Tag Archives: small press publishing

A Long Overdue Hello

Posted on by
2

I came by to approve a comment on one of my old posts, and I was slightly horrified to notice I hadn’t made a peep around here since last year. This is my first post of 2020. Happy New Year! Happy Valentine’s Day! Hoping you had a great Oscars Party!

Ugh. I’ve been a terrible correspondent. Where do I begin to explain? I can’t blame everything on the world going bust with Covid-19 and the continuous trauma of our times here in the United States, or the stress of quarantine-living and working from home. Those things had an impact on my writing productivity for sure, but the truth is I mentally stepped away from being author Andrew J. Peters months before any of that. The reasons felt too personal and in some parts too much of a downer to share publicly.

But [deep breath] I’m going to take a dive into what’s been going on with me.

I’ve always been the sort of person who prefers to get the bad or I should say harder news out of the way first, so let’s start with that. 2019 was a tough year for me as a writer. Some great things happened, like seeing my short story anthology make its way into print, but I’d been struggling with the angsty realities of being a small press author for some time. I’m searching for the right metaphor. The air ran out of the balloon? That doesn’t quite capture things because I’d been thinking long and hard about what to do with my writing career. It’s been more like an intentional pause.

I hesitated to share how I was feeling, and not just with my readers. I only told my husband and a few close friends. I worried about sounding whiny or sounding blame-y or letting down the people who helped me get to where I am. I know some writers who have publicly talked about the things I was experiencing, but still I dreaded coming out about my own struggle. The optics seemed like a disaster. Successful authors don’t complain about how hard it is to make it in the industry and admit defeat. Who wants to buy books by someone like that? It just felt counterintuitive.

I’m still not convinced I’m doing the right thing by talking about it now, but I’m at a place where that’s okay. This will be cathartic and maybe it will be of some use to other writers who might be silently feeling the same way.

When I started writing with an eye for getting published, some ten plus years back, I was really humble about it. Writing was my second career. I was a newbie with a ton to learn. I soaked up all I could about writing craft from books and blogs. I attended conferences and retreats, and I avidly participated in writers’ forums and made a lot of writing buddies. I joined critique groups and for a while co-led a group for queer writers. I was hardly a jaded victim of early success or peaking too soon.

Starting out with my short fiction, I blithely reached for the stars but gratefully ended up publishing in non-paying markets for the most part. Through a writers critique group, I learned that my first novel manuscript, which I labored over three years to write, was total crap, and I spent a year figuring out how to fix it and then another year executing that fix. Then came two years of querying agents and just about every small press that took unagented submissions. Easily, I accumulated over one hundred rejections. I had some really deep lows, but I always bounced back. I’d never been more determined to accomplish something, and I’d never worked harder on anything in my life.

As the saying goes, it just takes one yes, and wow, that yes happened with an LGBT publisher in 2012, and it included a respectable advance.

Still, I like to think I kept my head out of the clouds. Words of wisdom from writers who were further along in their careers helped. Write your next book. What’s done is done. Don’t look back. I had a lot to write. That same publisher picked up my next two books, and I placed a series with a second publisher and a different planned series with a third.

Some of my titles did all right with sales. Most barely broke triple digits, including a title that was a finalist in the Foreword INDIES. I had an agent for a while, but she couldn’t get an editor interested in my title. The disappointments always stung, but I found a way to shake them off, usually in no more than twenty-four hours. I kept focused on both improving my writing and getting better at networking and marketing. And I kept writing books.

In 2019, I had a publishing contract for a short story anthology I’d never dreamed would come to life and a novel manuscript that was getting bites from agents in just my first few queries. It felt like things were taking off.

But then, they didn’t.

Despite a shit-ton of my own promotion, the anthology debuted to crickets chirping. Meanwhile, after all those initial enthusiastic responses to my new manuscript, rejections from agents, then editors started coming in. The wheels came off. There’s another metaphor. I started asking myself: what’s the point? I don’t expect a lot from my investment of time and creative energy, but I can’t keep living completely in the red.

