About April
L. Hamilton
I
live in Southern California with my husband, two children and
entirely too many pets. When I'm not writing, kid-wrangling or
pursuing my grandiose and hopeless dream of a neat and orderly
household, I can generally be found reading, reclaiming the domestic
arts (aka "crafting") or taking in a movie.
My
LibraryThing Profile
My
IndieAuthor Blog
My Amazon Profile
How
I Became An Independent Author
I've
been writing ever since I learned to form complete sentences.
I won a few essay contests over the years in school, and had some
of my short fiction published in college literary magazines. Out
of college, I decided to take a stab at writing full-length novels.
My first, "Thanks For Having Me", was serialized on
the now-defunct political commentary and satire e-zine 'The Third
Rail'. I received a lot of positive feedback on it, which convinced
me to keep on writing.
Despite
being well-agented, and my novels being well-received by New York
publishing house editors, over a decade later I had yet to succeed
in getting anything sold for publication. During that decade I'd
also married and had two children, and my husband had started
up a pond maintenance business for which I needed to serve as
office manager. With all of these responsibilities on my plate,
writing was relegated to my back burner.
Since
several NY editors had remarked on my facility with dialog and
a couple said my novels read like screenplays, when I was able
to get back to the word processor I gave screenwriting a try.
I had some success, in that two of my screenplays were optioned
for development and I got a couple of writing assignments. However,
while I enjoyed writing screenplays a great deal, I found trying
to sell them a soul-killing exercise. After that, I didn't write
much more than pond service invoices and thank-you notes for years.
In
the fall of 2007 while doing some online holiday shopping, I stumbled
upon the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest, which
had just begun accepting entries. The winning entry would be published
by Penguin Books. I had several completed novels gathering hard-drive
dust, so on a whim I decided to enter the one that had been best-liked
by NY editors: "Adelaide Einstein".
Other
contest prizes included a self-publication package from Amazon's
recently-acquired self-publish and publish On Demand (POD) companies,
BookSurge™ and CreateSpace™. In researching these companies,
and the state of the publishing industry overall, I discovered
much had changed in recent years.
Affordable,
quality POD services were now widely available through online
outlets, and with Amazon's Kindle™ and Sony's Reader™,
there was a growing acceptance of eBooks. Most importantly, consolidation
had winnowed the publishing industry down to a handful of major,
megaconglomerate players, leaving just a smattering of independent,
small presses.
I
discovered that much like the consolidated movie studios before
them, the newly-consolidated publishers are only interested in
three types of fiction 'product': potential award winners, potential
blockbusters/ bestsellers, and genre fare that earns reliably.
The 'midlist', comprised of a publisher's catalog of titles that
can be expected to sell between 10K - 40K copies, is an endangered
species now that publishers' overheads require certain minimum,
threshold profits from every book they publish. As a result, a
lot of quality work in General Fiction is now marginalized and
excluded from big publishers' consideration.
Similar
circumstances exist in the film and music industries, and in both
cases the result has been a vibrant, varied independent movement
among artists whose work doesn't fit the business model of the
major players. It seemed only logical to me that writers should
follow suit, but the extreme and pervasive publishing industry
bias against self-publication has yet to reconcile itself with
the new publishing industry paradigm.
The
big publishers no longer want to buy "little" books---those
expected to sell anything less than 40K copies---, yet they do
everything in their power to discourage authors from taking the
future of their "little" books into their own hands
through self-publication. This is because they want that work
preserved for their future purchase in the highly unlikely event
that they ever buy any manuscript from the author in the future.
Meanwhile,
back at the ABNA contest, "Adelaide Einstein" garnered
excellent reviews and made it as far as the semifinal round, but
no further. It was clear to me that in the new publishing business
model it wasn't likely I would ever succeed in selling my novels,
regardless of how many positive customer reviews I could bring
to bear.
But
on reflection, I realized the big publishers didn't have much
to offer me anyway. They reserve their promotion budgets for their
star clients, their advances are usually quite small for first-time/unknown
authors, and they can no longer even guarantee my book would be
shelved in any brick-and-mortar bookstores now that Borders™
has announced its intention to reduce in-store stock by 20% in
order to display more books face-out on their shelves. They claim
this move has resulted in a sales spike, so the same strategy
will undoubtedly be coming to a bookseller near you soon. Moreover,
with Amazon™ currently the #2 bookseller in N. America and
#1 in international book sales, I think we've reached a tipping
point. Brick-and-mortar store presence no longer seems to be a
prerequisite to success in authorship.
In
addition, author royalties on independently-published books run
about three times the typical amount for mainstream books, so
big publishers can't win me over with royalties, either. Finally,
when it comes to taking full advantage of new technologies such
as eBooks, viral marketing and all the potential of Web 2.0, big
publishers are woefully behind the times.
About
the only carrot big publishers have to dangle in front of new
authors nowadays is their parent companies' continuing stranglehold
on all major media outlets, because the parent company of a publisher
that rejected your book will not want its TV, magazine and online
arms undermining that decision by granting you reviews or exposure.
So,
armed with my knowledge of industry realities and the tools now
available to me, I made the decision to go independent. My books
are all published independently, using Amazon's Digital Text Platform™,
CreateSpace™ P.O.D., and related technologies. I design my
own book covers, solicit my own reviews, build and maintain my
own web presence, and generally act as a one-woman promotion team
for my work.
Most importantly,
I've made it my mission to reach out to other disenfranchised
authors and share all that I've learned with them. There's no
reason writers shouldn't have an independent movement of their
own, in likeness of, and solidarity with, those of the film and
music industries. Conditions have never been better for an Indie
Author movement to finally take its rightful place in the publishing
industry. Together, writers and the readers who support them can
make it happen. Support The Indie Author Movement!
.
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artwork © 2006 HitGuru
Website content © 2008 April L. Hamilton
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