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Self-publishing – 2020 to 2022 in review
Table of Contents
- The Dramatic Origin Story
- Projects
- Problems
- Notes for next series
- Business Approach
- Marketing
- Final Feedback
- Goals
So it’s important to reflect and ponder, at least for the first few days of the new year!
In 2022, I became a self-published author, with one book. I started back in 2020, so this is like a two year recap/reflection.
The Dramatic Origin Story
It was 2020. I was re-writing the Epic Fantasy Novel (about five years in development) and got frustrated when I’d finished it and the structure was pudding. It was a bunch of novellas bolted together. COVID was everywhere, and I was trapped in my house. So I joined a year long writing, online course. It was in the UK, I’m in Australia, so lots of getting up at 4am to talk to people or waiting for the replays of courses rather than joining in them.
Anyway, one thing the course guys said was to focus on the bestselling subgenre in your genre. For me, this was urban fantasy rather than epic fantasy. Also, because the genre draws a lot from detective stories, I could do a complete story in one book! And the main character could have another adventure in the next book!
I also attended WorldCon 2020 in my bedroom. At the urban fantasy panel, a cool idea for a setting struck me—what if it was a world similar to ours with cars and technology but not our Earth? And what if the past was an epic fantasy setting? And in the modern age, what if people thought that their past was folklore? But magic was still there, if you knew where to look.
Projects
In 2020, I wrote the first novel in the setting. And got it finished, thanks to the online writing course. I had a draft, but it wasn’t ready for release. Lots of getting stuck in the middle, and figuring out to make the main relationship ‘work’ between the two characters. It’s not a romance–it’s more of a thriller, but that relationship needed to click or the main character’s motivations wouldn’t make sense.
So, as a side project, I wrote a novella featuring a side character from the novel, which became ‘Final Night’. I also wrote a short story per month for my mailing list and wrote all of my world building for the setting as a tabletop roleplaying game.
Problems
- The novel took longer to develop than expected! In fact, I took it through two more writing courses (I think I got addicted to courses during COVID) and I still think it needs another draft.
- Because of the above, I launched the finished novella as an ongoing series, which meant dropping the novel and completing the new series based around Lukie, the undead teen detective from the novella. This was a bit of rework and rescheduling things.
- My best short stories (current reader magnet) don’t link into the current series I’m working on.
- I’m still working out what comparison authors to use for marketing the series.
Notes for next series
- Finish at least the second book in the series, and have an idea for the overall size of the series.
- Have the reader magnet that links into the main series ready when the first book is launched.
Business Approach
I realised I’d be a ‘slow’ author, and wouldn’t be able to keep up the book-a-month or rapid release schedule that the 20Books250k group focuses on. That’s all based around the KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited platform on Amazon. So I’d release wide instead. I went direct with Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and did the rest via Draft2Digital. I’ve only made about $10 from the release so far from vendors (more from hand selling to people at conventions and my book launch). I’m not too fussed, as my plan is to build a backlist and market that when I’ve got the box set ready.
Uploading to all sites was relatively painless. However, because I kept tweaking my backmatter, I’d have to login and reload my book multiple times. Next time, my final upload will be final.
Marketing
I started a mailing list, and wrote a short story a month to entertain people while I worked through things. I decide to have a character host the newsletter, as it makes it more fun for me to write, so I’m still working out a balance between microfiction/and real-life author updates.
Final Feedback
Final Night had a lot of work on it – lots of beta reading, developmental editing by the amazing Angela Slatter, more editing by Nef House Publishing…. And I thought it sparkled and gleamed like a fresh-cut gem!
I entered Final Night in the StoryGraph beta giveaway program. I got lots of reviews! Amazing! However, they were mixed. A few two stars, lots of threes and a few fours. After brooding for long hours on top of a skyscraper like Batman, I read the critical reviews. I thought people would have issues with the world building (It’s a modern world with an epic fantasy past!) but no one’s actually complained about that. Instead, the main takeaways were that readers thought the pace was too fast, and wanted more character development or digging into the side characters. I’ve made notes for Book 2—and I’m juggling the character development with the thriller pacing.
Goals
Long-term goal – build my author backlist. So write more books, and worry about ads and things later.
- For 2023 – Finish the next two books in the Revenant Records series.
- Complete twelve issues of the monthly newsletter.
- When I finish my current series/short fiction backlog for the newsletter, submit at least three stories to magazines.
- Write a proper Lukie-focused short as a reader magnet for the current series, and a second short for readers who’ve gone through Book 1.
- Streamline my automation sequence for the newsletter.
- Social media – Write a blog post at least once a month, besides the newsletter. Crosspost to Dreamwidth and Tumblr for audience reach. Try to find a social media that I can engage with that is fun and not tedious. (Currently enjoying Mastodon.) Write a blog post reviewing social media later on.
