Self-Pub Journey
Book cover to my forthcoming novel, ‘The Red Masks of Montevideo’, set in Uruguay, South America, during a violent time in the country’s history. Book cover by Meghan Allbright.
HOW I STARTED MY SELF-PUBLISHING JOURNEY:
EARLY WORKS
I’ve been scribbling now for more than twenty years. And when I say that, I mean planning, drafting, writing, editing and finalizing my novels for publication. The first book I ever completed — written in a furious haze of youthful enthusiasm in the mid-1990s — was Master Sisyphus and the Saveloy Men, a novel inspired by my love of Flann O’Brien and Vladimir Nabokov, while partly influenced from my time working in a sausage factory as a student. Then, a year later, was Mister Blue Sky. Like my first novel, it is set in Birmingham, England, and tells the story of a Birmingham City FC hooligan, Darren Acheson, and his life, loves and tribulations during the Blues’ 1985/86 relegation season. I tried to get them both published, especially Mister Blue Sky after the furore from the release of Kevin Sampson’s great football hooligan novel Awaydays in 1998. Unfortunately, publication and fame evaded me. I’d had a little poetry published in small independent publications beforehand, but nothing to get excited about.
And then my confidence got rocked.
Flann O’Brien, one of my literary heroes. Photo source: Wikicommons
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. REJECTION
The new millennium came and went without Y2K threatening to do what it had promised. I carried on writing: short stories, sketches for longer works, until in 2006 — while living in Warsaw, Poland — I started working on an idea that eventually ended up becoming Red Corner, An Alternate History of Rus, a historical novel set in Veliky Novgorod, Rus, in 1470, during the reign of Grand Duke Ivan III. I’d been obsessed with Russian history ever since watching Sergei Eisenstein’s classic movie Alexander Nevsky about Russia’s first national hero on late-night TV as a teenager. Although it was in black and white, I loved the costumes, the special effects, and I thought the cinematography was something else for 1938. The novel took me eight years to write on and off, and when I’d finished it, I really thought I’d accomplished something great. Fuelled by the new-found artistic optimism I’d gained, I got it professionally edited (something I hadn’t done with the previous two novels) and then proceeded writing cover letters in the attempt to get an agent. That task fell flat on its face: of the thirty or so I’d sent off to potential agents, I received one polite form letter saying the novel wasn’t what they were looking for. Then, out of desperation, I sent off to publishers directly — again, I can’t remember the exact number, but I’d say twice as many as with the agents. Luckily, many of them accepted email submissions, so, therefore, saved me a lot of money on postage.
Déejaà vu. Rejections again. A few more polite replies refusing my book from the editors who were polite enough to reply, though they didn’t contain anything encouraging.
I was about to give up.
EUREKA MOMENT
In 2012, while perusing the internet, I came across a website by Irishman David Gaughran, a man who had started his self-publishing journey in 2011 with three works, Transfection, If You Go Into The Woods and A Storm Hits Valparaiso. The first two are shorts. A Storm is, like my own Red Corner, a historical fiction piece. After purchasing it on Amazon and reading it (you must too!), I wanted to find out more about the author, so I checked out his website and blog in greater detail (highly recommended). It was a revelation. From David’s website, I was soon checking out Joanna Penn’s blog. Both these people have been trailblazers in the world of self-publishing. It wasn’t too long before they’d won me over, and after publishing a few of my short stories, I pressed publish on Amazon KDP and released Spaghetti Junction, A Napoleon Clancy Book, Volume 1, on the 12th September 2013. I haven’t looked back since. Although sales were good early on and I garnered nearly twenty ratings within the first few months, things died down after that. Nowadays, five years later, things are slow, but that doesn’t curb my enthusiasm for it and I am always ready to publish something else. Self-publishing has liberated me. In retrospect, as an independent kind of guy who disdains the shackles of the corporate world, this modality of publishing suits me.
My book ‘The Desert Dago’, a neo-noir thriller. Book Cover by Meghan Allbright