Speculative Fiction Anthology Announcement, With Cover

Here it is, my official announcement. I'm going to independently publish a novella-length anthology of my short stories. It will be called Conmergence, and you can see my design for the front cover above.

I've given a lot of thought to this. I have, in fact, been considering publishing my epic fantasy (Dindi) series independently, but I'm not sure yet, and I don't want to screw it up. Certainly, I don't want to do a shoddy job, so I decided I needed a trial run first. (I may have mentioned this before, here, on Facebook, on Twitter, in an email...I have basically been thinking in public for the past several days, a habit which is a disturbing by-product of imbibing social media too frequently. I apologize if I became boring or tiresome or tried to bully you into beta reading... I was drunk on a new idea.)

One reason I decided to try independent publishing is that several people I respect have tried it and done well with it. I don't necessarily mean financially, but even more importantly, they've created something lovely and worth reading, not just unreadable slush, such as one traditionally associates with self-publishing.

Here are some small, online presses that sell the backlists, and sometimes new works, of established, and, dare I say, utterly kickass authors.

Closed Circle --> Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher.

Parsina Press --> Stephen Goldin

Yard Dog Press --> Selina Rosen

And I can't tell if Jeffrey Carver has an actual store, but you can buy books through links to Amazon on his blog.

Book View Cafe --> C.L. Anderson, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Chaz Brenchley, Jay Caselberg, Brenda Clough, Kate Daniel, Marissa Day, Lori Devoti, Chris Dolley, Laura Anne Gilman, Sylvia Kelso, Katharine Kerr, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rebecca Lickiss, Seanan McGuire, Vonda N. McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore, Pati Nagle, Steven Harper Piziks, Steven Popkes, Phyllis Irene Radford, Patricia Rice, Madeleine Robins, Deborah J. Ross, Sarah Smith, Sherwood Smith, Amy Sterling Casil, Jennifer Stevenson, Judith Tarr, Gerald M. Weinberg, Susan Wright, Sarah Zettel.

Of course, all these authors had a platform, an audience, and the proven ability to write engagingly before they turned to epublishing and/or POD. Book View Cafe, for instance, is a cooperative only for previous published authors. Previously published in print, by royalty paying publishers. (It advertises things like Margaret Atwood in conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin, which, wow, makes me wish I lived in Portland.) It's not for those of us still trying to break in. (Piers Anthony's press, Mundania, does accept and publish new authors, although last I checked they were closed to submissions for a while).

How Publishing Really Works discusses the usual (and perfectly true) reasons most self-published books sell under 200 copies and also reports one agent who is not interested in a self-published book that sells less than 10,000 copies.

I don't expect to sell 10,000 copies; I'm not even sure I can sell 200. If response is favorable, I'll take it as a sign that selling my fantasy series myself is viable. This does not follow, logically, but... *shrug.* If sales are poor, I'll take it as evidence that my writing still needs improvement. Actually, one's writing always needs improvement. If you stop trying to better yourself, what's the point?

What I shall do is document each step of the way, as others have done, to my benefit. Michelle is still running her series on self-publishing on The Literary Lab, and I am following it closely. She was brave enough to post her numbers, and I will too. If they are small, so be it. So far, by the way, I've spent $15 on stock photos for the cover. It took me approximately 16 hours of work, about four hours a day for the last four days. If I were better at Photoshop, it might have been faster.

And guess what...

I also made my first book trailer!

I'm planning another one, but for this, I used Animoto. It couldn't have been simpler. I had one image, a few lines of text, and chose from their templates of movement and music. Voila.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

What goes around comes around, so feel free to critique the book trailer. I guess you may consider this the book trailer of the day. I'll discuss the making of the book trailer/s in depth more later.