The Gutter Margin (or How E Publishing Saved Me)

 So it's the first day of October, and to kick off my NaNoWriMo Prep
series (see here), I have a special guest.  I don't have guests here
that often, but Kealan Patrick Burke is one of my many author friends
who have found success, creative fulfillment and financial stability
through e publishing, and I thought you might find his story as
inspirational as I have. It really speaks to why THIS IS THE TIME to be
an author, like maybe no other time in history, plus his spooky work is perfect
Halloween reading, and so I thought this would be a good way to jump
start the month.



Please welcome Kealan Patrick Burke!





 The Gutter Margin (or - How E Publishing Saved Me)    





I’ve
been writing since I was eight years old, submitting stories to magazines since
my teens. On my eighteenth birthday, a story of mine appeared in an Irish
writing magazine entitled, appropriately enough Writings. They hadn’t notified me (I
discovered the story while flipping through one of the issues at a newsstand),
and there was no payment, but at the time I didn’t care. It was the best
birthday present I’d ever gotten. I promptly bought all the copies they had and
sent them to friends and family members, who were suitably impressed. I was a
writer, by gum, and I challenged anyone to debate the fact when I had the pub
credit to prove it!




            Of
course I later discovered that in order to qualify for publication in Writings magazine, all you had to do was
send them something. Anyone could get published there, and rather than getting
any compensation, you were out the cost of a stamp.




            Lesson
learned.




            In
2001, a few weeks ahead of the 9/11 tragedy, I accepted the invitation to come
to the states. The way I saw it, I had nothing to lose. I had exhausted all
employment possibilities in Ireland and hadn’t written a word outside of
bar-napkin soliloquys in about two years. It was to be a three-month stay with
an American woman I had met while she was traveling Ireland. As a writer friend
of mine once put it, I was “arguably the world’s first Irish mail-order husband”.
Okay, so it wasn’t that cheap or that simple. We were good friends, but the
marriage, at least in the beginning, was definitely one of convenience. That
changed as time went on, and we got closer. It helped, selflessly on her part,
selfishly on mine, when she proposed that I take two years to do nothing but
concentrate on writing. If it was meant to be, she said, then two years would
be enough to prove it. If not, I’d rejoin the workforce and become a worthwhile
member of society (my words, not hers.) 




            It
was a big risk. After all, though I’d been writing most of my life to that
point, who was to say that I had any talent to back up my passion for the
art—certainly not the sole credit in the come one, come all Writings magazine. 




            Well,
call it luck, call it persistence, call it talent, or some combination of
these, but the ability to just sit and write paid off. I got my share of
rejections in the beginning, but used them to learn, and mere months since I
embarked on this trial run, my stories began to get picked up by modest
semi-pro magazines. I quickly learned to aim higher. Then, a year to the day that
I accepted my wife’s gracious offer, I cracked my first professional market.
From there, there was no turning back.




            Cut
to two years later and my name was starting to become known in the small press.
Strangers and peers recognized me at conventions. Professional editors started
inviting me to contribute to their magazines and anthologies. Life was good.
What wasn’t so good was the money. Short stories in professional paying
magazines can net you about a nickel a word, ten to twenty cents a word at the
high end (higher if you’re a big name, which I wasn’t.) It was good money, but
not enough to allow me to feel as if I were repaying my wife’s investment in
me.




            I
started writing novellas. One of them, The Turtle Boy , struck a chord with readers and
fellow writers for its nostalgic view of American childhood summers, and went
on to win the Bram Stoker Award that year, beating out Stephen King’s
novella-length version of Lisey’s Story in the same category. I think King probably
deserved the award more, but you wouldn’t catch me admitting that back then. I
was over the moon. Three years into my odyssey and I had won a prestigious
award! I followed it with a sequel for Cemetery Dance Publications (a personal
benchmark), a handful of novels (one of them for Subterranean Press, another benchmark!),
edited some lauded anthologies featuring the biggest names in the genre (King
among them), and had published hundreds of short stories. Things couldn’t be
better.




            Naturally,
because I’m a writer, not the most stable of vocations, and sometimes life
outside the page feels compelled to intervene, it couldn’t last.




            Fast
forward again to 2010. Things have taken a dramatic and depressing turn.




