Indie versus trad: grudge match

Ladies and gentlemen and everyone under the sun, tonight we have quite a show for you. Indie versus traditional publishing! Fighters take your corners. Whiffle bats out. And ... go!

Except it isn't really that simple, is it?

There are lots of reasons authors choose to self-publish, get an agent and go the traditional route, or build a career that is a hybrid of both of those. Moreover, most authors are only too happy to share how they did it. Here's the kicker: you can listen to every single one of those fervent devotees to their publishing path describe how you ought to do things, and they are always wrong.

Your path is your path. Your path will never be whatever worked for somebody else.

A while back, a speaker came to talk to my local writing group. She was a fierce advocate of self-publishing and had a few negative things to say about traditional publishing. At that time, I had just signed my debut three-book contract with a publisher, and as she spoke, I had this horrible sinking feeling. Had I done the wrong thing? Had I already tanked my career before I even really started it?

Well, honestly... maybe. 

Looking back, I'm not sure I should have gone with that first offer. I'm not entirely sure I should have published that book at all. But of course I didn't know back then what would happen. All I knew was that people had told me how to do this writer thing, and I was following the steps.

Let me be clear: there are no steps. You are on your own. We all are.

For me, the decision of what to send to my agent and what to self-publish is still murky. I haven't figured it out by a long shot, and income probabilities don't make any of this clearer.

Last year, I received royalties for the two books that were published and distributed by a fairly large publisher. They were in book stores, printed in paperback, submitted to the fancy review sites, etc. They sold okay, I guess. The third book in the series, I self-published. It had no fanfare, zero buzz, and uninspiring sales. When I filed my taxes this for the year, I was a little startled to see that I had made more on that self-published book than I had for royalties of the other two books combined.

So I don't even know anymore. The waters of this whole pool of indecision have gotten awfully muddy. Some days I decide I will self-publish the book I'm working on. Some days I think maybe it's good enough to send to my agent. Some days I just hope I finish the thing.

I'm sorry I don't have solid wisdom on this topic, but the takeaway might be this: No one can tell you what to do. The decision is entirely yours. And I believe in you.

Indie & Proud

I'm one of many self-published authors on this blog but one of the few non-hybrid. Not being traditionally published by one of the Big Houses isn't because I've eschewed that part of the industry; it's simply because stars and stories haven't aligned.

I'm unrepentantly Indie. It's been a joy watching this half of the industry scrabble into existence, explode with popularity, then settle into a competitive marketplace. Sure, the royalties from the gold-rush days would be nice to see again, but that era is long gone. Then again, so is the insanity of indie authors having to release two books a month just to have a toe in the game. It was a fascinating moment when readers cried, "Whoa! Too much, too fast!" Authors happily responded, "Whew! Burnout is real!" By then the importance of backlists was established. Readers could binge, authors could breathe. Suddenly there was room for authors who couldn't pump out a dozen+ books a year, but who did publish stories readers were willing to wait to read. Niche markets were finally being served in measurable quantity with rising quality.

Speaking of rising quality, the Indie market provided opportunities for more than authors. The supporting industry of creative professionals from artists to editors to formatters and designers found new demand for their talents. It used to be a struggle to find someone willing to work with a self-published author, now our business is par for the course. Small tech companies have popped up too to serve our unique demands, innovating in ways that are thrilling to provider and user. Oh sure, crackpots and exploiters abound everywhere, but for the most part, Indie authors are gaining the respect of peers and readers.

The downside of self-publishing? There are many institutional biases we still have to overcome. There are public-facing opportunities (books fairs, expos, cons, local news, etc.,) from which we are excluded because organizers don't consider us properly vetted. We are hugely dependent on the benevolence of a singular capricious capitalist company. A single seemingly insignificant design change on any retailers' site can tank our sales. A tech glitch on their end can result in significant losses in sales and challenges to our Intellectual Property (among other legal complications). Retailers who struggle financially find the easiest copout is to delay paying us pay us or to not pay us at all. Worse are those who under-report our sales, a circumstance against which we have no proof or recourse. When distributors have a problem--be it in tangible or digital product--it's the author who gets blamed, though we have no ability to right the wrong. We've yet to consolidate our voices to demand changes that benefit all self-published authors. We ride the shirttails of the publishing industry despite our conflicts of interest. Oh, and of course, the whole damn enterprise is costly. Success is a long-game. Books into which you invested your heart and savings will tank. Envy is real, jealousy pernicious and prevalent. Don't get me started on piracy.

