Sunday 22 February 2015

From self to shelf

I have just signed a traditional publishing contract with Urbane Publications Ltd for my next book.
The Ghost Tree, the sequel to The Sleeping Warrior, is due off stone in October.
I put a lot of thought and effort into self-publishing The Sleeping Warrior but it's taken me a year to realise that I have neither the marketing skills, the time, the budget nor the experience in the publishing world to get my book out into the public domain with any great success.
Irrespective of gathering thousands of online friends on the big social media sites, it is notoriously difficult for the majority of new writers to get noticed as an individual inside Amazon's crowded halls. Even more impossible is the opportunity of securing a traditional publishing contract, even for good writers with excellent stories to tell. Despite some very successful self-published authors commandeering the top spots on Amazon's best-seller list, there is still a fair amount of snobbery and stigma attached to self-publishing that is not going away any time soon.
I feel very fortunate by managing to catch the eye of a few publishers for The Ghost Tree but decided to go with Urbane.
I met the publishing director, Matthew Smith, on Twitter. He kindly agreed to run an interview about his publishing house for my Ivy Moon Press blog and I was immediately struck by his passionate and professional approach to publishing.
Unless you sell millions of books for them, publishing houses do have a reputation for putting sales before the author. Urbane conducts its business the other way round and that's what I like about them.
Matthew's worked in the industry for a long time and uses this experience to sell his authors. He's also very active on social media, knows the market and all its quirks and and, more importantly, gets Urbane titles on the shelves.
I hope that this will be a very long and productive relationship between us.