skipped him 5 times. And there's those stories about people sending out queries for stuff like "The Old Man And The Sea."

    You hit the nail on the head, though, when you said you knew you had something special, and that you wanted people to see it and the reviews speak for themselves -- that's not an easy thing, getting to 12 reviews. If you work hard at something (like we all know you do) then you can recognize quality, and it's just a matter of finding an audience for that quality.

    I wonder why your small publishers didnt get your books into bookstores. To me, that's the only advantage remaining for traditional publishers: the marketing impact of being in an actual bookstore. Of course, they won't be around all that much longer. I really do think that publishers are going to be like record companies: MUST less relevant 10 years from now. Can you even name a major record label? Once Louis CK decided he didn't need broadcasting and Radiohead, Beyonce, and that one group whose name I can't think of but who was like an adult-contemporary U2, why can't I think of their name, they made "Fix You..." COLDPLAY -- once Coldplay and all those others decided they didn't need record labels, the deal changed.

    And once bookstores are dead, publishers will die, too.

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  9. Mostly, I think people need to stay away from traditional publishing and, especially, agents. Agents are like leeches that take money from you without providing much of anything in return.

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  10. A free tank of gas is pretty dang good. That's about what I get too. I love the control self-publishing gives me. I also like not having to wait for things to happen.

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