- Read and review books and log them on Goodreads and/or Storygraph. Do one book review per month.
- Engage an artist for some character/concept sketches, starting with the Librarian host of my newsletter.
- Learn to draw so I can do my own character/concept sketches. Try to do one sketch every two days.
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Final Night pre-order
As everyone knows, the best way to manage your anxiety is to launch a book. I usually rely on lists and CBT to keep things in check, but this is madness! If this was a serial killer investigation, there would be corkboards and string connecting pictures to
bloodcoffee, stains and incomprehensible scribbles! Wide publishing! Paperbacks! Do I use an aggregator or go direct to all the different vendors? Do I need affiliate accounts? How much should I do?I’ve also changed my email service provider at the same time—it was like moving e-house. Anyway, it’s done now even if I want to hit the block editor in the head with a rusted crowbar.
Final Night was the book I didn’t intend to write. As my ‘survive COVID project’ I wrote a novel first, and then a short novel featuring one of the side characters. Well, a year later, the novel is still cooking, but Final Night is ready to face the world. And I’ve changed my publishing plans—to write a few more novels in the Revenant Records sequence before continuing with the novel sequence. That’s the good thing about self-publishing—you can change your tactics as you go.
(You can tell I’ve had too much coffee this week.)
Pre-Orders are Go!
So the book! The first thing I’m launching commercially! It’s going live in less than a week! Currently on pre-order most sites and should be available for everyone on September 14th. (I’ll tell you about hardcopies later…)
What’s it about? A teenager comes back from the dead to investigate her murder. A homage to the 80s, and a twist on the usual slasher film tropes. Set in the unique ‘Vestige World’ urban fantasy setting: a modern world with a magical past.
Recently risen from the grave, Lukie has until dawn to avenge her death. If only she could remember who murdered her. And only if someone else doesn’t kill her again.
High school’s out for the class of 1983. Forever.
The last thing Lukie remembers is the farewell party in her hometown of Breakwater Bay. A final blowout before she leaves for university.
But when she wakes up as a living corpse, confused, and weirdly hungry, she finds the sleepy coastal village is now full of strange cars and loud tourists. Her family home is a block of flats, and she can’t find her father. Her best friend has aged twenty years in a single night.
Her memories are in tatters. She knows that someone hurt her. Someone betrayed her. Someone killed her. And that in some dark lonely place, she made a pact with something, and now she’s only got until dawn to find her murderer, or when the sun rises, she’ll be dead again. Forever.
Also the audiobook, narrated by professional actor and performance poet Kyla Lee Ward, is available from my store now, or will eventually be on your favourite audiobook provider once it trickles through the Findaway Voices ecosystem.
Let me know if you want an advance copy in exchange for an honest review! Unfortunately, the book isn’t set up on Goodreads yet–there’s a huge queue! Anyone know a friendly librarian?
I have things set up on Storygraph, although it requires a login.
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Convention Daze
In pre-COVID times, we used to have role-playing game conventions. A time of meat pies, and pizza (before I was diagnosed as gluten intolerant, alas) and crowded halls. Of buying too many dice sets and books from the stores. Of playing weird boardgames found in the library library and trying to figure out the rules late at night. But they were a long time ago.
But Melbourne announced a convention—the first in what seemed like centuries. So I dug up my in-progress Vestige World roleplaying system and ran four convention games. The idea I had when developing this world for my fiction was that I could use roleplaying games as a creative test lab. Develop cool stuff, and see what people responded to the in the game, and what didn’t.
So what did I learn? I thought it would be hard to pitch the setting to people, but it’s been fine. (So far, I’ve pitched it as:
- Lord of the Rings meets World of Darkness.
- Onward Meets Final Fantasy VII.
- …urban fantasy, in another world that’s not earth, but still has telephones and skyscrapers.
And if I use tropes and twist the,m it’s okay! Like–the world was ruled by the Dark Emperor ruled the world two thousand years ago… but now he’s been defeated and his castle is the city’s most popular tourist attraction.
But if I wander too far away from a trope, people will point it out. Like vampires. I had vampires in initially as one of the critters, but people who played the first incarnation of the game (and those who read the first draft of Final Night) commented that the vampires weren’t anything like what they thought of as ‘vampires’ so I changed them to ‘revenants’. (They drank blood in the first version, but the sticking point was that they had to make a pact with a ghost lord to return from the dead, which was not a thing that the platonic idea of vampires in people’s minds did.)
Anyway, so it’s good to get out there using one of my favorite hobbies to share my ideas that might work its way back into my stories. I think the direct transcription of roleplaying games into written stories doesn’t work (at least for me) but it’s a great idea furnace to model and design how the world works.
Have you found that one creative pursuit helps another? Let me know.
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Survey about book formats
I’m gearing up for publishing, which means I’d love to know about what formats you like to read your books in. Take the quiz and let me know.
