Admin Post: Night Shivers, Talking Hybrid, and Blog Notes

I have several points I want to touch on here. This is sort of an admin post so bear with me please. Though there is a gratuitous kitty picture at the end of the post.

So I finished NIGHT SHIVERS. It is now off to the editor I’ve hired. I have to say, I really had a blast writing in Cicely’s world again. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed her. If this novella sells well, I have ideas for other novellas and full books that can spin off of it. You see what I mean when you read it. Right now my creative process is running wild. It’s as though, once I made the decision to go hybrid, I opened the floodgates and a vast reservoir of ideas poured out.

I’m going to talk a little more about the fact that I am going hybrid. Some of you may not quite know the lingo, so I want to explain a little more.

In the publishing realm if you are published by a regular publisher, you are “traditionally published.” That includes small presses like my very first one—Llewellyn, all the way to the Big 5 (like Penguin, who has been my publisher since 2002). When you publish your work yourself, you are a self published author or—as it is called now, an indie author. When you go both routes, you’re a hybrid author.

I do love working with a big publisher—it offers benefits like distribution, backing, and most important—advances, and that’s how I pay my bills. But if books don’t sell well, you can lose contracts. Which is why Otherworld is ending with Berkley. Sales went way down on it, and they decided it wasn’t economically feasible to continue. That is their right—they ARE a business, and I don’t fault them on that. So I move on to other series with them, and frankly—it’s a relief playing in new worlds.

But…I want to finish Otherworld, so that’s where Diversion Books comes in. They are…a way to make it easier to transition over to the indie side. They create covers, do small print runs, offer distribution I don’t have lined up. But…no advances, so everything I put out on my own is a gamble. And with novellas, etc., like NIGHT SHIVERS—where I’m doing it all myself—total crapshoot.

This all gets very complicated and frankly it’s too early for me to sort through it, so I will just say that as a hybrid author:

My books from traditional publishers will be as usual—found in stores, and available in print as well as e-book.

My books from Diversion will be in e-format, and in print—but the print will cost more because it will be trade size instead of paperback and you’ll most likely have to order the print versions online, though we are going to do our best to maintain the relationship I’ve built up for signing print books through Seattle Mystery Bookstore.

The work I put out on my own—for now, it’s e-book only because, at least for the shorts and novellas, it’s not economically feasible for me to charge you what would be the price of a paperback for a novella. I know some people wish things would remain the same as they were, but they can’t. Everything shifts and changes, and if you don’t adapt, you get left behind with the dinosaurs. At least we’ve cracked the Nook formatting issue, so the short collections I have out now, as well as future novellas/books will be available in Nook as well as Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo.

Bear with me—more to come here.

As far as the blog goes I want you to be aware that I will be blogging heavily for the next few months. For those new to my blog, autumn and winter always seems to see a definite increase in my posting. Excerpts of NIGHT SHIVERS will began on September 7^th. Excerpts of AUTUMN THORNS will begin on September 28^th. I will be having a fun NIGHT SHIVERS release contest on my blog starting on September 16^th. While we missed August’s I-LOVE-TO-READ contest, we’ll be starting up again in September.

Re: Unsubscribing. If you decide you don’t want to get my blog notifications any more, be aware you can unsubscribe through the blog website. There will be a place to manage your subscriptions. If you absolutely can’t find it, and decide to email us, asking us to do it for you, please Type “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line of your email, and make sure your email is the one that you used to subscribe to the blog. Otherwise I guarantee we won’t notice it in the glut of email we get. Also, because of the amount of email we do get, it may be a day or two before we get to it.

And that’s it for this morning. Time to get my latte and get to work. So I leave you with a picture of our kitties — because kitties make everything better.