Maybe, if I were some kind of amazing author, a writing protege, with nothing to do but labor lovingly over my works of fiction, I could think about doing this the “normal” way, if such a thing even exists. There’s something attractive about traditional publishing, mostly that the publisher usually takes care of all of the logistics, advertising, and social media outreach. In other words, the traditional publishing route (at least as I imagine it) would allow me to hide in a cave and write, without worrying about all of this publicity and business.
For better or worse, that’s not really an option for me, in my present circumstances. That’s why I’m doing this the hard way, where I act as not only the author, but also the publisher, advertiser, and businessman behind each and every story to be dragged from my higher reasoning cortex. Editing, cover art, revisions, copyrighting, marketing, selling, managing, outreach: all of these tasks will fall to me. After being on your little blue speck of dust hurtling through the cosmos for over nine thousand years, I still don’t have a social media presence. I guess I’ll probably need to change that.
By no means do I find this entirely regrettable. By working this way, I have a level of both control and flexibility with my writing efforts that I suspect would be hard to come by, certainly as a new author, via more traditional methods of entering the writing industry. In fact, even if I had no other reasons to choose this route, I suspect I would for those advantages alone.
One of the tips I’ve received is that if I want to build an audience, I need to engage with my audience, and I should post consistently on…something. The vagaries of most social media seem ill-suited to my temperament, but perhaps this blog will suffice, at least for a start. After all, I can hardly expect people to buy my works if all that ever changes on this site is intermittent postings of new works.
It’s not much, and I can’t even promise when I’ll have my first work available for you, dear reader, to possibly purchase, but everything and everyone has to start somewhere. This seems as good a place as any.
IGC Publishing 