I don’t mean financially. I’m privileged to have a good-paying day job. With that recent manuscript, I’m pretty sure I could work my way over to a smaller publisher and find a home for it. Yet I was thoroughly demoralized by the prospect of doing that.

For what? To take another manuscript I busted my butt to write through the arduous editing and production stages just to have another title out that a handful of people will read?

This is no dis to small presses. Those folks work hard as hell and pour their lives into keeping their businesses afloat because they love books and believe there are stories that need to be shared with the world. This is me talking about me. I took an inventory of myself and decided, I just wasn’t getting enough out of publishing my work. I needed a break. I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to keep trying to get published and promoting myself as an author.

I fully admit I’m not the greatest at the business side of writing. I loathe self-promotion, and I’m just not a natural at it. I pushed myself to do it for years, accepting that no writer can say their job is done just because they’ve put together the best story they can write. Even the big house publishers expect their authors to do a lot the selling on their own.

But I came to a reckoning. Do I want to keep grinding to promote a book that’s going to give a publisher a bigger share of the profits? I don’t expect to get rich, and believe me, I haven’t made any of my publishers rich. It’s the lack of an emotional return on the investment that brought me to my knees. And I’m not saying I deserve more because I’m such an awesome writer. But I deserve something, and I just haven’t been getting much.

A sidebar to that reckoning is the type of stories I write, gay fiction, are always going to have a limited readership. That’s not a statement about homophobia or discrimination in publishing or among readers. It’s just what I believe to be a fact. And I’ve got no interest in writing anything different or trying to write to market (whatever the heck that means). It’s a lonely place to be.

So, I’m on a pause from being author Andrew J. Peters. Since the start of the year, I’ve done zero with my mailing list, zero social media promotion, zero with my Patreon page, and zero work on drumming up publicity. It actually has been kind of awesome.

But I know myself. I’ll come back to it sometime. Maybe writing this post is a step in that direction. I don’t know for sure.

Meanwhile, I have been writing and doing something pretty different. It started as an experiment about two years ago: self-publishing my racier work under a pen name. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really enjoying self-publishing. Yeah, there was that twenty-four hour period when I was in tears because I blew up my website and had to completely recreate it. And I’ve had some meltdowns doing file conversions. But overall, it’s brought the joy back to my writing. I’m not raking in cash from it, but having control over production and marketing makes a big difference for me. The self-promotional work is less dreadful because I’m directly and proportionally reaping the profits. What I put in is what I get out, and the process of building a readership feels more organic. It’s the fresh start I needed.

Thus, the story behind my disappearing act has a happy ending. If you’re curious about what I’m working on, drop me a line. Only if you’re 18 and over though. It’s explicit stuff. 🙂

I’ll end by saying thank you for believing in me and for picking up one of my books and dropping me a line from time to time. Maybe I’ll be back in action writing gay fantasy and young adult books in the future. You’ll certainly hear about it if I do, and I’m happy to keep in touch in the meantime.

Be healthy and well, #BlackLivesMatter, and vote!

Some thoughts on small press publishing

Posted on by
3

From time to time, people stop by my blog with comments and questions about my journey to get my books published and the business side of being an author. I’m hardly a huge success story, but I’ve been doing this writing thing for a little while. So I thought I’d do something different and share a bit about my experience being a small press author. Full credit to Victoria Sheridan, a fellow NineStar Press author, who wrote this piece on the subject for the NaNoWriMo blog and got me thinking about the idea.

I actually have titles with four small presses so I guess that gives me some cred on the subject. First off, I should explain there’s three main pathways to getting your book published: big press, small press, and self-publishing. I’ve also had some experience with self-publishing through some short fiction I published on Smashwords and a romance/erotica novel I published on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) under a pen name.

The big press route is the most coveted pathway for authors. I don’t think I’ve ever met an author who didn’t start out with that goal in mind. As publishing corporations have shrunk and merged due to declining sales over the past decade or so, five publishing houses are left as “The Big Five.” They make up an estimated 80 percent of market and offer the largest distribution networks, promotion/marketing resources, advances for authors (i.e. you get paid something up front before your book makes sales), “social capital” to generate buzz and opportunities, and the much sought-after stamp of prestige.

