Time to go old school

Falling is officially a failure.

I say that not as a tortured artist considering shooting myself in the head in Idaho or slicing my ear off in a fugue of delerium at a cold world that doesn’t recognise creative genius (although the temptation to do so just so I can say stuff like “give it ‘ere'” or “‘ere you go” or “what’s going on ‘ere?” is quite an incentive).

From a commercial standpoint, it was completely expected. I wouldn’t hazard a guess how many ebooks are self published in the world every day, although I’m sure it’s high and as this industry story shows, the growth is exponential.

I knew going into this that unless you’re Don Winslow or James Patterson, the chances of any kind of success or recognition were low to zero. I tried as hard as I could with the resources and expertise I had, sent it to anyone I could think of (particularly anyone of any influence who might get it some attention), have run this accompanying blog pretty faithfully and have researched and enacted any and every marketing activity I can think might have helped.

And after all these months of effort almost nobody’s bought it and nobody’s reviewed it. As far as I know nobody’s even read it.

But the fact remains self publishing a novel as an unknown author is like (to coin a slightly profane metaphor) peeing in the ocean. Doesn’t matter how badly you needed to do it, you’re quite literally a drop, and the variables that might propel your drop to stand out in the rest of the ocean are too numerous, their pathways too random to predict, track or force.

So rather than become a bitter alcoholic as so many of my far more talented forbears have done, I’m trying to act like a publisher rather than a writer, and that means moving on to the next plan.

And the next plan, paradoxically because of the state of the printed word today, is the printed word. I have a recent connection with someone senior at a retail book chain, and at long last I’m going to return to the original plan for Falling, one that predates Amazon, this website or anything else.

I’m going to try and get it into bookshops. One chain in particular.

I’ve done the requisite administrative groundwork to make it as painless as possible for a retailer to take it on by having the ISBN applied, and (if I do say so myself) the print version isn’t the horrorshow most self published books are owing to my design background.

First I’ve got to come by a print copy – I only have one left, so I might have to buy another handful from Amazon (yes, you have to buy your own book if you live outside the US) – and I’ve already drafted the letter I’m going to send to the guy.

Fingers crossed he opens it up, the cover sells itself and the letter about how easy it will be for him to take it on if he likes it will clinch it.

With two or three copies each in about 60 of their stores around the country, it would need a whole new project finding proper printing and shipping to get them where they need to be (probably a distribution centre), but it’ll feel like things are trundling along.