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Book Review: Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
I have mixed feelings about this book. I love TJ Klune’s writing and amazing characterization, but this one didn’t work well with me. Being a story about about a man who died and the afterlife, I was expecting something along the lines of ‘The Good Place’ and ‘On a Pale Horse’. Instead, it’s about, well, redemption through connecting through others and hanging around a tea shop.
I think my main problem is that the book hinges on the character journey of Wallace Price, lawyer turned ghost, changing from a selfish to a compassionate and self-sacrificing person. And I couldn’t buy his transformation. He starts off a caricature–a terrible lawyer who spends his opening scene sacking his secretary. He appears as a ghost at his funeral, a miserable affair where everyone who show up discusses how they hate him. Then he’s escorted by perky Mei, a ‘reaper’, to Hugo, the ‘ferryman’. Hugo’s a nice guy who runs a teashop, but his main job is counseling ghosts until they’re ready to pass through ‘the door’ that takes them to the afterlife. During Wallace’s stay at the teashop, he bonds with the supporting cast (including a ghost dog and Hugo’s ghostly grandfather), develops a deep connection with Hugo, and assists several other tormented people through the course of the story.
But Wallace’s shift–from his initial introduction as a caricature with slowly deepening layers–didn’t work for me. Also, the core problems that Hugo resolves in the story started ‘off camera’ and are narrated to Wallace in conversations, making them feel one step removed. The initial thrust of the book–hanging around a teashop–feels devoid of action and narrative drive. And the wacky comedy bits feel out of place.
But there are some awesome subplots, especially the Cameron story. And the book has some powerful things to discuss about death and grief.
It’s good, and will appeal to readers in a contemplative frame of mind.
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Final Night release and reflections
A year ago, I signed up to a year-long writing course at the Bestseller Academy, determined to get out of my rut of endlessly writing unfinished multi-volume fantasy epics and to complete something I could independently publish.
How did the course go?
Well, it kept me sane and focused during COVID lockdown. I wrote a novel, a novella and a chunky world bible that would also become the basis for a future tabletop roleplaying game in the setting. I also soaked up everything I could about book marketing and independent publishing.
So the important thing was to learn how to write a good book. I learned a lot from professional editors and workshopping my stuff at writing courses and groups. I also finished the RPG, and ran a few games of it, and found it was great having this open feedback loop between the stories, setting and game.
In terms of addressing my original problem—having stuff out there—well—I’ll release the novel next year after another draft, and the game some time after that as I keep on polishing the system.
But the novella, Final Night, is available right now to my mailing list subscribers. It’s a love letter to 80s horror films, and journeys into the Underworld to rescue the people you love. It’s about monsters and forgiveness. As one reader put it: “You have an alternate earth, parallel but different cultural stuff, supernatural monsters, metaphysical rules, alternate realities, reality-bending magic, selective amnesia and weird memory stuff… ” And it all works to tell a story about a woman’s last night in the world. I hope you enjoy it.
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Book Review: War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
Time to read and review some urban fantasy! As this is the blog’s first review, I think I should put down some reviewing standards. I’ll only review books I like, or if I don’t like them, it’ll still review them if they’re cool and interesting in other ways.1
War of the Oaks by Emma Bull is credited with being one of the earliest ‘modern’ urban fantasies. 2
Fae and their Seelie and Unseelie courts are a popular trope in urban fantasy. The Sidhe royalty ruling over a variety of different fae—inhuman, glamorous and beautiful; lower castes of fae like brownies, cheerful and hardworking; dashing balls and dangerous intrigues. It all started with this book, back in 1987. War for the Oaks didn’t invent the fae courts, but rather codified them into their modern form. (Also, it was a strong influence on the Changeling: the Dreaming roleplaying game, back in the 1990s, along with a bunch of Neil Gaiman comics, but I digress.)
Eddi is a musician in the Minneapolis music scene. After a disastrous booking, she breaks up with her boyfriend (the band’s manager) and then breaks up with the band. And inadvertently becomes the Seelie court’s champion in a staged war with the Unseelie Court. She’s got to be their ‘chosen one’ for six months, until the war ends after an agreed three rounds. Eddi’s presence is required to bring an aspect of mortality to the war, so that “all wounds would be true ones, and some would be fatal.” A phouka, fae who can turn into a dog, is assigned to be her bodyguard for the next six months until the war ends. And in the interim, Eddi starts a new band.
The book is well written. The plot is straightforward; even languid in some places. It’s more about Eddi, her band, and her attraction to the phouka and some new mysterious band members. Minneapolis is well-depicted; the descriptions are feel authentic and lived in. And the fae and their courts are nicely detailed, regal and inhuman; a nice contrast to the city about them. And the chapter titles are all song titles!
