5. On Direct Publishing
It wasn’t until I finished the final (original) version of The Featherweight Augur a few years ago that I began to think at all concretely about whether and how to publish it. At the time, I was already outlining the second and third books of what I planned to be a gargantuan trilogy. I felt like Lyric’s story had some blood going to it, the end of the first book was exciting and left a whole mess of loose ends flying around, and it would take a good, long while to tie everything up. But writing fiction was not an easy endeavor for me, and – while writing for oneself is a valuable exercise – on some level stories are meant to be shared with others. I spent a bit of time researching how to publish a debut novel and quickly realized there were many obstacles.
For one thing, as an untested first-time author, the book was probably too lengthy for most publishers to take a risk on. The full text was nearly 200,000 words long and while that works great for folks like George R. R. Martin and Steven King, it was going to be too long for no-namer like myself. I spent months mulling over whether it made sense to cut back on the novel’s content. I set the manuscript aside and reread it (for the fourth time) a year later. Mulled it over some more. Ultimately, the story felt strong to me in that form, and I hesitated to thin it out.
A second impediment was simply the time and effort it would take to either query an agent or directly submit the manuscript to a publishing house for consideration. As the pandemic set in, it seemed that literary agents were increasingly overwhelmed by submissions from folks who finally had time to finish novels they’d been working on for years (I get it!), and many publishing houses, for want of staff, had closed off their direct submission portals. It looked like very narrow bottlenecks all around.
Third, the economics of traditional publishing just didn’t seem to add up. And I’m not primarily talking about my bottom line (as the author), but rather your buy-in (as a reader). I liked the idea that directly published books were cheap and accessible. I also liked the idea that directly published books are owned entirely by their authors, who can fluidly adjust their price (that is, make them more accessible to readers) in perpetuity. The tradeoffs in eschewing the traditional publishing model are real, no doubt. But I was persuaded by the promise of greater agency and flexibility in managing my creative work.
Finally, and frankly, I’ve been wrestling with a chronic illness since May 2022 that often leaves me with little energy and even less ability to focus. The pieces of the direct publishing process (design a book cover! choose the manuscript font! learn about eBooks!) just felt … smaller, I guess … more manageable than the traditional route and its huge-seeming milestones (find an agent! land a book deal!) By pursuing direct publishing of Lyric’s story, I could work slowly, piecemeal, fill my time at the margins and feel like I was making steady progress over time instead of pursuing an ephemeral inflection point in a marketplace I didn’t understand.
So having decided on the direct publishing model, what changed about the project?
The first and biggest change was to rebuild The Locutor Trilogy as The Locutor Series and offer the story in nine (still-very-generously-sized) installments instead of three (enormous) ones. This was facilitated by a happy coincidence: the original The Featherweight Augur had been written in a three-act structure, and each of these acts quite readily stands on its own as a separate novel. I sat down with my outline of the second novel and realized it could be easily broken into three novels. From a structural standpoint, rather than weakening Lyric’s story, this approach felt like it would strengthen it.
I also began to think about how to convince potential readers to take a risk on a first-time author: why not publish multiple books in the series right up front (and offer the first one at an extremely cheap price!) to present readers with a low-stakes entry point? If someone enjoys the first book, then the second is waiting right there for them; having enjoyed the first book virtually for free, perhaps the second book’s price tag would seem less daunting.
Finally, the nine-book approach would put pieces of the story in the hands of readers more quickly, allowing them to consume the fourth, fifth, and additional installments at shorter intervals rather than having to wait multiple years for the next large tome. Along the way, I could publish standalone stories set in The Locutor universe or offer free content to members of my email list. All told, the direct publishing route offered more dynamic and reliable ways of interacting with readers and rewarding their interest in Lyric’s story.
Now, I am not a very “online person” so it’s going to take a while to get the engine up and running. This website is one way of alerting folks to the forthcoming existence of The Locutor Series on Amazon. Another is my email list (which I hope you’ll consider joining) as well as my Instagram account (which I hope you’ll follow) that features things like book cover artwork and notable passages from the novels. My goal is to offer The Featherweight Augur, The Silent Mountain, and The Shattered City altogether on Day One. Depending on the format you prefer, that “Day One” is going to be different: Amazon KDP allows for pre-orders on eBooks, but not so much on paperbacks. So the paperbacks on going live Oct 14 while the eBooks (available for pre-order now) will launch in mid-January.
With the fourth book, The Troubled Search, my goal is to make it available a few months thereafter, shooting for Summer 2025, with books five through nine coming at less-than-a-year intervals. Considering I’m about one-third through Search already, I’m hoping the timeline is workable.
If you’re here, thank you! Please feel free to poke around on the website or navigate over to Amazon to check out the books.
