Launching The Girl on the Kerb (Part 1)

The Cover of a Cozy Thriller

Last week I talked about my new appreciation for my role as the publisher of my work. This week I am going to continue along those lines, talking about the launch of my new novel, The Girl on the Kerb.

(Edit – I’m never in any danger of writing anything too briefly. I waffle on and on, and I do so here as well. I had intended this to be a single piece, but after including everything I thought I needed to include to fully explain the launching of the Girl on the Kerb, I found the word count approaching 1000 words, and I hadn’t even reached the actual launch yet. It was only then when I decided to split this report into two parts. Seeing that I have nothing else in mind to write about, save my April book report, it was an easy decision.)

First, some background. By the time March had rolled around, I had learned enough about traditional publishing to decide that I didn’t want to sell my story to a traditional publisher. This was easy to decide, since I hadn’t been asked. However, the thought of losing effective control of my work, just stuck in my gullet even though I had no expectation that Gollancz would actually buy it. Still, I promised myself to wait on their rejection before publishing it myself. It was part of the game I was playing. They had said that the process would take 6 to 9 months, and March was the ninth month… I had only to wait it out before I could consider my promise kept.

Nevertheless, I decided to cheat. Just a little. Given my feelings about traditional publishing, I felt safe, on 11 March, to put the ebook version of the story up for pre-order on Amazon for a 6 April release. Being slightly superstitious, I always releasing my books on a Thursday, and that was the first Thursday in April. I told myself that I could cancel the pre-order if the impossible happened and I changed my mind. I then took a step further. Not wishing to wait until mid to late April for my author copies of the paperback book, I quietly released the paper version of the book on 11 March. Almost no one buys paper copies of my books, so I figured it hardly counted as a release.

As it turned out, I received my rejection from Gollancz on the 24^th of March. I know of several writers who passed this first process, and had their stories go on to the second round consideration – that would take another three months. Oh, the hoops publishers put poor writers through – because they know any writer will do just about anything, and accept just about any deal, to get published.

With nothing holding me back, I decided to release the Smashwords and Google ebook and audiobook versions on the following Thursday, 30 March.

My next decision was what to release The Girl on the Kerb as. As in what category or genre it would be slotted under. Using the freedom and opportunities afforded by being my own publisher, I decided to release The Girl on the Kerb as something other than a science fiction novel.

There as a number of reasons for this. The first being that during my time posing as an aspiring traditional writer, I discovered that though I could find agents who said they were willing to take on science fiction, what they really seemed to be looking for was fantasy. Indeed, I watched an interview with an agent who confirmed this, saying that publishers were far more anxious to find fantasy than SF. That suggested to me that SF wasn't all that hot. And even in author publishing, fantasy outsells SF by a fair amount.

Still, there are a lot of author published SF books on Amazon, but much of it is military SF in one guise or another. Military SF is the largest single category, but when you consider that Space Opera, First Contact, Alien Invasion, as well as Adventure all usually feature wars of some sort, that’s more than half of the SF titles. This suggests that military SF in its various guises is what most Amazon SF fans want to read. Since my story isn’t military SF, releasing it as SF would mean that it would likely only appeal to my usual readers. Which is fine… But if I could find some way to find some more readers...

A second reason for not releasing it as SF is that over the last couple of years I’ve had my own personal epiphany. I’ve had to admit to myself that despite considering myself a SF fan almost all my life, after reading SF blogs and watching SF YouTube videos, I've come to realize that I really don’t like most SF stories. On any list of 100 great SF books, I may’ve read, or tried to read, 17 of them. Of course, I’ve slotted almost all of my books into SF, because they are all set in the future, and most on other planets. But that, in part, is due to sheer laziness on my part; it means that I don’t have to do the research needed to write a story in real places at real times, I could just make up things as I go along. But thinking about it, is the setting what really matters? What if I released it in accordance to its plot rather than its setting?

If I wanted to find new readers, and as a publisher, I do, it seemed to me that I would have to offer something new to find new readers. I had tried this before, writing and releasing Beneath the Lanterns as fantasy without, I must admit, any great success in breaking into the fantasy market. However, I’m hoping to rectify that this year… but that’s a subject for another post. Still, I had to believe that  it was worth trying again. In this case, I decided to release The Girl on the Kerb based on its plot, by listing it as an espionage novel instead of a SF novel. I figured I could do this, just as long as I made it clear in the blurb that the story was set in the far future, i.e. they were getting an espionage novel with a SF twist.

Having decided on this course of action, I discovered, when setting up the book, that espionage novels are not a separate category. Rather, they are a sub-category of “thrillers”. This, I must admit, gave me a bit of a pause. I hadn’t written a thriller. Or at least, I didn’t think I had. Though not being a reader of thrillers, I couldn’t say one way or another. Perhaps there are such things as “cozy thrillers.” Well, if not, I guess I’ve gone and invented them with The Girl on the Kerb. In any event, I decided to go with “Thriller – espionage” and double down with “Thriller – adventure” for its category/genre. No mention of SF at all. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So how has it gone? That’s next week’s subject. Stay tuned.