But...for all the negatives, it's worth it. To me, at least. I write stories because I want to share them. I want to help total strangers escape their realities and find a bit of joy.

The biggest advantage of being an Indie author is also its greatest disadvantage: control = responsibility = accountability.  It's our name on the cover. It's our words on the pages. It's our reputation regardless.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

I choose you!

Hi folks.

It's been a while.

Sorry, I was off having cancer and doing everything I could to get that under control, but I'll do my best to post regularly again. No promises, of course, I'm busy playing catch up.

So this week's topic is near and dear to my heart. Traditional or self-publishing.

Listen, twenty years ago I would have sneered at self-publishing. Right or wrong (for the times) I felt the true measure of professionalism was getting published by one of the Big Five. Less than that meant less than professional.

Then the world changed drastically.

Self-publication stopped being an amateur hour. You could do it and actually have a chance of making money, which, two decades back wasn't the case very often. There were always exceptions but they WERE exceptions.

One of the best things bout self-publication these days is called BACKLISTING. I have several books in print now that weren't there for a few years. True story, I did a book called BLOODSTAINED OZ with one of my best friends. It sold through a small press at a price of $40 for a numbered limited edition and $125 for a lettered limited edition. lt also sold out in one weekend. After that, you just weren't going to see it again.  There were no plans for a mass-market version because we were talking about a novella.

fast forward ten years and the book was practically a holy grail affair. The books that had sol at $45 were going for over $1,000 dollars on the secondary market. because we could and because there was obvious demand, my partner on the book and I agreed to put it out as an ebook for $1.99. We sold a few copies and the market dropped. Now you can get a second-hand version for a far more reasonable price. What can we say? Books are meant to be read.

I have several more books that are currently out of print. I intend to put most of them back into print during the next year.

I'm doing them a few at a time because I have to pay someone smarter than me for the layout and someone else with artistic talent for the covers. :)

I still have plenty of traditionally published books in the queue. but my backstock? I can do that myself, if only to ensure people can still find copies if they're so inclined.

Keep smiling folks!

The Freedom of Being a Hybrid Author

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Choosing your freedom - Traditional or Self-Publishing?" We've been asked which freedom we picked: the freedom to write without getting into the business side or the freedom to control it all?

You all know me: I'm the both gal. As with everything, I'm pretty much in the Venn Diagram overlap of both worlds. I'm a hybrid author, with a foot equally in each camp. My income for the past three years has been 60/40% from trad/indie or indie/trad. It goes back and forth depending on the year, but I figure it evens out to 50/50.

I like both routes! Being able to control my covers and pricing is great, but I mostly love the freedom of being able to move my self-publishing deadlines around. I particularly love the monthly income. I also really love being part of a team. The St. Martins team working with my on my Forgotten Empires trilogy - and the release of THE FIERY CROWN in one month! - is beyond awesome. Having a high-quality group of people loving my book, cheering it on and pouring their own energy into making it succeed is really wonderful.

All the freedoms belong to me!

Voracious Reader Here, A Consumer of Books

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Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is reading! Do you set aside time for it each day? How do you decide what to read next?

I’ve always been a voracious reader, ever since I learned to read. I get anxious if I don’t have things to read and almost always have a book with me (although nowadays it will probably be on my kindle rather than a physical book). I’m the kind of reader who likes to devour a book in one sitting and I get very immersed in the world the author created or revealed. It’s hard for anyone to reclaim my attention (although Jake the Cat manages) and if I love the story and it’s part of a series, I’m quite likely to work my way through the author’s entire backlist before I’m done.