I tried the big press route with most of my titles figuring it made sense to aim high first and give my books the best chance of discoverability. With rare exception, an author needs a literary agent to get their book considered by one of the big houses, thus the first slow and agonizing step in the process is to query agents who can sell the kind of book you’ve written.

If an agent accepts you as a client, you’ve increased your chances of getting published by a big press, though results can greatly vary. I had an agent for Irresistible who had nearly four decades of experience repping gay literature for example, and she couldn’t get any editors she works with interested in it. She candidly shared with me the number of big house editors interested in gay fiction has dwindled such that she can count them on one hand. Fiction generally is the softer side of big house income, resulting in greater reliance on authors to do some of the marketing themselves, even presenting a business plan and an established following in some cases. Thus, landing a book at a big press has become ever more elusive for many of us.

Self-publishing is the accessible alternative and has become quite popular via platforms like Amazon’s KDP program. The advantages are control over production, marketing, pricing, and of course getting a much bigger share of sales. KDP for example pays authors 70% of list price. Big presses pay as little as 8-10% on hardcover and paperback sales, 20-25% on e-books.

On the other hand, self-publishing requires a considerable outlay of money in order to start making sales, from editing and design services to marketing costs. Moreover, the most successful self-published authors churn out a ton of books in order to establish a following so the sense of being free to DIY however you want has some limits. According to writer sites like Reedsy, it’s become pretty much obligatory to focus on writing serials if you have expectations of generating income as a self-published author.

I dabbled in self-publishing as somewhat of an experiment. I had a couple pieces of short fiction I thought might be useful as freebies to entice readers to check out my longer work. Then, I had a more [ahem] mature novel I thought I’d try on KDP out of curiosity and really for the fun of it.

I did practically nothing to market the short fiction pieces on Smashwords. One story which is permafree has gotten about 600 downloads since it was published almost five years ago. The other story, published just last year, got 40 downloads when it was free for a two-week trial period and has since gotten about 40 downloads while priced at 99 cents. So, nothing too impressive there.

And there’s no way to track if those downloads led to purchases of my other books. Smashwords allows you to mention other titles inside a book published on their platform, but they prohibit direct links to competitor retailers like Amazon. My guess is any buy-through activity has been very light.

The novel at KDP, also barely marketed, has sold 20 copies over a one-year period, leaving me pretty deep in the red as I paid $500 for editing and book design.

I said this post was going to be about my experience with small press publishing, but I thought that lead-in was helpful to put things in context. Small presses, sometimes called independent presses, are often described as that world in-between the big houses and self-publishing since they offer some of the advantages and some of the limitations of both of those routes.

Most small presses will take unagented submissions, and they’re quite specific about what they’re looking for. For instance, I was encouraged by the number of independent publishers who are enthusiastic about LGBTQIA+ fiction, and I found homes for several of my titles at Bold Strokes Books and NineStar Press, which publish LGBTQIA+ fiction exclusively.

Now I should say, when I refer to myself as a small press author (primarily), I mean a small press. There are scores of independent publishers outside of the Big Five, and they vary in size. The bigger ones might have a staff of twenty and publish over 100 titles annually. The smaller ones might have one or two people running the business and a pool of editors, production staff and marketing folks they hire for projects, altogether publishing a dozen or less titles each year. That describes all four of my publishers.

As such, their response time to submissions was generally gradual. I waited six months to receive offers on two of my titles. The quickest turnaround was for Werecat – two weeks, and that project also has the distinction of having a 100% success rate. I really liked the publisher’s mission statement and backlist and sent them an exclusive submission.

Bold Strokes paid a $500 advance for each of the first two books I published with them (The Seventh Pleiade and Banished Sons of Poseidon) and offered $200 on the third since I had not earned back my advances on the other books. My other three publishers do not provide advances, but their contract terms were largely more favorable. The best is a 50/50 split on both print and e-book sales with no right of first refusal on future titles.

