Twelve Months On

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor crept onto the top 100 free downloads in the Contemporary Fantasy section of Amazon Australia over Christmas, snagging a position at #16. This occurred twelve months after I first republished the story via Brain Jar, on the heels of nearly 300+ downloads in various storefronts.

It’s interesting to look at the books that surround it in that section—one of these things is very clearly not like the other ones. Not just in terms of being a short story, but in the choices around cover arts and fonts that position it within the genre.

This pleases me.

One of my great issues with the indie publishing scene lies in the rush to conformity. The conversations that dominate forums are how do I produce fast and earn some sweet kindle money, and familiarity is a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The advice always boils down to the same core principles: hit the genre tropes, use a cover concept that speaks directly to genre, publish fast and find a profitable niche to mine it for all it’s worth.

I don’t begrudge the folks who do it—making money from your writing is an important and powerful thing—but for me it fritters away the true joy at the heart of the indie publishing world: Every madcap idea is feasible & nobody can stop you. It’s a space where you can take chances without fear of wasting time and effort, because everything has the potential to find its audience if you give it long enough (and, unlike traditional publishing, you can).

Essentially, every barking mad literary project you’ve ever dreamt up has potential in the indie world, so long as you don’t have your heart set on making an immediate profit. The economies of scale that see traditional publishing focus all of it’s marketing push on the first six weeks are gone, replaced by a system where books can take time to find their audience.

It can be slower—Hornets Attack is over a year old and just finding a new group of readers who dig its weird little blend of slipstream sensibilities and teenage ennui—but it’s also one drop in a growing bucket of projects I’ve got out there for readers to find.

While Hornets has been killing it of late, Black Dog: A Biography overtook it in terms of downloads leading into Christmas. It’s the weirdest, least-accessible short story I’ve ever written, and it’s still finding its way into reader’s hands. I recently did the math and discovered the Short Story collections tend to sell a book a month on average