May My All-New Great Indie Adventure Begin--Reb MacRath
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May is only the beginning of a ride I believed I had taken before and urgently need to take now. In my 15 years of publishing on Kindle I'd always loved the writing part but had always moved on to the next book as an award-winning writer between publishers and agents without bothering to market or hustle my work. But something remarkable happened as I approached two milestones.
My first Kindle book, Nobility, had never been available in paperback. Something about rights management had condemned it to only digital status. But this book had always been special to me and had had a curious history, sitting for years on the desks of publishers and agents. Too short. Too dark as a Christmas thriller with a hard-won happy ending (written long before the wave of dark and violent Yule movies). I'd drawn up a long list of other short books sold as novels instead of novellas. No market for a story of a broken man who'd betrayed his country and an angel who's no angel against a brutal gang of pickpockets on a speeding train? FGS! Finally, I surrendered and published the tale as an ebook--where it attracted good reviews but hardly sold one copy. I'd moved on, as you'll have guessed, to a second short dark Christmas thriller. Then a third. Still, it broke my heart to not have a physical copy of the book that is the best introduction to my work. I'd even lost my ms flash and files with purges made to Outlook.
The first milestone I referred to is the May publication of this paperback, thanks to brilliant efforts by Lev Butts of Hold Fast Press. Whatever hoops he went through paid off the month before publication of my new thriller after six years of work and research. Stephen King's Carrie had been rejected 30 times. With all respect to Mr. King, my baby suffered dismissal for over 30 years, scorned from coast to coast. Now seeing it in paperback led me to milestone number two--and my birth as a real indie writer.
In my seventies now, I had what seemed my last chance to find a publisher or agent. I'd worked out a powerful pitch, outline, and even a query. And I'd worked with a great editor. So I thought to sound out several gatekeepers, anticipating flack over the 57K word length of the book, my age, my past sales etc. But Nobility would arrive in May. And I dug the new book as it is, short length and my past sales be damned. I had an idea for its cover--and, for once, sound ideas of how and where to market it.
I'd changed after meeting these milestones. The hell, I thought, with going through the loathsome query and submission hoops. The hell with waiting a couple of years to see the book in print--compromised in its design and formatting, with next to no promotion. The book that might once have been a Bicentennial or then a Millennial could now be a birthday gift on our country's 250th birthday: a man without a country finding his way home at last. As a proud new indie author, I would run the show along with a gifted team of allies.
So here they come: Nobility will run through May as a promotional event, heralding the indie arrival of my defiantly short hot crime thriller.
This is my report.
*****
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