Episode 313 – Pioneering In Digital Indie Publishing with Peter M. Ball

Mark interviews author, publisher and RPG gamer Peter M. Ball who has been engaged in experimental and digital publishing since the very beginning of its appearance in the book industry.

Prior to the interview, Mark shares a word about this episode’s sponsor.

You can learn more about how you can get your audiobooks distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.

In the interview, Mark and Peter talk about:

Peter being a night owl who is most comfortable starting to write at about 10 PM at night and working through the nightHow, through necessity with a regular life schedule, Peter will get the writing done first thing in the morningPeter having wanted to be a writer since he was quite youngThe way that most of the work he has taken on in his life has been somehow affiliated with the writing worldDescribing the Gold Coast of Australia as Miami with slightly less charmThe undergraduate degree focus which mostly avoided genre fictionHow you can never escape poetry once you’ve done it, even years later being introgued as “Peter the Poet”How in the early 2000s Dungeons and Dragons open-sourced their rules, allowing people to provide material within their realmGetting involved in DriveThruFiction back in 2005The hunger for content that came out in that time periodHow changes in the RPG industry that happened were later echoed a few years later in the eBook fiction publishing spaceThe issues Peter recognized in 2006 in creating role playing game material where somebody else held the licensce for itChallenges of submitting fiction to markets from a country like AustraliaSpending six weeks at an Australian branch of the Clarion Writers Workshop and how that dramatically changed the perspective forced on him from his university educationContinuing to submit his fiction to the traditional markets but paying attention to what was going on in the self-publishing, digital publishing, and indie publishing spaceLaunching Brain Jar Press in 2017 largely as a vehicle for publishing his backlistWhy cutting your teeth in short fiction can be greatHaving a plan to indie publish his own books for about ten years, make all the mistake on his own books, rather than someone elses, and getting solid learning and experience from it to benefit his pressWorking with Kathleen Jennings on a poetry collection right at about the time her first book with Tor went hugeThe idea for a series of short chapbooks with four or five essays per writer in order to bring these remarkable articles the authors had already written back into availabilityBorrowing the cultural capital of all the people they’re publishing so that they can grow and eventually launch new writersHow Peter fell in love with print quite accidentallyThe requirement of having to have an online store for the pressThe joke that it’s cheaper to get things to Narnia than it is to get them to AustraliaThe thought exercise Peter does regarding how many books he has to sell to make it to $100Understanding the market base that you’re likely selling to as a small specialized indie pressPeter’s impatience for just replicating what midlist are publishing is doing in the face of such wonderful, free, and dynamic digital tools when one can be breaking the model, expanding, and forming new ideas and new productsether Peter has been doing much of his own writing since launching Brain Jar Press 2.0The flash fiction writing Peter has been able to do during a few 8 minute breaks at workWhat Peter is most optimistic about with what’s happening in the publishing world nowAnd more…

After the interview Mark reflects on Peter working in publishing and writing related realms, the value of connecting with others in the industry, and Peter’s thirst for innovation and experimentation within digital publishing.

Links of Interest:

Peter M. Ball’s WebsiteBrain Jar PressFindaway VoicesBuy Mark a CoffeePatreon for Stark ReflectionsBest Book Ever PodcastLovers Moon PodcastThe Relaxed AuthorBuy eBook DirectBuy Audiobook DirectPublishing Pitfalls for AuthorsAn Author’s Guide to Working with Libraries & BookstoresWide for the WinMark’s Canadian Werewolf BooksThis Time Around (Short Story)A Canadian Werewolf in New YorkStowe Away (Novella)Fear and Longing in Los AngelesFright Nights, Big CityLover’s MoonHex and the CityThe Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Peter M. Ball is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The Hobbit, Star Wars, David Lynch’s Dune, and far too many games of Dungeons and Dragons before the age of 7. He’s spent the bulk of his life working as a creative writing tutor, with brief stints as a performance poet, gaming convention organiser, online content developer, non-profit arts manager, and d20 RPG publisher.

Peter’s three biggest passions are fiction, gaming, and honing the way aspiring writers think about the business and craft of writing, which led to a five-year period working for Queensland Writers Centre as manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace and convenor of the GenreCon writing conference. He is now pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Queensland, exploring the poetics of series fiction and their response to emerging publishing technologies.

He’s the author of the Miriam Aster series and the Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thrillers, three short story collections, and more stories, articles, poems, and RPG material than he’d care to count. He’s one-half of Brain Jar Press with his partner, Sarah, publishes his own work under the Eclectic Projects imprint, and resides in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two very affectionate cats.

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0