Self publishing success

Before I get started, I wanted to mention one thing. I've had cause recently to think back to when I was new to agent assistantry when each new query was a grand adventure into absurdia. These days, I've seen virtually everything. Even if I haven't seen it ten times before, the odds of it making an impression as unusual in any way- good, bad, weird etc. are slim. If the cause of these recollections is reading, yes. I've even seen that geographical coordinate thing (very likely the same author, actually). But a query came just yesterday I believe that made me smile. It opens:

Dear Messrs. McVeigh and Crew:


I am contacting you regarding representation for my novel [title removed to protect anonymity], complete at a little over 75,000 words, because Mark is bald and Robin has a blog that is, in its own way, subversive. Professionalism without austerity.

My first thought: "Holy shit. I had no idea I was professional or subversive. But considering I take it as a compliment, maybe I am." My second thought: "Shortest author bio ever- either 'I am a bald subversive' or 'I like bald subversives'. Neat-o."

On to more significant matters- the promised first post in a series about media entrepreneurship. And there's actually no better place to start than with the idea of self publishing authors. Now, I'm sure all of you have heard or felt at one time or another that self publishing is "vanity" publishing and that there is little to nothing worth rescuing from that garbage. This may or may not be true on the whole, but it ignores a lot of other plain and simple truths. For one, self publishing used to be very common. If it was good enough for Poe, it's good enough for you. And of course, there are plenty of times when there was gold to be mined and the powers that be completely missed out.

Here's a fun one, the emergence of the keitai novelists in Japan. Seriously, read that article because it's a hoot. And although that 15 year old girl (now 16, I guess) was writing books that sounded truly awful, she sold over 100,000 copies by this time last year. How many books have any of us sold? Or closer to home you have examples like Richard Paul Evans. He only ever writes "christmas" books and they don't seem terribly interesting to me. But he self published to give the thing away as gifts and wound up becoming a bestseller in hardcover and paperback at the same time which NEVER happens. Even he didn't realize what a product he had.

These aren't my favorite examples though because neither was really intentional. So I'd much rather talk about Zane. Haven't heard of her? Neither had I until a few years ago. What she writes isn't really my thing. But here's what you need to know, apart from her having only one name. Because of her own life and tastes she noticed a big gap in the book market. There were no romance novels for black women. So she started writing online and developed a following. Of black women. In like, 1998. Those dark and terrible days when the tech savvy boasted about having a second phone line for their 56K. I mean, it was the dark ages. How she pulled that off is beyond me. But she did. So she started to self publish and sell them herself. Before long, she was getting six figure deals from Simon and Schuster (who also do Richard Paul Evan's books, coincidentally), then she had her own imprint there and was directing and producing her own TV specials for...cinemax, if memory serves.

Why does this matter? Well, either the entirety of publishing had it's head so far up its ass that the idea of black romance had never ever occurred to anyone and they'd never been pitched anything like it- which I don't believe for a second- or they casually dismissed it as a genre that was either too small or too difficult to reach to justify bothering with. So in comes Zane and becomes synonymous with the genre itself. Now, I still don't want to read her books, but it's no joke to say that every black romance has one of the following three connections to her-

1- She wrote it
2- She runs the imprint which published it
3- She inspired it

See, publishers can make mistakes too. They misjudged the size or tenacity of that audience. For reasons I'll explain later, probably next week, this has a lot to do with retail models and pressure to produce nothing but guaranteed best sellers. But whether you want to see them as well intentioned but trapped in a corner, or clueless and outdated this is just one example of how there are markets not being served to their fullest. And to be clear: you don't have to be Zane to be successful. The market can exist and simply be under-served. A smaller company can pull a profit worth their time from 10,000 copies compared to S&S's need to sell 50,000. A self publisher could sell 1,000 copies and have made a difference. It wasn't so long ago that I got a query from an author who wrote an extremely detailed how to manual for model train do-it-yourselfers. How many of those are there? I've met one model train guy in all my life and I'm pretty sure he has neither the time nor the money nor the desire to build custom engines from scratch. But this author sold 1,000 copies or some such to railroad museums and hobby shops. The only part where he fell down is thinking that publishers were going to be able to sell it any better than he was already doing himself. But his product was so unique that while 1,000 copies may not have made him a ton of money, he filled an invaluable gap for those people. One I can honestly say I'd never have thought of.

So here's your mission if you should choose to accept it- think about your hobbies, or your education or even those around you and try to identify some unusual skillset or knowledge base and ask yourself if there's a an audience for that. Because I guarantee you there is. The first Sci-fi magazines in America had subscriber bases in the hundreds and the readers were spread so thin you could go for miles without finding another one. But over time, people have become more connected, especially these days due to the internet. You could go to a damn Sci-fi, gaming, or comic convention every weekend all year round if you had the resources. Because geeks nerds and losers have found each other. It's exactly what Zane did but she pulled it off singehandedly. You'd be surprised at what there's a market for. The short answer is EVERYTHING. And while they used to be largely irrelevant because they were too hard to reach THAT ISN'T TRUE ANYMORE.

Next time I'll go into detail on a case I find particularly interesting about a recently released niche product and how they used its very niche-ness to propel it to massive commercial success.