by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I’ve been asked by writers and others if I’d ever query traditional publishers again.
As a matter of fact, I’ve gotten queried by traditional publishers a couple of times in the past year. I’m not really sure why, since there now seem to be many cozy writers out there. I’ve politely rejected them.
It’s not that I had a bad trad-pub experience. It’s just that I’ve had a better self-pub experience.
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
This is the second time I’ve gotten the rights to my characters back from a publisher and taken a trad-published series to self-pub. The last time I did this was five years ago.
There were some big differences between this time and last time. The first time I’d had only one book released in the series before taking it to self-pub. This time the series had five books in it.
This latest series had a nice following but I found that many of my readers for the Penguin series seemed unaware of my self-published series. They would email me asking when the next Southern Quilting Mystery was coming out and I would tell them…and then ask if they knew about my Myrtle Clover series. Many times they didn’t.
One reason they didn’t is because Penguin didn’t want any non-Penguin books included in my author bio. I can understand this. So not only were my self-published books not included in my bio, the original trad-published book in the series (from Midnight Ink) wasn’t, either.Continue reading
By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Much has been written about the control that a self-published writer has over their career and their books. It’s usually portrayed as a good thing. We can choose when our book comes out, when its sequel comes out, what vibe our cover is sending out, when to run sales, how much our book should retail for.
Sometimes we’ll hear about the flip side of having this control—the overwhelming nature of it, the high learning curve in handling it, the realization that when our book seems to flop on release that it was related to something we did. Because no one else was in the driver’s seat.
What I have recently discovered is that the control…the good, the bad, and the ugly of it…is completely addictive. Until we feel, I think, a lot more ownership and responsibility for a book, even when we don’t have any control over it.
I’ve come a long way with how much control I’ve wanted to have. I remember when my editor at Penguin told me that a sequel for a book in my Memphis series was approved for release in 2013. That was two years after the previous book in the series launched. I had serious reservations about this and I didn’t understand it. I can write a book in three months, easy. If you push me, I can, technically, write a book in about 5 weeks. I’ll be stressed out and snapping at family members, but sure, I can write it. So why the delay? Or, really, why not ask me to write a book sooner? Why not ask me in 2011 to write the book, then decide if you want to publish it or not later? It could have started its year-long production process a lot sooner. If they didn’t want it, I could probably have reworked it to fit a different series.Continue reading
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
In October, my agent received an email from my editor. I have a release scheduled in the Southern Quilting series this June (book 5). My editor knew my contract for the series was about to run out and asked me to come up with some ideas for additional books for the series.
I developed two book outlines but never emailed them. My editor wrote my agent last month to say that print sales had decreased (I’ve no doubt…they’re only a fraction of my digital sales for my self-published books) and Penguin Random House wanted to stop printing the series. Instead, they were interested in my exploring their e-only line, InterMix.
And…I asked for my character rights back.Continue reading