            I’m
divorced (amicably, I may add; we’re still the best of friends, but conceded
that the marriage thing, ill-advised in the beginning, had turned stale and
given rise to surface tension we both knew was merely masking the true root of
a deeper discord.) I live in a modest (read: claustrophobic) apartment, work
ungodly hours as a fraud investigator (a job I liked, and was good at, but
hated because it wasn’t writing), and haven’t written a word in years. My
books, once trophies of pride, are packed in boxes in the closet because I have
nowhere to put them. The Bram Stoker Award (a wicked cool little bronze haunted
house) sits beside the TV wearing a patina of dust like a sad reminder of the
good old days. The dream is over, and so is my “career” as a writer. I resign
myself to this, but occasionally snap back to myself at work and realize I’m
still trying to eke out stories, none of which I am ever likely to finish and
which may in fact get me fired if I’m caught doing them on the clock.




            Frustrated,
I get to thinking about ways to sell the rights to the stuff that’s already
written. I quickly dismiss the idea of peddling my trunk stories (i.e. stories
that I deemed unsellable and relegated to the file for such things), because I
don’t want my name out there on sub-par work. Despite how far I’ve fallen, I
still retain a measure of pride. I consider reworking them and know I no longer
have the requisite concentration to see them through. So I turn my attention to
the novels, the novellas, the collections, the dozens of titles stowed away in
those boxes in the closet. New York publishers are unanimous in their
appreciation for my skill, but equally (and eerily) unanimous in their lack of
faith that it would sell, or that they could effectively market it. The small
press publishers are in the market for new work only, and even then they’re being
increasingly selective because the economy is in the toilet and finances are
tight. Readers are just not as inclined to splurge on high-priced limited
editions as they used to be.




            I
start googling news articles on the state of publishing, just to pour salt in
the wound. I have one wary eye on the clock because I have to be at work in
five hours. And in my online travels, I keep seeing the words “digital”,
“self-publishing”, and “Kindle”. I am peripherally aware of what all of this
means, of course. At the height of my time in the small press, digital was a
seldom heard of outlet for publishing, whereas self-publishing was viewed as toilet
paper on the shoe of legitimate publishing, mostly because what it produced (with
notable exceptions, of course) was sub-par amateurish pap, and usually via
presses that gouged their writers. Quick-fix validation was the order of the
day, it seemed. Writers unable or unwilling to go the traditional route either
because of lack of knowledge, patience, or some subconscious awareness that
their work wasn’t ready, turned to vanity presses. Writers, whether established
or not, who took the digital route, found little success. Few people wanted to
read on their computer screens, and the means to do so comfortably and conveniently,
hadn’t yet come on the market to any significant degree.




            Then
came the Kindle, and everything changed.




            That
night, as I sat in my apartment wearing a heavy coat because the heating had
broken for the tenth time in as many weeks, I found myself growing intrigued.
The Internet was rife with success stories about folks who’d chosen the digital
route. I noted names like Konrath, Eisler, Hocking, Locke, and read more about
them. I was only familiar with Joe Konrath because our short fiction had
appeared in many of the same magazines, and we moved in similar online circles.
And so, like many others, I ended up at his blog, and slept not at all that
night as I read what he had to say.




            The
next morning, groggy and ill-prepared for the day ahead, I went to work.




            On
my day off, I downloaded or read up on everything I could get my hands on about
the digital publishing process. I already had something of a knack for graphic design,
so that was no problem. The formatting proved to be the hardest part. So over
the next few weeks, I studied and studied like I was prepping for a final exam,
and I taught myself how to do it.




            In
September of 2010, I put The Turtle Boy and some short stories up for sale. I followed it
with The Hides,
and eventually the other books in the Timmy Quinn series. By the end of the
year, I’d managed to sell a grand total of 101 books, and made $134.00. And I
was pleased. My expectations going into it had been grounded and realistic,
because if my almost a decade in the small press had taught me anything, it was
that lightning in a bottle is usually something that happens to other people.
Try to duplicate it and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. And this
was alien territory for me. So when I started, I expected nothing to happen, that my books would
remain just as forgotten in their digital box as their physical counterparts
had. When the books started to sell a copy here and there, I was delighted. The
sales were just enough to cover the gas bill every month, and I thought that
was pretty damn cool.