There was a break in my reading habits when I had my two children. As the mother of little ones I would only get quick chunks of time to read and so I turned to magazines, where I could read an entire article over lunch and then move on to the next maternal activity without feeling cheated or left wondering what was going to happen next. I didn’t read very many if any books for a few years there. Well, not adult books anyway. One of our favorite shared activities was curling up together and reading age appropriate books!

Children do grow up, however, and I got back to reading novels eventually.

One of the reasons I’ve always written – since I was 7 – is that I could never find enough books of the kind I wanted to read, and so I wrote my own. As Jeffe said earlier this week in her post, reading a really good book and writing my own book seem to take up the same creative space in my mind.  Both activities satisfy the same need. Sometimes after reading a book that really grabs me, I’ll be full of the energy and desire to write my own, maybe exploring similar broad themes, or taking off on a tangent or wanting to ‘play’ in a new genre. More often though, reading a good book leaves me content and without the urge to write, at least for a while.

Which isn’t a good thing for a fulltime author.

I can’t be all dreamy eyed re-reading Nalini Singh or Anne McCaffrey, or even Jeffe’s books for too long because I have the rent to pay and cat food to buy.

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The other consideration for me is what type of book I’m writing at the moment. I’m published in science fiction romance, ancient Egyptian paranormal romance and fantasy. If I’m deep in writing about 1550 BCE Egypt, for example, I can indulge myself and read an Anna Hackett Galactic Gladiators novel, or one of Tiffany Roberts’s inventive Infinite City series or Pauline B. Jones’s Project Enterprise novels. They satisfy a different part of my creative nature than writing the Egyptian is doing, even though it’s all romance and adventure.

I can’t read SFR while I’m writing SFR. I just cannot. Not even excellent ones like Cynthia Sax’s  Cyborg Space Exploration series. So I one click the new books and let them sit in the virtual TBR until I have the finished draft of my work in progress complete and then I go on a binge of catching up. While writing SFR  I can read ‘hard science fiction’, post-apocalyptic novels set on planet Earth (I don’t write those), Regency romance, nonfiction, paranormal romance, military adventure….

I don’t write in the fantasy romance series that often, so I have no idea what books I can and can’t read if I’m working on my Magic of Claddare novels.

I will, on occasion, if a new book is one I’ve been anticipating keenly, break all my rules, throw caution to the winds, the WIP be darned, and spend the day reading as soon as the book hits my kindle. Patricia Briggs’s Smoke Bitten was the most recent title like that for me.  Any Nalini Singh new release has the same effect on me. Of course then I often go back and re-read the other books in the series, which encroaches on my writing time but hey, a person has to break their own rules sometimes!

When do I read? Given that I tend toward compulsive in my reading habits and want to read an entire book start to finish once I begin, I don’t let myself read novels during the day. I dip in and out of magazines or nonfiction research tomes (usually about ancient Egypt) at my meals and snacks.

When the day is over and my energy and creative energies wane because I’m a morning person and go downhill all day from a peak at about 5am, I sit in bed and read. I read very fast, always have, and can finish a book in a few hours. If it’s a long book but really engrossing, I’ll stay up as late as it takes to reach that satisfying Happy Ever After ending, now that I don’t have a day job that involves commuting and interacting with other people face to face. I can sleep in!

When I finish writing a book, there’s a time period from two days to a week where I’ve exhausted my Muse and I do a lot of reading, all day and all evening long. Then when I know I’m ready to dive into my next project, I revert to the ‘reading only at night’ routine.

What do I read? EVERYTHING! Well, not actually – I rarely read murder mysteries any more although for a long time I was a huge fan of the genre. I never read true crime – too grim and sad for me. I’m not much into ‘dark’ romance, reverse harem, Omegaverse, thrillers, Scottish Highlanders…but even having said that, there’s always an exception if the book sounds good and is really well written.

