Different Plans for Different Projects, JoeLanta Reminder

What will continue to be self-published and what I might try for a traditional book deal for. Also a reminder for JoeLanta 8/11-13 and request for reviews.

For those of you in the know about publishing lingo (wow, I’m rhyming), I’m what’s called a hybrid author. My horror-comedy novella Little People, Big Guns is out through Deadite Press and my debut novel The Thing in the Woods was first published through the now-defunct Digital Horror Fiction imprint of Digital Fiction Publishing. Had DFP not folded when it did, they might have published its sequel The Atlanta Incursion as well. However, everything in my Wastelands fictional universe was independently published from the get-go, and after DFP folded I got the rights back to Thing and independently-published both it and TAI. My military science fiction novellas set in Lindsay Buroker’s Fallen Empire universe were first published through Kindle Worlds, but when Amazon shut that program down, I got Buroker’s permission to re-publish them independently. I also produced a number of short stories, some I self-published and others that went out in DFP anthologies; most of them eventually went into my collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire.

(Independently publishing single short stories generally won’t cover production costs unless you get special arrangements. For example, a graphic designer I met at a North Point Community Church program for unemployed journalists and communications people back in 2012 created the covers for “Melon Heads” and “I am the Wendigo” either for free or at a very nominal rate and I did all the layout/formatting myself. As of this past June, I’ve made $53 in royalties off “Wendigo” and $23 off “Melon Heads” in Amazon royalties. That’s more than I would have made with an outright sale to most short-story markets, but the indie covers for my other projects were $25-50. Had DFP not bought many of them for collections later, they’d have been money-losers or taken forever to break even.)

Independent publishing has its benefits — I have total creative freedom and can run my own marketing, which publishers do less and less often for most authors these days. Seriously, read this article from a New York Times best-selling author for how little support authors who aren’t Stephen King or J.K. Rowling get from publishers. I’m not in competition for a tiny number of publishing slots or bookstore shelf spaces, I don’t suffer the years-long delays between submission and publication writers working for traditional publishers do, my books won’t get spiked due to complaints from the left and the right and the just plain upset, and I get paid on a much less complicated schedule (Amazon and Draft2Digital royalties from a particular month are paid two months afterward) than traditional authors are. However, at the same time, I have to put up all the money up front for editing, cover art, layout, marketing, etc. and paying off those costs can…take awhile.

(Seriously, that’s a big issue. I’m seriously considering doing a Kickstarter for my next big project to get those out of the way.)

To make a living, almost all writers have to keep putting out material rather than living off a single best-seller in the fashion of J.D. Salinger. So which of my projects do I plan on staying on the indie path for and which ones am I willing to try the traditional route?

Indie: “The Long War” (Thing and TAI) and Wastelands series are almost certainly going to stay independent. The first two “Long War” books are pretty short for novels (publishers these days prefer longer word counts than in previous decades) and although Thing was previously traditionally published, TAI never was. And Battle for the Wastelands was previously rejected by many agents and publishers, despite making the second round of judging at one publisher, and steampunk was noted to be declining a year before I seriously considered self-publishing Battle. Once you independently publish something, it’s almost impossible to get a traditional deal for it unless you sell ridiculously well, which happened when Amazon’s science-fiction imprint picked up super-successful indie authors Marko Kloos and the late H. Paul Honsinger, and I’m not at that point yet. Anything I serialize on Substack and my Patreon will be independently published once done if it’s long enough, since putting it online means it counts as previously published too.

(In my next newsletter, you can vote on my subscriber-only fiction. It will either be a Wastelands or Long War story set earlier in the timeline with different characters.)

Traditional If Possible: In a previous email, I mentioned working on a “U.S. Navy in space” military science fiction novel entitled Blood on the Border. It’s “a standalone with series potential” (i.e. it works by itself but I have ideas for two sequels to make a trilogy), but that’s only halfway done in terms of word count and it’s very research-intensive. It’s also been awhile since I’ve significantly worked on it, so getting back up to speed could be difficult. However, once that’s done, it seems like something Baen Books would love. I’ve also got a creature feature called Preying Mantis (heh) I could easily send to Severed Press and Deadite and I’ve talked about it briefly with Falstaff Books, assuming it ends up at the right length.

(This of course assumes an agent couldn’t get me a deal at a larger publisher, but larger publishers keep consolidating and agents get massive numbers of book submissions per month. And, given recent controversies in the book world and rising production costs, I could imagine agents and publishers being very risk-averse.)

Fortunately, both could also be independently published — if I do that with Mantis I could even hire the guy who did the Little People, Big Guns cover art to illustrate it — but since they’re not associated with an already-indie series, traditionally publishing them would be much easier.

Selling Again at JoeLanta, August 11-13

Reminder: If you’re a fan of toys and comics and GI Joe in particular, check out JoeLanta 2023 August 11-13. It’s at the Hilton Atlanta Northeast in the suburb of Peachtree Corners.

This will be my second time there, and it looks like I’ll have a better location. I’ll be at Table T-4, which you can find on the vendor map here. This weekend I’ll have Serpent Sword for the first time (most sales last year were Battle for the Wastelands and its prequel novella “Son of Grendel,” so now people can see what’s next) plus stickers based on the Thing cover and some comics I’ve finished reading and no longer need.

Also, there will be another show going on at the same hotel — GooCon, which is dedicated to molding, casting, and special effects. Back when I wanted to work in movie special effects, I would have loved to visit something like this. JoeLanta is selling tickets to both shows.

So mark your calendars! I look forward to seeing people.

Request for Reviews

Most of you are on this list because you’ve purchased physical books from me at conventions and other events. Now that you’ve had time to read them, could you do me a big favor and rate or review them on Amazon, Goodreads, and/or other places online?

Book reviews help authors increase sales in several ways. Most obviously, the more reviews a book has, the more confidence readers have in its quality. Also, readers use reviews to see if they’d like the book, so the more reviews there are (and the more specific they are), the more helpful that is. Also, although this is a bit fuzzier, the more reviews a book has the more visible it might be on Amazon due to that algorithmic magic.

And they don’t have to be good reviews. If you didn’t like the book, feel free to say so. An overly-high rating, especially with a small number of total reviews, looks like it was only the author’s friends and family reviewing. Furthermore, specific things one didn’t like help readers too.

That said, no more than one review per household. A man I know from my writing group bought the first edition of Thing at my first book signing and both he and his wife reviewed it. Amazon ate both reviews, since they came from (I assume) the same IP address.