On being an indie author

Time to get back in the saddle (as we say in the western US) with my blog! It’s embarrassing to look at my most recent post and realize it was three months ago. It’s not easy to sustain a regular online presence, and I really have no excuse except to say I feel like I’m shouting into a void. My tech- and marketing-savvy son made me a spreadsheet to help me game out topics and timing, so again, I have no excuse. He suggested I should blog every day, though even at the get-go I said that would be impossible. Where would I find the inspiration? But even I know that quarterly is not a good strategy. So off we go . . . into the wild blue yonder.

My first novel, The Moon Is Backwards, has been out for more than a year, and the Portuguese translation, a lua ao avesso, for nine months. My initial phase of blogging (everything I’ve posted thus far) has been Brazil-related—mostly culture and politics. Which of course remain fascinating, especially as the chickens seem to be coming home to roost on former Brazil president Bolsonaro’s malfeasance. For example, Bolsonaro asked a minion to sell two Rolexes he received as official gifts from the Saudis as president (therefore the watches belong to Brazil), at a Pennsylvania strip mall. What could possibly go wrong? The Trump of the Tropics seems to be en route to his comeuppance, dragging a lot of corrupt officials with him. But I hate to make a whole blog post “meal” out of schadenfreude.

I’ve resolved to step back from striving for perfection in my posts (which results in long periods of dead air) and also I won’t limit my future posts to Brazil-related topics. My first two novels have done relatively well for a debut, indie author, and I’m grateful for that. Of course I’m nowhere near break-even, given the various expenses of paying an editor, a book designer, a translator, and so on. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and my book is out in the world, an accomplishment I’m proud of.

Today I’ll write about getting published, and what steps I took to make it happen. As a novice to the whole authoring and publishing game, I had only a vague idea about the process involved. I had heard the term “query,” because my mom wrote a memoir about living in Australia and spent a couple of years trying to get it published. So “querying” was an endless, back-breaking chore, it seemed, with heartbreaking results. Arlene (my mom) was not successful with her many queries, so she took the only option available twenty years ago, and paid to have her book, Living in the Land of Oz, published. This was called vanity publishing. The company she used, Xlibris, is still a presence in the market, and because I want to avoid libel and defamation lawsuits, I’ll just observe that representatives still email me (as Arlene’s contact) trying to upsell her on follow up services, years after Arlene passed away and I told them to buzz off.

To begin writing my novel, I took a course on “How to Write a Novel” at City, University of London, when Jasiel and I were living there in 2018. It was enormously helpful and gave me the kick start I needed. I had been thinking about writing a novel based in part on the many stories my Brazilian mother-in-law had told me, but I had never put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). The class involved each student submitting their first chapter in rotating fashion, and I banged mine out over a weekend (I was still teaching at Barts and The London). My classmates were amazed I had written it so quickly, but I said, “Don’t be impressed, it was a weekend of writing and ten years of thinking about writing before that.” I received favorable reactions and excellent ideas for improvement. Most important, I met the teacher Martin Ouvry, who is an author, a mentor, and an editor, as well as a rock musician. He led an independent writing class outside the university which I would have joined (I was honored that he invited me), but Jasiel and I moved to Portugal in early 2019.

I worked on my novel in a rather desultory fashion for the ensuing months, and then in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Locked down in the hills above Faro, Portugal, I focused more on writing. Then one of the things I call “the upside of the pandemic” occurred. Martin Ouvry contacted me and asked if I would like to join a writing class he was conducting on Zoom. Portugal is in the same time zone as London, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to get guidance, and just as important, regular kicks in the ass as we rotated sharing extracts of our works in progress. I continue with this mentored writing circle to this day, and benefit from the brilliant writers who make up the group, and Martin’s invaluable feedback; he has a gift for being supportive while generating ideas for improvement.

By late 2021 I had a final draft, and at long last a title, The Moon Is Backwards. I engaged Martin Ouvry as my editor, and he did a superb job. He finds things that need correction (this was not copy editing, though, my copy is usually pretty clean) but he has a light hand and great sensitivity about preserving the author’s voice. I have some quirks, such as a relative failure to wield semicolons and a tendency to be a bit skimpy with description, though I have definitely evolved over time.

After Martin had done the edit, I engaged my beta readers, twelve friends who had agreed to read and provide feedback. Ten were very positive, one said it wasn’t literary or psychological enough, and one friend liked more commercial fare, telling me “it needs more sex.” No doubt! All of the places where readers said they went “huh?” or had questions, I changed based on their feedback. Anything that slows the reader down is a no-go in my book. As they say. As a result of the beta reviews, I realized TMIB sits firmly between literary and commercial, and it has a name: upmarket!

Then I did a brief phase of querying. First, researching agents in my genre, historical fiction, and trying to intuit from their web profiles who might find my mid-1960s historical novel about Brazil and the dictatorship of interest. I also had researched what was already out there in the market, since most agents ask you to provide “comparables,” books that are like yours. Or more accurately, books that your book is like. Well, good luck finding anything like TMIB, as it turned out. There was absolutely nothing in English that remotely resembled TMIB. That really was a fundamental problem. No one seemed to be interested in a quirky, niche novel that they would have no idea how to sell to a publisher. I queried about 30 agents, and most didn’t bother to even reply, several sent formulaically encouraging rejections, and I got one full manuscript request, which was a big deal. That agent got back to me in two months and said she really liked the book, but it didn’t fit her list. Meaning, she had no way of selling it because it didn’t fit the publishers she had relationships with. I remain grateful to her for giving TMIB a go.

Now, you may suggest my queries were lacking je ne sais quoi, and that’s a fair question. I sincerely believe TMIB is solid writing, an interesting story, and it keeps the reader turning the pages. But it doesn’t fit neatly in its main genre, historical fiction, due to its time and setting. And it isn’t exactly women’s fiction, although it’s the saga of a woman’s life. And given the contraction of the publishing industry, and the loss of so many independent publishers that might have been receptive in past years, it’s hard for any author to get an agent and then get published by a major house. Also, I was feeling the pull of political events in Brazil as then-president Bolsonaro, who was on record with his love of the dictatorship and torture, was going to up for reelection in the fall of 2022, with the threat of violence simmering below the surface, and I wanted to capture the zeitgeist. So, I set out to publish the novel myself.

I then learned all about buying ISBNs and other details, options for publishing (IngramSpark and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing). I hired book designers to do the cover and the interior, a major expenditure. I put out the big bucks for that because actually, people do judge a book by its cover. And I uploaded the books to IngramSpark and Amazon KDP. And the rest is history. Or not yet history, but I remain optimistic.

Independent publishing has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. There is still the sense that indie authors write shitty books and have no recourse but self-publishing and given how relatively easy it is to publish a manuscript these days, there is often some truth to that. But it’s also true that there are many, many books deserving of publication that have zero chance in this era of the literary-industrial complex.

A British acquaintance here in Portugal is a published author who writes a monthly book review column for a regional magazine. She told me, “I just would never vanity, erm, self, publish. It has such a stigma.” And importantly, she told me she isn’t allowed to review indie-published books, her magazine editors forbid it. But then, she also told me she “doesn’t get” American authors like Faulkner and Steinbeck, so I guess it’s just as well.