Winding Down a Career with Self Publishing

As I wind down my career in book writing, I must reflect on my successes and my not so successful books.

The two most successful series I wrote, were my first two; the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir series and my Skyler Foxe LGBTQ Mysteries, as far apart from each other as they get. One is a dark, historical mystery, dense with research, and the other is a light, contemporary comedy set in southern California.

I guess I mean by “success” is that they made the most money, kept me afloat. The Crispin series continues to give, while the Skyler series has begun to fade, mostly, I think, due to the problematic nature of a contemporary novel that slowly becomes outdated.

The Skyler series began with a niche publisher, but I self-published the novellas that continued the story arc of the characters in between some of the books. Small publishers don’t offer an advance, but at the very least, they should remember that every month royalties are due. This publisher made excuse after excuse for why they wouldn’t be on time. All the other writers just cooed at them and gave them a lot of breaks. But I wasn’t about to do that. This is a business and if you are publishing others’ books (and another red flag is when the publisher exists to publish their own written works, which this publisher did) then you have a responsibility to keep good records and PAY on time. I saw the writing on the wall and got all my rights back as soon as possible before they collapsed completely, but in the meantime, I just began to publish the rest of the series myself. It angered some folks there, including my editor who got a cut of each of my books, but I have no regrets. I also self-published the audiobooks with Amazon’s audiobook arm at ACX.com and gave a debut narrator his first gig. He was fantastic and continued to provide performative narration for the books…until he got too much in demand, and never did get to the last book of the series. That doesn’t sit well with me either. I lost sales because of that. And it was far too late to get a new narrator. C’est la vie.

In any case, I eventually reprinted all of the books myself and still occasionally get royalties from those, though I don’t advertise them very much these days.

And then I self-published quite a few of the rest of new and varied series, mostly because my agent really wanted me to be his “medieval mystery author” and to sell me that way. But I wanted to write other things. And I presented my first paranormal series to him, Booke of the Hidden, a four-book urban fantasy/paranormal romance (it’s really more of the latter since the romance is what drives the plot).

My agent got me that small publisher as larger ones weren’t interested. Again, no advance but “what makes up for that is a larger share of royalties“. But that doesn’t necessarily happen if the publisher isn’t on the ball selling them. And, they were going through a whole lot of changes too. There were red flags that no one picked up on. In the end, they only published the first two of the four (for which I finally got my rights back) because they wanted to shift over to non-fiction sports books(!) I had already written the last two of the series, and so my agent and I self-published those. I get royalties for those as well, but I don’t know that I’ve ever sold through what I spent on editors and cover designers. Yes, even if working with an agent, it’s the AUTHOR who pays for all that upfront. Never again.

My agent tried to sell what was supposed to be a medieval caper series, (like Ocean’s 11 but in the Middle Ages) OSWALD THE THIEF, but he couldn’t sell that either. I don’t think publishers understood it. So I self-published just the one book…and readers loved it. But writing a caper series was a lot of work, especially with medieval technology, as you can imagine. So that became a standalone, and I still get royalties on that one.

I wrote the first of a gaslamp/steampunk trilogy that my agent tried to sell but couldn’t, and so I self-published those, the Enchanter Chronicles, about a Jewish/Romani magician who could perform real magic by summoning helpful Jewish daemons, while foiling plots from pro-nationalist German dirigible magnates intent on taking over the world with a golem army. At least in the first book. Fun!

I was starting to see a pattern. The books I most enjoyed writing, my agent couldn’t seem to sell, couldn’t grapple with what they were, but readers DID connect with them. And that series also continues to sell.

I went to my “vault” of unpublished standalone historical novels, reworked, rewrote, got it edited, and self-published those.

Now came the time, some years ago now, when the most successful CRISPIN GUEST MEDIEVAL NOIR series was coming to an end (for which I took the unpublished actual first in the series, CUP OF BLOOD,  and reworked, got edited, and self-published it as a prequel between the time St Martin’s let go of the series and when Severn House picked it up (it received two industry award nominations).

It was time to develop a replacement historical mystery series for the wind down of my writing career. The first idea that had rattled around in my head for years was using Will Somers, the real court jester to Henry VIII, as a sleuth in a Tudor mystery series, that I called the King’s Fool Mysteries. My idea was to write them in first person for a very intimate look at what most

people consider a well-known reign (it’s a very complicated story with so many layers and politics it became somewhat daunting) and make it a limited series of only six books, one for each of Henry’s wives, either the center of the action or just tangential to it. Severn House published the first three, and I will be publishing the last three.

I also wrote the first in my Victorian Sherlockian cozy series, An Irregular Detective Mystery, focusing not on Sherlock Holmes (so not exactly a pastiche), but on one of his Baker Street Irregulars all grown up and becoming a detective for hire like his mentor, Sherlock. I really enjoyed writing that first one, THE ISOLATED SEANCE. But my agent was so viscerally opposed to it, that I approached my publisher on my own and sold it to them myself. Score! No sharing that 15% to my agent. Ha! I sold my publisher two more before they put a pause on them.

A side note: As you can imagine, it’s much easier selling the rest of the series if it is first published by a traditional publisher. It will already have the imprimatur of that publisher, and their catalogues with that book will have already gone out to bookstores and libraries.

But.

Publishers are notoriously bad at marketing. You’d think after a couple of centuries of publishing books they’d get better at it, but they are notoriously hidebound about it, taking far too long to get with newer ideas and programs, of going “wide”. Most still price ebooks far too high, and still window release of hardcover and paperback. Some, like my publisher, directed all their attention at selling to libraries, and have draconian policies toward bookstores, where they make it hard to return unsold books, that in turn make it so bookstores won’t order those books in the first place, making “discovery” very hard to happen (that is, how readers find books. The old-fashioned way of actually being in the bookstore and browsing the shelves? You know that one.)

So, the upshot is, I will be self-publishing the rest of the King’s Fool Series and An Irregular Detective Mystery series, however long that one goes. I am really loving writing the latter, an age I am unused to researching and writing in but finding it a joy to delve into. I love where it takes me and to follow the Doyle stories just as if they are historical documents and cannot veer from them. Self-publishing has its joys of complete creative control, but it also has its downsides of no advance, trying to get it into markets, and having to buy the books yourself in order to sell them at different venues (but when I had to do that anyway with a publisher, then I might as well just publish it myself).

The stigma of self-published works is less these days than they used to be, though conventions and other venues still treat it like a bastard child. Funny that a series written by an author that had been previously published traditionally is now somehow less when published by the author that you loved. Don’t make that mistake when you choose what book to read next. You will miss out on some good ones.