I pulled out my kindle and here’s a partial list of my most recent reads. I don’t mention any that I DNF’ed or deleted from my kindle after I read them, because there were some but they shall remain nameless:

Cat Pictures Please and Little Free Library, both by Naomi Kritzer

Bone Dry, Buried Bones and Good Bones, The Dance and Dei Ex Machina all by Kim Fielding

The Lasaran by Dianne Duvall

North Bound and Warlord Reunited by Cynthia Sax

Storm’s End by Justin Bell and Mike Kraus

Solitude by Dean M. Cole

Cold Storage by David Koepp (I so wanted more books by him but this is apparently his first)

Culture Shock by M. C. Herron

The Summer I Dared by Barbara Delinsky (a re-read of one of my favorites)

It’s Not All Downhill from Here by Terry McMillan

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Problem Child by Victoria Helen Stone

Paladin by Anna Hackett

Smoke Bitten by Patricia Briggs

Rock Hard  (a re-read of a favorite) and Love Hard by Nalini Singh

Ull by M. K. Eidem

Break the Fall by Jennifer Iacopelli

The Matrimonial Advertisement by Mimi Matthews

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (I've re-read that one SO many times)

Mercy by Tara Ellis and Mike Kraus

Lethal Game by Christine Feehan

Dauntless by Lisa Henry

The Women in Black by Madeleine St. John (I’d seen the movie, set in Australia, post-WWII)

Sweep With Me by Ilona Andrews

Shards of Hope and Shield of Winter by Nalini Singh (more beloved re-reads)

Malice by Pintip Dunn

Thanatos by Kris Michaels (I love this romantic suspense series)

Fais Do Do Die by Pauline B Jones

On A Sea of Glass by Tad Fitch, J. Kent Layton, Bill Wormstedt

The Ship of Dreams by Gareth Russell

Fate of the Tala by Jeffe Kennedy

The first ten books of the McClane Apocalypse series by Kate Morris

A few of my own backlist, checking on plot points or for other reasons, including Star Cruise: Marooned and Aydarr…

…and more!

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I have a HUGE To Be Read list on the kindle, including lots of new SFR I can’t wait to dive into when I finish the current WIP. There’s no science, logic or criteria for what order I follow when reading the waiting books. I kind of riffle through the list and grab what seizes my fancy at the moment and off I go. So it might be a title newly arrived on the kindle or one that’s been waiting a month or two. I check my Amazon Devices & Content list from time to time to ferret out books I’ve held unread for so long I forgot them (horrors!) and bring them up to read and enjoy.

Happy reading to you!

I May Have a Reading Problem

Enemy Storm is available for preorder from Amazon. We should see more preorder links come available shortly. We all know the 'zon likes to beat everyone else to the punch. This is book three of the Chronicles of the Empire SFR series. Unlike Enemy Within (book one) and Enemy Games (book two) this one hasn't been published before now. Official release date is June 10. 

Reading

I love to read. Always have. I hope I always will. I love it enough that when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I made a pact with my best friend. We signed up for a speed reading course. We then spent several days in a cramped, dark room with a bunch of airmen learning to not subvocalize while we read. However, I have a pretty serious problem with reading, too. Once I start a book that's good, I don't stop. You know all those memes that go around about what kind of person you are based on how you mark you place in a book? I laugh. Cause I rarely need to mark my place in a book. I read. And read. And read. To the detriment of sleep. And chores. I will grudgingly get up to feed the cats and scoop their boxes. But other than that, the rest of the world can just take care of itself for the few hours it's going to take me to get through whatever I'm reading. 

So I try to save reading for rewards. I finish writing a novel, I get to binge read a book or three. I'm like most other people are with Netflix series. Don't get me wrong. A book has to hit my reader buttons in order to merit that kind of attention. A book either makes me turn pages like a freak, or I DNF. There is some gray area in there, but it's not much. Life is too short to finish meh books. The biggest fun I get to have is beta reading other writer's books. Second to that, is finding an author whose writing lights me up. I really don't care what the genre is. Right now, I'm still reading my way through all of the new-to-me, under-represented authors who were promoted in the midst of the last RWA crisis. Some have been really good, and some have not been my cup. But that's the way with everything, I feel. At least I'm still reading. When I'm not on deadline.

What book have you read that surprised you into liking it? (My example - I thought I would hate To Kill a Mockingbird because we *had* to read it for school. Ended up loving it. What's yours?)

TBR

TBR (noun): to be read. 

