Why I'm Going Indie
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Welcome to the first installment of Views from the Midlist, our ongoing new series of articles from award-winning and bestselling author Chris Humphreys. Chris has published eighteen books over his two decade career, with such illustrious houses as Doubleday, Knopf and Orion. But the fact is that traditional publishing just isn’t what it used to be – even for the midlisters who have found success within the system. Views from the Midlist is a monthly feature in which Chris pulls the curtain back on his experiences in traditional publishing, his adventures in indie publishing, and the craft of writing.
Hybrid, my Concise Oxford Dictionary informs me, is “the offspring of two plants or animals of different species.” To wit:
The tigon…or is it a liger?
The Honda Accord I owned a few years back was part electric and part petrol – a hybrid.
Me! I’m an award-winning author who’s the offspring of two different species: traditional publishing and self-publishing.
Writing, as a profession, has undergone massive changes in the last ten years. Foreign sales have collapsed, advances have shrunk, and the same refrains are repeated ad nauseum, such as “You see, Chris, historical fiction is just such a hard sell these days… especially in America.” An example of changing times? In 2013, Random House (before they were acquired by Penguin) gave me a two-book, two-city deal – Toronto and London – for two novels: Plague and Fire. They paid me a living wage so that I could live for the year, pay all my bills, eat out once in a while, buy beer, and shood my child (is shood the present tense of shod? Probably not). Five years later, my deal for three books was a quarter the size – and effectively one fifth of minimum wage.
Oh, for the Golden Age! The days when I lived in London and would pitch a story over a lovely lunch, write up a couple of paragraphs for a synopsis, and then wait for the editor to offer me a year’s salary to sit at my desk and make things up. To be followed by days when all that was required was to show up at a launch party to drink warm pinot grigio, and sometimes venture off to a writing festival to ramble on and on about voice and POV before necking an Islay malt in the hospitality suite with a haiku writer from Zagreb.
Not anymore. Not on the mid-list, baby. Being an unknown can actually be an advantage in some cases: no track record, no underwhelming sales. So BookScan shall not trouble ye, the Sales Department not shun ye, and ye may even get a reasonable advance for the Can Lit bildungsroman you composed for your thesis during the final year of your MFA at the University of Guelph. And if you are perceived to be Giller or Governor General worthy? That puts you in the top 1% of traditional authors, and you’ll split 90% of the house’s marketing budget with your fellow shortlisters while your spine will never darken the further stacks of Chapters – for you are cover-out on the big table facing the door, next to the Atwoods.
For the rest of us though? The mid-listers, or the starting-outs without a house? Do we keep writing part time and sending endless beseeching letters to houses and agents, waiting six months for the same response: “Thanks but no”? Or do we finally do what we’ve both yearned and dreaded to do all this time – and self publish?
Fifteen years ago, this was still largely seen as the resort only of the desperate and the deluded: those slush-pile dwellers who’d battered their heads against the gates of an indifferent industry long enough. (Or James Joyce. All self-publishers will eventually cite his example, trust me). But that is no longer the case. Not when Stephen King – as front-lister as ever there was – is doing it. Not when writers in every genre are scoring big. And of course if they do, Big Publishing comes along and snaps them up. 50 Shades, anyone?
So, what are the attractions? One of the biggest must be control. You control everything – starting from the fact that no one can say “no” to you. You want the book out on this date – voilà, there it is. You want this cover? Yours. The price? You set it. Marketing? Down to you. Yes, it’s work you have to do that occupies whole departments at the Big House. But it’s work you do for yourself.
And yet, you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are so many platforms now that make it click-and-upload easy. Amazon of course, where many begin and end. And there are others who will take the “grunt” out of “grunt work.” Since I am writing here on their blog, I do think FriesenPress is one of the best. It is for good reasons that I have chosen them to be my partners on my ongoing indie journey – one I shall chart in further posts.
For now, though, I’ll tell you the indie story so far. The pleasures and the pains.
In 2018, Doubleday in Toronto published my 1930’s thriller Chasing the Wind. And they brought all their traditional skills to bear on the book. It did reasonably well in Canada – yet Canada is the only place it sold. The Americans, despite the American heroine, didn’t buy it. The Brits… well, it has an American heroine, don’t you know? And did I mention how translation rights have died?
I decided that Chasing the Wind was it – my chance to do what many friends had been doing for a while and that I’d resisted. I would self-publish. I was excited and not a little nervous.
It was, to say the least, a steep learning curve. Three months not writing but attending “Self Pub University.” I developed chafed ears from the podcasts and blurry eyes from the videos. I had to become somewhat technical, never my strongest suit. I wrote ad copy and Facebook posts, I tweeted and blogged. I learned of Fiverr and bleed. I attempted to understand algorithms. (Failed!) I clicked “Publish” on June 5th 2019 and did “reasonably well.” Chasing the Wind sold close to five thousand copies, mainly in the US, over the next few months. Which sounds great – except playing the main game in town, the Amazon game, almost inevitably means playing cheap. If people don’t know you, one of the main ways to get them to finally click “Buy” on their browser is by offering them a book for next to nothing. You sell in volume – but you sell at 99 cents*.
My next indie journey, voyaging with FriesenPress, is different again. I am going to be re-launching some of my backlist, specifically my Young Adult novels that began with The Hunt of the Unicorn. Publication will have several stages, each fascinating and illuminating. From new cover designs to a new website. A complete rebranding (or is that proper branding for the first time?) of who I am and how I am seen as an author. A new marketing and advertising strategy. Two of the books in that series were published traditionally by Penguin Random House. But I have written a third, deliberately to make a proper three-book series. It will be the first novel I have written specifically for the indie market. So that one will require editing, copy editing, proofing, design – the works!
Talk about being a hybrid! Ultimately I have to say it feels most empowering to be making my own decisions. It’s good to be a tigon or a liger… or indeed, a Honda Accord.
As they say: watch this space. The journey is going to be fascinating.
*I have experimented since, in different ways. I will admit that I am one of those who has somewhat profited from the current world disaster. I re-released my Arthur Ellis award-winning novel Plague – a serial killer story set during the Great Plague of London 1665. My defence against the profiteering charge is that this is, at least partly, what historical fiction is for: giving people a taste of a different time that allows them to compare it to their own and see that either a) we haven’t changed very much or b) though it's bad now, it could be a lot worse – at least your neighbour doesn’t have a bubo in his armpit. (Yet.) Some find such reads comforting. Others shun them, only seeking escapism. I sympathize with both positions. To date, and after a little over a month, I have sold about 1,200 copies of Plague and about 600 of its sequel, Fire.
