The Self-Publishing Blues

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Several readers have asked me lately why I haven’t published a second novel yet. It’s been four years since I self-published my debut novel Storm Orphans so that’s a fair question. The answer is until I find an agent and a publishing deal, I won’t. I learned my lesson. I can’t speak for other authors, but for me, writing a 60-100K word story is hard. Really hard. I went into self-publishing wide-eyed and enthusiastic. Here I was putting a zombie apocalypse novel out in the world at the height of The Walking Dead’s popularity. I figured there must be a decent-sized audience for a fast-paced, well-written tale of a ragtag band of good-guys trying to survive in a country overrun by the undead. The Walking Dead was pulling in 17 million viewers per episode at the time. My goal was a modest 10K digital sales. Surely a small portion of those millions of people would try a book with a similar theme and location, especially one they could download for a measly four bucks on the world’s largest eCommerce site. Well, I sold less than 300 copies. And don’t call my Shirley.

For anyone unfamiliar with Amazon author revenues, that means I made a bit over $400 for my efforts. There are certainly self-published authors who have been wildly successful. Hugh Howey (Wool), E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey), and Andy Weir (The Martian) are three of the best known. I became one of the bazillion others. Yes, I managed to find a potential couple thousand more readers via free giveaways, but paying customers? Darn few.

Was it a lack of good promotional skills? Was it a poor choice of subject matter? Was the book simply not good enough? With four years of road behind me, I’m willing to admit it might be a combination of all three. What I’m not willing to do is the same thing hoping for a different result. We all know how that old chestnut ends.

I actually did write a second novel. It’s a MG sci-fi story. For those of you not hip to publishing lingo, that’s science fiction for middle-graders aged 8 to 12. I wrote it for my kids and ideally, yours. My query letter was rejected or ignored by 45 agents that specialize in that genre between March of 2016 and February of 2017.

So I shelved it. As much as I’d love for kids to read it, I’d rather it sit lonely on my external hard-drive than lost in the shuffle of Amazon’s million books published each year. Unlike Howey, James, and Weir, I obviously need the boost an agent and traditional Big 5 publisher offer.

So what does this mean for my small, but loyal band of readers? It means I’ll continue to publish short stories when I find magazines willing to buy them. I’ll post more flash fiction on this blog from time to time too. However if you’re going to read another novel by yours truly someday, it’ll have a publisher’s logo on the spine.