The entity that is the TBR comes in various forms. There’s the TBR list; which some keep in spreadsheets, some use Goodreads, and others *gasp* keep a list in their mind. There’s also the TBR pile. Piles really, because honestly, where there’s one there’s certainly more. You can also toss in the TBR stack, TBR shelf, and TBR cart.

Currently, I have 1,278 books on my Goodreads TBR list, 57 in my physical TBR stacks around the house, 6 waiting in my Kindle’s TBR queue, and 1 in my TBR-carry-along, aka my purse.

Clearly, I have a book hoarding problem. But that’s not the topic of the week, this week it’s all about reading. 

Reading’s an escape, a hobby, a pastime, a chore. It’s a hundred other things that can change by the moment and is also a necessity if you’re an author. Yet, I see many writers posting comments that they don’t read. 

A writer who doesn’t read is like a movie producer who doesn’t watch TV or motion pictures, like a chef who never eats out. A writer who doesn’t read is like a marketer who never studies another’s successful launch, like a product engineer who never uses or tests another company’s items. A writer who doesn’t read will never be as great as they could be.

“If you don’t have time to read, 

you don’t have the time or the tools to write. 

Simple as that.” 

~Stephen King, On Writing

I’m addicted to reading, always have been. And when there's been too much time since cracking open a book I start to crave the escape. Yes, as a writer there are times you have to buckle down, editing cave anyone, and reading takes a backseat.  

Editing Cave (noun): a place where time and space are suspended. 

When one enters, they are unable to leave until such a time when they can produce a finished product. Warning; food and beverages that pass into the editing cave never return.

But after a time of famine you have to refill the well, as we’ve blogged about before, which you can read here, and binge on reading. Reading will stimulate the imagination. Reading will draw you down new paths you didn’t know you needed in your own writing. Reading will give you the mental break you crave after a trip to the editing cave.

I have a book hoarding problem, but I don’t merely collect them. I read them. One or five at a time, I read them, and sometimes re-read and re-read them. 

A romance gives melts my heart and makes me more cuddly. A fantasy leads me to the woods and lets me dream. A sci-fi takes my imagination places I’d never believed I’d find. A thriller makes my heart pound. A mystery makes my mind question and seek answers. And all of these allow me to see people through their eyes, to feel the agony of their lives, to understand what drives them and is important to them. 

Tell me, what have you been reading? Have you recently read something that gave you an ah-ha moment? Or maybe a book that took you away from your daily stress? 

Time to read but no brain for it

I used to think, if only I had more time to read, I'd cut a canyon through my to-be-read pile. (The metaphor works because it is and has long been a vast mountain of a thing.) Every time a book that checks all my boxes comes out I'm all, YAY and one-click it and get really excited... and then it goes on top of the mountain, often never to be seen again.

Part of the problem, or so I thought, was lack of time. But right now, stuck in my house all day, every day, and no things to drive my kids to or appointments for dogs or husband or moms or self or grocery shopping or errands of any kind, I kind of do have time.

I just don't have the brain for it.

Like, I keep pulling books off the top of the mountain and cracking them open with glee, and they keep being well-written and engaging, but I just. Can't. Focus. I can't care. I surreptitiously side-peek at a news story or a think piece about the new normal or the endless Twitter feed of people freaking out.

I check my email.

I do the taxes.

But this week, I had a mini-breakthrough. My kids have a reading assignment for remote-learning school, and they have to sit down and read books for the project. Like, literally, butts in chairs, eyes on pages. So, in order to encourage this behavior, I told them I'd read with them. I started to reach for the peak of my mountain to pull down a much-longed-for piece of gooey fiction, but then I paused. Thought about it. And then grabbed a nonfiction book instead. To my surprise, it held my attention for hours. I zoomed through it, and for a little while, it was like old times, books and me, OTP.

So I'm thinking that's my strategy going forward. I'm on the lookout for nonfiction that can keep my attention off the news. Recs in comments, please!

Oh, and as a footnote, the topic of the book that brought me back to reading? The plague of 1347-1351. Because of course.

We get through this however we can, people.