There is no best path in this business of writing fiction and every author’s career is different. I started in the usual way, with traditional publishing, and had six science fiction novels published by New York houses between ’95 and 2003. My work garnered good reviews and there were a couple of awards, but despite my best efforts no meaningful amount of money was going into the family coffers. Economically, I was wasting my time. Emotionally I was inhabited by a deep, dark sense of failure, with no viable means to turn things around. So circa 2000 I more or less walked away from the field for almost ten years. I did not stop writing entirely, but it was close.

In 2009 I woke up to the ebook revolution.

My background and situation let me jump right into self-publishing. I’d worked in web development for nine years, so I knew how to handle the HTML behind ebooks, I was familiar with Photoshop, I’d learned the basics of InDesign, I had the rights back to all my novels, and I had time to devote, since the recession had ended my programming job. So I became my own publisher and reissued the novels, first as ebooks and then in print-on-demand editions.

I found that I loved this new business, because I was in control.

In traditional publishing, after a book is sold, the important decisions are made by the publisher—format, cover art, cover copy, sales date, pricing, promotional budget (if any)—and once those decisions are made they can rarely be changed. So my near-future bio-thriller Limit of Vision was released with a pulp cover featuring giant bugs, while my far-future novel, Memory, was released with a back cover description that got the basic facts of the story world wrong.

As my own publisher, I make mistakes too, but because my business model—low upfront costs and no warehoused inventory—is radically different from that of traditional publishing, I’m in a position to correct those mistakes. I can—and I have—changed cover art, cover copy, and pricing after publishing a book.

Of course these days, self-publishing out-of-print backlist isn’t controversial. The question writers debate is what to do with original fiction. I looked at it from a business perspective, asking What’s best for me? And I couldn’t justify trying New York again.

For some writers, sticking with traditional publishing makes sense. Maybe you’re getting a lot of support and publicity from the publisher, maybe you move a lot of books through bookstores, maybe the advance money is essential to your business plan.

For me, the equation is different. If I try to market a manuscript, I can expect to wait months (years?) on a response, more months to negotiate a contract, and no doubt the advance would be low. Suppose I accepted $10,000. Fifteen-percent would go to the agent, my home state of Hawaii would take 4%, and I would be left with only $8,100, stretched out in multiple payments. Going by past experience the advance is all I’d ever see. Traditional publishing, even when done well, is no guarantee of success.

Of course financial success with self-publishing is unlikely too.

There. I said it. Self-publishing is not a magic solution, and still the odds of success look better to me because my profit per unit sold is much higher than it would be for a traditionally published book, and the potential exists to generate that profit for the life of the copyright (subject to the risks of piracy, irrelevance, or the end of the world, of course).

These are reasons I made the decision to self-publish my newest science fiction novel, The Red: First Light, released last spring.

That said, I think it’s fair to ask if I had a realistic shot at selling this book to a traditional publisher—and in all honesty, I’m not sure I could have. On the plus side, I’m an award-winning writer, and over the past year-and-a-half my original short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Analog, Asimov’s, and Nightmare magazines.

On the negative side? Well, I don’t exactly have a great track record of book sales, but even putting that aside, TRFL has a lot of strikes against it:
• It’s hard science fiction (written by a woman)
• It’s military science fiction written by someone with no military back story
• It’s written (by a woman!) in first person from the point of view of a male protagonist

None of these factors says anything about the quality of a book, but they are all things to make traditional publishers look with doubt on a submission. Sorry, but those are just the facts of life as I understand them.

So it wasn’t a hard decision to independently publish this book.

The ironic thing? If I had managed to sell the book to the traditional market, it probably wouldn’t be published until next summer. As it is, it’s been out over six months now, and it’s beginning to get some buzz in the genre. It was reviewed at Locus in August, and a few weeks ago it was reviewed at Tor.com by Stefan Raets who said:

“The Red: First Light is a dark, intelligent, cynical take on military SF. It’s an excellent novel that deserves a much larger audience.”

Heh. I’m still working on connecting with that larger audience…

Next time, the second half of my original post: Bringing the book to market

Posted on: Tuesday, October 8th, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Categories: Publishing.
Tags: The Red: First Light