            In
January of 2011, the post-Christmas rush resulted in over a hundred sales for
the month, and I was ecstatic. It didn’t even matter that February’s total was
a quarter of that. Finances were dismal after Christmas and a couple of hundred
dollars was a welcome bonus.




            Fast
forward again to August of 2011. The Turtle Boy, about 88 pages in print, and
the first of a five book series, had changed things for me back in 2004 when it
won the Stoker. I had no idea that making it a free download was going to
change things again. I had already made it free at Smashwords, and so a week
into that month, Amazon price-matched it. Downloads were through the roof, and
as a result, sales of the other books in the series increased. August ended
with 823 paid sales in the US, and resulted in a permanent increase in
popularity for the entire series.




            By
December my earnings through Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and especially
Amazon US & UK, had started to eclipse the paycheck from my day job. By
March of the following year, I was making more than I had at any job I’d ever
had, and decided to quit my job and go back to full-time writing. A risky move,
you’ll agree, and in the back of my mind I found it difficult to shake the fear
that this was all temporary, that the next month might be the one where it all
came to a screeching halt and left me dangling in the wind. But I knew that my
decision to quit a stable job would only work if I considered writing my
full-time job in every sense of the word, and treated it as such. Digital
publishing meant that for the first time I was not just a writer but a
publisher too. This was my business, and like any business, the success of it
would be directly proportional to the effort I was willing to invest.




            Up
to this point, I had relied primarily on sales of my backlist, and it had paid
off. Not only that, but the success of those titles yielded hundreds of emails
demanding more than I had available, and questions about when I was going to
finish the Timmy Quinn series. The demand staggered me, inspired me,
revitalized me, and slowly but surely I began to write again. The passion I had
allowed myself to forget, allowed my life to bury, came back with the force of
a freight train.




    Two
years ago I was in a dismal place and took a half-hearted risk on a digital
venture and then promptly put it out of my mind. I was not happy. I was not a
writer. Common wisdom states that real writers never give up. I disagree. I
think that when life squats over you when you’re already down and takes a
magnificent dump on your shoulders and you find yourself with no passion left,
you forget how to write. You can only kick a dog so many times before he
forgets his loyalty and just decides to quit coming back. Writing is like that.
But the stories never stopped coming. I just forgot how to write them down. A
real writer remembers when the opportunity presents itself, never forgets what it felt like
to have ink for blood, and when he or she picks up the pen, that ink flows from
the veins like its business as usual. That’s what digital did for me. That’s
what my readers, both those who shelled out for the small print run hardcovers
back in the day and those who read on their Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, do for
me now. Digital was initially a curiosity, a last-ditch effort to save
something of myself, a struggle to retain any connection at all to the writing
world before my ship sank for good. It ended up giving me the magic, my life,
and my passion back.




       







            In
the past year I have paid off my debts, moved to a more spacious (but still
modest) apartment, and I’m living comfortably with a woman I love (who is also
a writer—she’d have to be, I think, wouldn’t she?), and I’m writing as much, if
not more than I did back in the good old days.




            Because
these days are better.




            This
is what I tell those who—just as I would have done once upon a time—turn their
nose up at digital self-publishing. To those of us who do it for the right
reasons, it is not an attempt to cash in, or become famous millionaires; it’s a
matter of survival. To write you need talent, yes, but you also need time, but
to have time you need to be able to support yourself or have someone willing to
do it. Some people can work two jobs and still find time to write. I have the
utmost respect for these people because I’ve never been able to do it.




            Digital
publishing allows us to survive, grants us a way out of the gutters,
legitimizes our efforts, allows us to control our own futures and to connect
with the people who really matter: our readers. It allows us to tell our
stories, stories that would drive us mad if denied their outlet. And why would
anyone begrudge us that?




            It
is a good time to be a writer, a good time to be a dreamer. A good time to
remember how cold the edges of the gutters felt when our backs were pressed
against them, and to retain that memory forever more, because in the end, it’s
what made us who and what we are.




            - Kealan Patrick Burke




      Download The Turtle Boy for free 

      Find more of Kealan's books here.     

            

And he's going to kill me, but I KNOW some of you out there will appreciate this photo as much as I do....









Happy October!



- Alex