P is for Publishing

 

I self-published the early Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries. The first two were way too short of what a publisher would require anyway. I had been traditionally published prior to the Kindle and it wasn’t always a happy experience.

I published my first two novels in 2002, and within a month or so of returning the second contract, the publisher went bust. I managed to place them with another publisher and he went bust before he could even put them out. Those two books are lost to posterity.

I sold my next novel in 2007 to an American POD (print on demand) outfit, Virtual Tales, and it stayed with them for three years before they, too, went into liquidation.

Obviously, I’m the kiss of death to publishers, and by now, Laurence and Steph Patterson, who run Crooked Cat Publishing, must be getting on something of a sweat, but things have changed since Virtual Tales first set up. The Kindle has taken off, and it’s being followed by other e-readers. All of a sudden, ebooks are the way forward.

The Kindle and its ilk opened the door for every man and his dog to become a publisher. It also opened the door for some of the most unadulterated rubbish ever to call itself a book. I do not include my work in that category, although it’s true to say, I always have doubts about my novels.

This influx of dross led to a situation where all self-publishers became tarred with the same brush: cheap, tacky, rubbish, not worthy of a proper publisher. And it’s nonsense. There are thousands of self-publishers out there producing excellent novels, and the truth is it’s the readers (or those who shoot off their mouths) who do not understand the publishing game.

It’s quite arbitrary. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time with the right product. Do you know how many agents/publishers turned down J.K. Rowling before she landed a deal? Why was she rejected? Because the agent/publisher in question saw no potential in her work.

So many people believe that publishers are in business to publish books. Wrong. They are in business to make money. They do that by publishing books. If they cannot see a market, a potential profit, then they will say, ‘no thanks.’ Hence, so many authors have turned to doing the job themselves.

So after self-publishing a range of titles, why did I decide to sign up with Crooked Cat?

I’m a writer, not a publisher. Even with Smashwords and the Kindle, putting the book online takes the better part of a full day. I have to set up different files for the different organisations, then I have to upload them, put out the blurb, set up the pricing. It’s a pain in the arse. Working with Crooked Cat, I may well be taking a cut in profits, but they take all that off me, freeing up valuable writing time.

There’s another angle, too. Visibility. At the moment Crooked Cat is the new kid on the block, but as their lists grow, as word spreads, so more and more people will visit the site, and that will do more to lift my visibility (and that of the other Crooked Cat authors) than any amount of tweeting.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords