GUEST BLOGGER: Carolyn J. Rose

Dodging Bullets by Taking Indie Road

By Carolyn J. Rose

Recently a writer I know completed the second book in a series. She worked on it for more than a year and, when she sent it off to her publisher, felt confident about the storyline and character development.

A few weeks passed and she got an e-mail from her editor outlining numerous changes. Not small changes.

Later she got an e-mail from her agent suggesting still other changes—changes far different from those suggested by the publisher.

She felt confused and even abused. She felt the message was that she wasn’t a good writer. She felt discouraged and tentative about writing a third book.

I commiserated, all the while feeling a sense of relief that these were bullets I dodged by indie publishing. My books are MY books—my ideas, my execution, my development.

Yes, there may be (plenty of) room for improvement. There may be things I could have done differently and/or better. There may be critics who don’t like the characters and stories I created.

But those are facts of the publishing life, independent or otherwise. There are always critics.

Fortunately, there are also fans.

In the past few months I received several e-mails from readers asking when I would release a sequel to No Substitute for Murder. I wrote back explaining that I was at work on two other books, but perhaps this winter would plot another mystery to ensnare Barbara Reed and her dog Cheese Puff. (One fan wants me to create a love interest for the ten-pound dog.)

“If you hadn’t put that book out yourself,” my husband said, “you might have a publisher leaning on you to set your other projects aside and get going on a sequel. They’d want to take advantage of the 20,000 you’ve sold since December.”

He’d pointed out more bullets dodged—the big bullets of outside pressure, deadlines not my own, and the financial considerations of others.

I have a strong work ethic and can create quite enough pressure on my own. I had enough of enforced deadlines and daily pressure during the years I worked as a TV news producer. And I was never consumed by the urge to make big money for myself or others. (Driven to make enough to get by plus a little more, yes. Consumed with the desire to keep shoving that bank balance higher and higher as a goal in itself, no.) Beyond that, I’m uncomfortable with BSP (blatant self-promotion). The message received in childhood was “don’t blow your own horn.”

So, while I felt I would relish the control I’d have by indie publishing, I also recognized the responsibility and effort required. Before I released An Uncertain Refuge in May of 2011, I bit my nails to the quick over the decision to take Indie Road.

My biggest worry was due to my feeling that the emphasis in the phrase “indie publishing” seemed to be on the first word. “Independent” implies strength and self-reliance, but I also felt a certain loneliness in the word. So I held back, feeling like a wallflower at a dance, afraid to get out on the floor because I’d make the wrong moves and everyone would point and stare.

But then I turned to some professionals who I now consider my friends. Thanks to my “support team,” the process of publishing gets easier with each book.

Patty G. Henderson formats my books for print and has never failed to be patient and offer praise on the days I need it most. (About five days out of seven if you’re counting.)

Digital formatters Kimberly Hitchens and her crew at Booknook.biz may be more than a thousand miles away—I’m in Vancouver, WA, and they’re in Arizona—but they’re so quick to respond and their communications are so personal that I feel as if they’re just down the hall.

Then there’s Dorion D. Rose (http://brokencork.blogspot.com/), my cousin. He’s an IT Architect for IBM, a business analytics specialist who designs software tools and web pages. Last year he happened to mention an interest in photography. A dozen pestering e-mails later, he allowed as how he might attempt a book cover. To his credit, he didn’t disown me when, after he’d spent weeks on the first concept for A Place of Forgetting, I scrapped it and asked for something else. He swears he likes the collaboration process. He’s probably lying. He’s created covers for No Substitute for Murder, A Place of Forgetting, Drum Warrior, and Through a Yellow Wood. Right now he’s at work on the design a book I’ll release late in the fall, By the Sea of Regret.

With such a great team, I’m not alone anymore and the emphasis in “indie publishing” has shifted to the second word.

Bio:

Carolyn J. Rose is the author of several novels, including Hemlock Lake, Through a Yellow Wood, An Uncertain Refuge, A Place of Forgetting, and No Substitute for Murder. She penned two humorous cozy mysteries, The Big Grabowski and Sometimes a Great Commotion, with her husband, Mike Nettleton. By the Sea of Regret, the sequel to An Uncertain Refuge, will emerge in the late fall of 2012.

She grew up in New York's Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. She founded the Vancouver Writers' Mixers and is an active supporter of her local bookstore, Cover to Cover. Her interests are reading, gardening, and not cooking.