My Indie Author Journey: Lessons Learned

My decision to concentrate on my career as a history professor was the main reason it took twenty years for me to publish Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. By 1992, despite having outlined a second book in my planned series, Uneasy Spirits, my “day job” as a professor of U.S. and Women’s history at San Diego Mesa College became too demanding for me to seriously pursue publishing.

What I didn’t give up was my mystery writers group. At its peak, this group had around a dozen writers, half of them who were successful in getting contracts for their mysteries. Being part of this group taught me important lessons on plotting and character development. Even more importantly, it taught me lessons about what it meant to be a traditionally published author––lessons that would inform my later decision to self-publish.

I learned that:

Unless you were fortunate enough to publish a best seller, publishing houses spent virtually nothing on publicity for your books (this was even true for the two award winning authors in the group.) In those years, publicity was primarily traveling around to do book signing in bookstores…trips that the authors usually had to pay for and returned little in sales.

If your book’s initial print run didn’t seIl out in the first 4 months (and increasingly that window narrowed) then bookstores returned (remaindered) copies, which meant that it became practically impossible for future readers to find your back list.

Once a publishing house determined that the demand for your books was insufficient, they took the older books out of print (again making it difficult for readers to find your books—particularly hard if you were writing a series.)

If your second book didn’t sell significantly better than your first, then the chances of getting an advance beyond the “beginners” three to four thousand dollars (of which your agent took 15%) became slim for the rest of your books. In addition, with smaller print runs of subsequent books, returns, and letting books go out of print, the chance of decent royalties in the future diminished as well.

In short, I saw that it was nearly impossible for authors to support themselves, year-after-year, as midlist authors, no matter how excellent or critically received your books were.

In 2001 and then again in 2004, I did make two more forays into the world of traditional publishing, the first with a small press that accepted my manuscript and immediately went bankrupt before they put the book in print. The second foray was with another agent, who I met at a convention and was enthusiastic after reading my manuscript. By this time the market for historical mysteries was established. She asked me to do some rewriting, and based on the changes I made she offered to sign me. However, this fell through when the agency owner decided that they couldn’t risk publishing Maids of Misfortune because it had been under contract with that bankrupt small press (even though the 3 year contract with the press was now up.)

The truth was, both of these experiences simply reinforced the negative impression I had of agents and traditional publishing. The end of the 1990s were difficult for my writers group. The unpublished authors in my writers group continued to fail in their quest to get agents or contracts and the published writers struggled to maintain the integrity of the writing process that had produced their excellent first novels, while simultaneously spending their own time and money to publicize their last book. By the early 2000s, as publishing houses were being gobbled up by multinational corporations, even these published authors were no longer able to get their most recent works published. I watched with sadness as these brilliant writers began to lose confidence in their own writing, a number of them giving up writing altogether.

None of this made me question my earlier decision to put aside my writing. I had a successful and rewarding academic career, a busy life as a wife and mother, and I was content to put off my dream of writing my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series until I retired. Fortunately for me, that time arrived just as the Kindle began to take off and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing division, plus print on demand capabilities, began to revolutionize the opportunities for independent authors.

Photo by Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash