Two Series, Moving to Indie Publishing

An embarrassment of riches, I suppose it could be called. Having two series going at once.

That’s where I am now. My publisher “paused” both these series, and says they want to publish more. Eventually. But I decided that dealing with publishers right now was pretty much over. Nice people, they mean well, but have some dumb ideas about promotion and marketing. They concentrate on sales to libraries. Hey, me too! I spend my own money to send postcards to about 600 libraries all over the country when I have a new book releasing, and about 30 of those usually get extra treatment by prepared packages of fun promo; a one-of-a-kind mouse pad, book bag, and bookmarks along with an amusing sales sheet, like the one below.

It’s encouragement to, perhaps, make a display in the library of Sherlockian matter. In some previous packages, I also included deerstalker hats with the logo of the book on the brim (below, along with event giveaways).

But when you make it hard for bookstores to carry the book by refusing to accept half the returns, then bookstores don’t tend to order them in the first place. Which leaves me in the unenviable position of having to BUY the books from the publisher (at half the cover price) in order to sell them in bookstores and forced to offer the books on consignment, just as if I were an indie author. And that didn’t sit well with me, especially now in retirement when money is tight. (If I had scheduled my usual number of venues, it would have cost me well over $600 just on a meager supply of books!)

And so, I am going indie. I have self-published books before, several series my agent couldn’t seem to sell to publishers, or a series a publisher didn’t know how to market and therefore turned down (like my Oswald the Thief book, a medieval caper like Ocean’s 11 but in the Middle Ages, which was supposed to be a series, but I only published the one as a standalone).

I do like writing these two series — The King’s Fool Tudor Mysteries with Henry VIII’s real court jester Will Somers as the reluctant but still humorous sleuth — and my Sherlockian series An Irregular Detective Mystery series with a former Baker Street Irregular all grown up and becoming a detective-for-hire under the mentorship of one Sherlock Holmes.

Well, the ideas just keep coming. Like the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir series, it’s so much easier to write a story with a detective-for-hire when clients literally come to your door to ask for help. It gets the ball rolling so much faster than a traditional historical mystery where an amateur sleuth must find a plausible reason to do their detecting.

But these Tudor stories come fast and furious to me as well. The real people, the history, the conspiracies! I know I only have three more books to go in this series, and I know roughly what each one is about. And I do want to give Will a good and complete send off. DEVIL’S GAMBIT, the fourth in the series is almost half-way done, so I’m pretty sure I will finish it in time for its January 2026 release. I have plenty of experience as a stringer, a reporter for several daily and weekly newspapers that I used to write for. There was many a time I had to bang out stories on a tight deadline. Of course, those were 1500 words as opposed to a novel at 75,000 words. It’s not hard switching mindsets, loving the characters in each era, and giving them their due. Whether I am in sixteenth century England or late nineteenth century London. I switch. Jester in first person, to two late Victorian blokes in third.

I have only just finished writing the fourth in the Sherlockian series, THE VAMPYRE CLIENT which is currently in copy editing stage and can’t be released until next July 2026 anyway, because the upcoming THE MISPLACED PHYSICIAN, the last to be published by Severn House, will release on 1 July next month.

It isn’t as if I hadn’t written successive volumes before in a series that had to wait to publish. That happened first with the Crispin Guest series with St. Martin’s Minotaur. I wrote four books in the series ever before a publisher saw them, just to see if I could write a series with the same characters with a looooong character arc. The first one, CUP OF BLOOD, was rejected (and I eventually self-published it as a prequel when St. Martin’s dropped the series after six books), but luckily I had the second one written with the idea in mind that it might become the first, VEIL OF LIES, which it did because nine months after the CUP OF BLOOD rejection, St. Martin’s sent me a contract for VEIL. The next book I wrote right after VEIL OF LIES was SERPENT IN THE THORNS and then THE DEMON’S PARCHMENT.  Each got a contract and each were released one year apart.

Such is publishing.

I guess authors are lucky these days that self-publishing has (sort of) lost the stain of self-aggrandizement in the days of vanity presses which still persist (don’t use them, authors. They will take a LOT of your money and their promises of getting them into bookstores are all for naught. Just do it yourself.) In fact, in the olden days of publishing, folks like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Beatrix Potter and many other authors of renown self-published their own work. But it was a much smaller pool of books with writers who also paid their dues and worked as writers either for newspapers or in other ways. There was no stain upon it in those days.

It all means that, though I will certainly miss the advances to be paid by a publisher (never enough to live on but enough for the promo and travel I will always need to do), and in the long ago day of seeing them in bookstores, I can still get them into libraries, because libraries don’t care, especially if they are penned by authors who have already been traditionally published and have a following. Those are actual sales. Not like in bookstores when they are only the promise of a sale and can be returned.

For me and for YOU, the books will be cheaper! The print editions will be paperbacks and the ebooks will be far cheaper than the price a publisher usually sets. Win-win. Go Will and Badger & Watson!

UPDATE (June 3, 2025): Just today received the publisher email that they have FINALLY listened to their authors and will allow 100% returns on their hardcovers. Too little too late, however, after they have trained bookstores that this publisher’s book can’t be returned, and how soon will that reflect what the Ingram pages says, as that is the golden bible all bookstores refer to when they order books. Since my sales have been directly affected by the lack of my current two series in bricks and mortar bookstores (people still browse in bookstores for titles they have never heard of) we’ll have to see if they come back to me with any decent offers, and I’ll have to consider what those offers entail.