Wednesday, May 30, 2012

KDP, Baby

Yeah, it's been seven discouraging months since I last posted.  After a few more rejections of my short, "A Fairy for Bin Laden," I made it through the slush pile at Bull Spec for editorial consideration in January (never mind that I submitted in November.)  I just said, "fuck it; fire and forget."

After a few monthly follow-ups after March rolled through with no word, I received a semi-form letter back last week apologizing for the delay due to some logistical screw ups at their end; the bottom line, though, was a polite no-feedback rejection.

So.

Last Fall I scored myself a Kindle to read on my daily train commute, and have done a lot of reading around not just the body of work published for the eReaders, but also around the self-publishing industry that eReaders and services like Kindle Direct Publishing have spawned.  After spending a week reading the blog archives of successful Indie (self-published, whatever) author Joe Konrath, I decided that perhaps self-publishing was for me.

I made a few more passes at editing the story, and dropped a line to an old colleague of mine, Jerry Branch, an amazing graphic artist.  He agreed to do a cover for me, and together we came up with an awesome concept and the image is coming along very well -- I'm pumped.  A good cover is no substitute for a great story, and won't make up for a poor one, but it -- and a good blurb / description -- certainly helps readers make decisions to pull the trigger on a sale.  I've downloaded some formatting and Kindle previewing software, and have been reviewing and tweaking the format to match the medium and present a professional product.  Sometime in the next few weeks I'll pull the trigger on uploading it to Amazon.

Don't get me wrong; I don't expect to make money on the thing; but I do expect a few sales and enough feedback and reviews to give me a reality check on whether I can hack it in this industry.  A short story isn't a novel (I've been pumped and excited enough to start making some progress on that again; thanks Joe), but writing is writing, and I'm going to expose my balls to the wind and see what sort of responses I get to my work.

I've decided, in the immortal words of Joe's guest blogger Stephen Leather, " . . . my overall opinion of the legacy gatekeeping system is that it can blow me."  


Let the readers decide.


In the meantime, I'm going to keep plugging away honing this craft.


Thanks, Joe.

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