Issue 41 The Indie Way

Hello!

A few years ago, when I started writing Surrender, I knew I was going to publish it independently, because I’d experienced “failure to launch,” with not one, but two other books. Those other books were both non-fiction and both good. On the recommendation of the editor of one of them, I sent off the manuscript to a list of agents he knew, who all said no or not now, and then I sent it to a bigger list of agents I’d researched who said much the same.

I didn’t want to go through that again with Surrender. Not only is it time consuming, but I felt some of the agents I’d contacted were making a distinctly non-literary judgement about me. They wanted to know my social media reach. On social media, practically nobody knows me as a novelist. So the agent route seemed like an exercise I didn’t need to try again.

Publishing Surrender isn’t my first self-publishing rodeo. (Terrible metaphor; kind of a fun mental image.) I’ve published five non-fiction books independently, but Surrender will be my first indie-published novel. The community-building, brand-building, and name-making is the hard part of this, harder than the writing, actually. The simple part is setting up an independent publishing imprint. Mine is called FutureX.Studio.