Rich and Famous

or can't play in the Majors

I get a kick out of the reactions of some folks when your book comes out. There is a great misconception about how the small press world works. To the layman, having a book is somehow equal to getting rich, and fame is assured you. The facts are so much different.

They expect you’ve gotten a huge contract when, in reality, there are only a rare few advance royalties given out in the independent press. The ability to advertise the book is limited. Quite often the staffs at small publishers are only a handful of people, sometimes only two or three. The indie press ranges from established publishers who have a small but active distribution channel to fledgling houses that usually go no farther than being a print-on-payment operation running out of an online book seller. Some publishers have managed to stay around for a while, but even these usually don’t end up making the author rich, and the rare times an indie book catches fire actually proves the rule.

As a publisher you make every effort to build a distribution regime. When you publish an author you do all you can to get copies of the book (even if it is print-on-demand) into the hands of reviewers. But reviewers are swamped, especially in the era of rampant self-publishing, and rarely - if ever - pick a book from their slush pile to review. Podcasters are generally uninterested in things nobody ever heard of and social media operators who might give the untouted a platform most often disappear with the wind. So it’s a tough business, and most unagented authors who live in the alternative or otherwise indie universe are glad to get a few bags of groceries out of the royalties now and again. If that.

This doesn’t stop people from assuming just because you have a book out there you’re about to get that beach house where you can type away on your next missive with an ocean view and an unlimited stream of cocktail parties hosted by sarcastically-inclined peripheral artistés.

On the other hand it also doesn’t stop your “friends” from snidely mentioning that you’ve got yet another book that couldn’t make the big time. And, for some writers, this is a deep cut, if unfair and based on a wide misunderstanding about how the Big5 publishers, the author’s agents who feed them, and the star-maker machinery in America especially, operates. But there’s no sense in going on about that here.

My third book, The Watchman Protocol, was published in the last month and can be found in many venues. There was no advance offered or expected. It has to fly on its own. The royalties will be what they’ll be. There will be translations in French and Arabic sometime later this year, but that’s going to be it. The publisher will list it in its promotions and otherwise do the normal things publishers do but Sulfur Editions is a small operation and, to keep going, will have to concentrate on forever making new material available. That’s just how it is.

How a writer feels about all this is up to them. It depends on what they want out of all their work. If they’re the type that wants to be name-recognized, must have a Wikipedia page while still alive, and is able to live well off their writing, that’s one thing. You need to do a lot of leg work and glad-handing and showing up at conferences to make contacts with agents or else have that bolt of lightning strike the lucky day, not to mention the slogging work of doing the actual writing - which is hard enough - to get to that point. Nobody is going to crown you just for the effort. But if all that matters is that your peers think enough of you to use your work and you don’t have to self-publish to scratch that itch, then nothing in the above shit matters that much.

I’m not rich and famous. I’m happy to be a ham-and-egger. Wait till you see what I’m working on next…