I am delighted to share a great guest post by author Mark Edwards on the blog today.
More
twists and turns than a bucketful of snakes… My publishing journey so far.
by Mark Edwards
As everyone knows, in the old days there
was only one route for writers: write a book, find an agent, then hopefully a
publisher. If you didn't find a publisher, that was it, unless you decided to
vanity publish (ie pay someone to print your book). You could keep trying and
trying…but if you never found a publisher who was willing to sign you, your
writing career was dead in the water.
That's what happened to me. I spent my
twenties and early thirties writing and writing. I got an agent and thought
that it was going to be easy from that point on. Three or four rejected novels
later my agent dumped me. Even when I started writing with Louise Voss, who
already had a book deal, and one of our books was optioned by the BBC, I still
couldn't get published.
So I gave up. For years I wrote nothing. I
had a good job, a growing family… The constant rejection was too painful. My
writing dreams were over. I'd given it my best shot and it hadn't worked out.
Like so many writers before me, I never made it.
And that's the way it would have stayed… if
it wasn't for Amazon and their Kindle Direct Publishing programme. I've written
about this quite a lot before so will be brief for the sake of those who know
my story. In 2011 Louise and I self-published our two novels on Amazon and then
set about promoting the hell out of them. It was agony at first: sales were
slow, but just encouraging enough to convince us it was worth continuing. After
several months, we suddenly had a surge of sales (prompted by a lot of the
people who'd bought the first book, Killing Cupid, buying the second, Catch
Your Death, all at once). We hit No.1 and No.2 on the Kindle chart and stayed
there for a month.
Within weeks we had a four-book deal with
HarperCollins. The day this happened I felt hugely emotional. The amount of
time and pain and hope I'd invested over the years… It felt like it had finally
all paid off. Our books were going to be in shops, we were going to cross over
to the non-Kindle-owning public. With a big publisher behind us, success was
guaranteed!
But it didn't work out like that. Catch
Your Death's bookshop sales were very disappointing (it was only in a few shops
for a very short period). Then Killing Cupid came out during the worst week of
the year for sales, during the Olympics, at the very height of Fifty Shades
mania. By the time our first brand new book came out six months later, our
publisher had effectively given up on us. All Fall Down got absolutely zero
marketing, wasn't in any shops… When Forward Slash came out I don't think
anyone knew it existed.
This is the problem with the old system.
Have one flop and you're done. Bookshops won't stock the next one. There are no
second chances. This is why writers
often have to reinvent themselves with a new name, which is something Louise
and I considered. I'm glad, now, that we didn't.
In early 2013, shortly before Forward Slash
was due to come out, Louise and I had an utterly depressing meeting with
HarperCollins which felt like attending
your own wake. At that meeting I told them I was going to self-publish my solo
novel, The Magpies. They were nice about it…but what happened next shocked
everyone.
Amazon have something called White Glove,
which is where you can publish via your agent. This means that Amazon help with
some of the technical issues like formatting and promise a small amount of
promotion. I signed up to this and self-published The Magpies at the end of
March.
By promoting it to my and Louise's loyal
group of Facebook followers, I managed to sell a few hundred copies in the
first couple of days. This was more than All Fall Down had managed! But then it
started to drop down the charts. I was despondent. If The Magpies didn't sell I
was facing severe financial difficulties. When we got the HarperCollins deal I
had gambled by quitting my full-time job, and had put all the money I'd saved
into getting onto the housing ladder, buying a little house in Wolverhampton. I
had massive debts and a baby on the way…
Then on Good Friday 2013, I checked my
Magpies sales figures and saw that I'd sold a lot more copies in the last hour
than usual. I checked again ten minutes later. More sales. They started pouring
in. I knew that Amazon must have sent an email to people who had bought the
Voss and Edwards books. By the end of the day, The Magpies was in the Top 40 on
Kindle. A couple of weeks later it was in the top ten, and after hanging around
at No.2 for a month it finally hit No.1.
It was incredible. This book had saved me.
The Voss and Edwards books started to climb the rankings too. The Magpies kept
selling. It's now sold over 200,000 copies and has reached No.1 or 2 in the UK,
the US and Australia.
Then Amazon Publishing stepped in and
offered me a deal for The Magpies and another book. Despite my experiences with
HarperCollins, I didn't hesitate. I knew that with Amazon things would be
different. They would actually make an attempt to market my books. Louise and I
have also now signed with Amazon Publishing for our next one, and working with
them is an absolute joy.
Of course, there's a downside. No books in
shops. But our HarperCollins books were barely in any shops anyway! Amazon get
a lot of bad press, but pretty much everything good that has happened to me as
a writer has been because of them.
Now, I am self-publishing a new book, What
You Wish For. This is the beauty of the current system. Authors can be
flexible, try different things, get out books as fast as they can write them. I
have no idea if this one will achieve a fraction of the success of The Magpies.
But for now I am doing what I've always dreamed of, what my nineties self
wanted more than anything. I am writing full-time, doing the thing I love.
A lot of rubbish is said about indie
authors and the death of traditional publishing, and how one is better than the
other, blah blah blah. As someone who has done a bit of everything, my feeling
is that there is no 'better'. It's just that now authors have options. There is
no single route. And it's as hard to be successful at self-publishing as it is
working with a traditional publisher, and vice versa. The important thing is to
be flexible and keep your options open. Find your own way. Don't take sides.
Yes, I harbour some negative feelings about what happened with HarperCollins,
but it's a bit like a divorce. At first you feel bitter, but then you get a
lovely new partner and you forget all about the old one…