Stuart, the loser ex-boyfriend, isn’t a great villain – he’s easily treated as a punching bag by Eddi’s fae boyfriends, and doesn’t really do a lot as the Unseelie champion to oppose Eddi. Speaking of fae boyfriends, the phouka strongly intrudes on Eddi’s life, but she’s okay with it by the end of the book.
From a diversity perspective, it could be more progressive. The upper class fae are pale, and the darker-hued fae (as far as I could tell) are the lower class ones. The phouka (who doesn’t get a name?) gets described as in exotic terms—”His brown skin was a shocking contrast to the rumpled white sheets”. But he does have a lot of agency; he’s the main love interest, and he’s directly acting against the classist structure of the fae world. By selecting Eddi as the ‘‘chosen one’, the phouka is hoping to break up the two courts by starting a third faction. “I needed someone who might command the respect and admiration of the high and low ranks.” At the end, there’s no bright anarchic revolution, but seeds are planted for future change. Something that interested me; I’d like to see more ‘class revolution’ aspects in fae stories by other writers.
Overall, despite the gentle pacing, I enjoyed this; the battles are a nice contrast with Eddi’s regular life, and I liked her determination to live her own life despite being drawn into the supernatural world.
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Glory Days: The Time of Swords and Eagles
For me, urban fantasy is defined by the late 1990s and early 2000s – not through novels, but through tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs). It was after second edition D&D had gotten dull and stale (and TSR’s long, entropic demise didn’t help) but before third edition D&D (which made our group want to pick up swords and leap into dungeons again).
So in this window, we started to play other things that weren’t D&D. Vampire: the Masquerade, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, the Everlasting…
It was different feeling to run around a modern city than a fantasy realm, especially a local one that you were familiar with. Still, we brought over from D&D an expectation of violence, and a lot of our earlier games ended up like mafia games with fangs, leather jackets and Desert Eagles (which was the best weapon in the game!) Gradually we drifted into more character-based, thematic gaming based on those books, especially when World of Darkness started to focus on different monster types for you to explore and play – vampires, mages changelings and so on. Then we went on to explore our own ideas such as a short-lived Highlander game3 and our own visions of urban fantasy.
So when I started the urban fantasy novel project, I started to figure out what I wanted from it, how you could build a modern-day setting with lots of supernatural critters, how they interacted with each other, and how would I make this an interesting place to explore. After buckets of text later, I realised I was structuring my notes like an RPG book. Who would the characters be in the setting? What would they be? And as I work on both side by side, the novel and the RPG are complimenting each other. I hope to release them both, and will see if the RPG captures (and improves upon) the experience of those early games4 in the time of swords of Desert Eagles…
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Urban Fantasy Tango
As I sit here, a glass of rum over ice close to hand, I am forced to ponder my impending mortality, and writing career. Or rather, lack of it.5 You know, I always thought that by 40-mumble, I’d have it made. Books published. Name in neon lights. Time to kiss that day job good-bye, and retreat to my writing garret where I would have completed every book I ever wanted to, with glowing fame, reviews, movie contracts, roleplaying game spin offs and video games.6
So, for the past twenty years, cripes, I’ve been working on a bunch of epic fantasy novels set in the same universe. They’ve been piling up, and they’re recursive, where I’d write one draft, then realise I wanted to write about the backstory of an other character, and would write a draft, realising that I needed another set-up book… And look. There’s a whole cloud drive full of prequels to prequels that aren’t going anywhere, any time soon. My current project is another stab at the epic fantasy epic, but it’s going take a while to sort out. I started it without knowing where it was going, and now I’m nearing the ending without knowing where it’s going either. 7
Part of the reason for this pile of stuff is that I don’t really plan stuff. Got a vague idea in my head, a strong idea for a character, and then I let it rip. So this leads to lots of dead ends, re-writes, re-builds and angry words. And then, as I realise that this book will take far longer than I have anticipated, I look over at other writing colleagues with actual finished books. Jealousy burns! How dare they, while my beautiful, epic fantasy still lumbers along, half-baked…
And then it occurred to me. What if I write… something else? What if I sign up for one of those commercial writing courses, and write something that follows an outline? (I’ve heard about them, but I’m not quite sure what they do yet.) Well, turning out a short book isn’t really something that someone who has spent spent 20 years writing EPIC FANTASY has a great deal of experience with, but, well, you need to start somewhere.
And then I thought, I’d change genres (mildly). I would write… urban fantasy. Noir, detectives, vampires, slick city streets, curses and people struggling just to get by. So, I know a bit about the genre, having played hundreds of hours of urban fantasy tabletop RPGs in the’90s and early ’00s (the Golden Age of Gaming). 8 And I can do a course, write a book, and have something structured and able to be self-published as something on Amazon in a year’s time. It’ll be amazing, and I can blog about it!
So, is it possible to plan, write and finish a book within one year of this post? Especially for a serial non-finisher? Let’s find out…
