Why Did I Go Indie? Guest blog by @ZeeMonodee #ebook #selfpublishing #pararom
Good day!! It gives me great pleasure to welcome one of my critique partners, and a good friend, to my blog today. She’s talking about why she decided to go indie with her most recent release co-authored with Natalie G. Owens, INESCAPABLE.
We’re doing a blog swap, so when you’re done here, be sure to pop over to Zee’s blog for the next stop on the ALIEN ADORATION tour, and to find out why I went indie.
Take it away, Zee! 
Hey everyone! Pleasure to be here today. Jessica is guesting on my blog, and the lovely person she is offered to host me in return. This also happened because this month, we’re both talking of the same topic – self-publishing.
My bestie (that’s UK slang for best friend, lol) is named Natalie G. Owens and she and I are like identical twins separated at birth (okay, soul and mind-wise. She’s a white Catholic girl from Malta; I’m an Indian-origin Muslim from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean). Oceans and years separate us, yet it’s amazing how much we think alike, how we conceive of life and career and success under the same strokes. She’s an author, too, so is it a wonder one day we started talking about collaborating on something?
Fast forward 1.5 years later, and our first collab book is out. Inescapable is Book 1 of the Eternelles series, focusing on the trials and tribulations of a mother-daughter pair. But our slant is that these two women are immortals, share no blood yet bond like family, and it seems like they are at the heart of a conspiracy that can either release Evil that has been locked behind a portal…or unleash the Apocalypse in the process.
Natalie writes horror really well, with a dark vibe and oftentimes, a Gothic slant. I, on the other hand, am a happy-go-lucky girlie girl who loves her light romances. I do, however, have an addiction to the show Supernatural… Put these two together, and you get Eternelles.
But the real question is – why did we go indie? Natalie is indie-pubbed, but I hadn’t crossed that line yet, and was very happy with my main publisher, Decadent Publishing.
The real reason is the utter scope of the Eternelles series that we uncovered once we started plotting. For one thing, we knew this would be an ongoing series. And plot bunny kept calling to plot bunny and before we knew it, we’d ended up with a tentative lineup of 24 books! We’ve whittled it down to 15 now, but the sheer scope of this project? Not for the faint of heart.
So here we were with a series that has the following characteristics:
- Ongoing lineup of 10+ books – in this day and age, we couldn’t wait by idle for a publisher to take a bet on us and grab our whole, 15-book series. No, we’re not JK Rowlings…
Arranged in an innovative manner that mimics TV show seasons (we spanned the main story arc over the whole series, but broke it down to smaller arcs for each 3-book season. Exactly like on a TV show, a season takes you through one plot while overarching the series’ arc. Just look at Supernatural, and you’ll know what I mean!)
- Both of us pretty much ‘unknown’ names at the time – so if we’d have to do all the work of getting ourselves out there, then why not go indie? In for a penny; in for a pound, right? What did we have to lose? (Yes, we’re both somewhat reckless souls…)
- Collaborative work – Nat and I each wrote a POV from the duo that make up the main protagonists in this series. Collab work, even today, is not often heard of. Few pubs take a risk on one author, let alone two. We needed to do this together or not at all, so guess what the compromise turned out to be? *grin*
- A mashup of genres and myths – Adri, the heroine I wrote, is the daughter of Dionysos, god of wine and revelry, and grew up on Olympus under the care of Zeus. Sera, her daughter (written by Natalie) has gypsy and phoenix origins. Then there is the town of Shadow Bridge, which is the main stage for this series. All sups you can imagine – vamps, weres, fae, witches, & more – live in that town. We also have a spin on the original vampire myth. To reduce Eternelles to merely “Paranormal romance with fantasy elements” didn’t seem right, and good luck trying to hook an agent or a publisher with a mashup of genres!
- Control! – Both of us know exactly what we want from Eternelles, and we have our vision for where the characters and the series are going. No “production team” was gonna come in and tell us to change our setup (for example, throw in more sex! True Blood lost me as a fan for that very reason!). We wanted to showcase to the world Eternelles as we conceived of it, and indie was the perfect route for that.
It’s been a couple of weeks since Inescapable came out, and we’re still finding our footing with indie publishing. But do we regret our decision? Not at all! What’s better than getting to have fun with your soul sister? That’s exactly what Eternelles is to Natalie and me!
And here’s a little more about the book:
INESCAPABLE (Book 1 of the Eternelles series)
Authors: Natalie G. Owens & Zee Monodee
An immortal born from an unlikely alliance…
Beautiful mythic Greek heiress Adrasteia ‘Adri’ Dionysios has roamed the world for millennia, taking her pleasure where she wanted. Until one night, when Fate drops a baby wrapped in fire into her arms. Motherhood is a formidable challenge, but so is figuring out the identity of a mystery man who makes her pulse race.
A vampyre’s obsession…
Seraphine ‘Sera’ Dionysios’ origins are shrouded in mystery. Torn between a mother whose blood saved her life, and a man who now possesses her soul, the only thing Sera can still cling to is her heart.
One rule matters above all others: Always protect the portal…
When Evil comes to Adri and Sera’s hometown of Shadow Bridge, a place where the mortal human world ends and the supernatural realm starts, it’s up to them to stop a prophecy as old as time itself…or die trying.
Read the reviews the book has been receiving on the
INESCAPABLE Goodreads page.
Available from:
Amazon US | Amazon UK | Kobo | B&N | Smashwords
iTunes, and ARe links coming soon!
View the trailer at http://youtu.be/vXuXBsEaQSw