An advantage over self-publishing is a small press provides professional editing, proofing, cover design, copyrighting, and placement/distribution at no cost to the author. While my experience has varied somewhat with my four publishers, I’ve largely been ushered through that process with personalized attention and a collaborative approach, which may be less common when working with a big house due to the volumes of titles their business plan demands. There’s nothing quite like working with an editor who is genuinely enthusiastic about your book, and I’m grateful to have had that experience with several of my titles (special shout-out to my fabulous NineStar editor Elizabetta!).

Now regarding placement and distribution, only one of the four presses I’ve worked with has a distribution plan for trade paperbacks that is even slightly comparable to the big houses, i.e. actively working to get their titles into brick-and-mortar booksellers, trade shows, and libraries. And even so, I saw those efforts trickle off with my three titles. As one metric, the first title got picked up by 36 libraries across the country and around the world according to World Cat. The second title got into 11. The third got into 2. And I saw a similar trend with Barnes and Noble, which briefly had a handful of stores carry the first two titles and never picked up book #3.

One of my small presses is e-book only, and another is e-book mainly because they use a print-on-demand service to publish paperbacks. That’s a significant limitation as paperback readers will never find the titles off-line, and even the bookstores and libraries I approached to inquire about carrying the title had a difficult time finding the book via wholesale distributors like Ingram.

Regarding promotion and marketing, there’s no question small presses have a lot of limitations, though there can be an upside that I’ll get to. That ‘biggest’ small press Bold Strokes offered the most in that department such as paying for exhibit booths at book fairs, entering titles in awards programs, and providing authors with ten free copies of the title to give away as samples to get it into bookstores and libraries and send to early reviewers.

One of my publishers places titles on NetGalley, and another uses the early reviewer giveaway program at LibraryThing. They all use social media and mailing lists, but being small companies, their reach is pretty modest. Their contracts include clauses about marketing being a “partnership,” and while the terms of that are non-binding and don’t require authors to spend money in that area, it’s been my experience across the board that small press authors must become the primary ambassadors of their titles.

I’d estimate I spent 100 hours or more on each of my titles via social media work, querying book bloggers, sending out to my own mailing list, running giveaways, creating related content for my website, and various forms of networking. I do readings at local bookstores and book fairs and conferences. I’ve also spent between $100-500 for each book on ads at Facebook and book promotion sites and printing promotional materials.

The impact can feel bleak. My best-selling title has sold 500 copies since its release in 2013. Two of my titles have only sold marginally better than that self-published novel I put up at KDP with close to zero marketing effort. Yep, I’m talking double digits.

The biggest success has been my e-novelette The Rearing, Book One in the Werecat series, which is approaching 15,000 downloads. That’s largely due to the e-book going permafree in 2017 and brings me to an upside to working with a small press.

Small presses can be innovative and flexible when it comes to promotion. That deal I brokered to set The Rearing permafree at retailers gave the series a second life after a period of declining sales, and the publisher’s willingness to collaborate on a pricing strategy is something that’s less likely to happen when working with a big house.

Another one of my publishers sponsored a live Facebook chat that was a fun way to launch the title, and another has a Facebook group with lively discussion and resource-sharing on everything from how to get the most out of tabling at a book fair to tips for getting books into libraries and connecting with vlogs and podcasters. I’ve found there’s not a lot a small press will do for you marketing-wise, but at their best, they’re a great source of information on how to DIY so there’s definitely value added there. I’ve learned a ton about media opportunities and how to make the best use out of Facebook and Goodreads. Most importantly, I’ve developed relationships with a lot of fellow authors, which is a huge source of mutual support and has often led to opportunities I would have never discovered by myself.

So I’d say the biggest benefit of being a small press author is being part of a community. Writing can be a lonely journey, and it helps to know you’re not traveling on your own. I cross-promote with other authors, commiserate when things aren’t going well (we all need that validation), and on the other side, we celebrate each other’s successes. For me, small presses are the realistic way to get my books published since I don’t have the expertise to design my own books, market them effectively, nor the funds to pay for professional editing and a publicist.