How I Self-Published the Anthology 'blank tapes' (part 1)
I've been meaning to publish my own work for a few years but as a freelance writer I was always invested in providing work for my clients. I just didn't have enough time to focus on my own writing. The impetus to start Twin Monocle Publishing came when a client and I decided that our relationship wasn't working out and I was left with a story I otherwise wouldn't have written. That story was 'The Haunting of Manor Lodge' which effectively became my first self-published book. I knocked up a cover in Canva , a cool if limited online tool for creating covers, and formatted the manuscript with Direct2Digital's online tool and took advantage of their publishing network.
And that's it. That all I did. No publicity, no ads, I didn't even tell any I knew that I'd published it. It was merely an exercise to see the process of getting a book out there. A learning experience and nothing more.
And then I got three sales.
Some how I got three sales.
Now that's not a lot at all in the grand scheme of things. But to see the numbers come in from D2D's reporting service was a low key thrill. I had to put another book out as soon as possible.
Years ago I'd written a few short stories. They were odd little things that had grown and become more refined as I updated them every few months or so. I even submitted them to various markets, and was rejected every time. The common consensus was that they were just too strange. I could have continued submitting to more places but I'd always imagined that I would release them myself one day.
So that's when 'blank tapes' (all lower case, despite what Amazon Kindle demands) came to be.
I thought about all the poor neglected short stories out there that weren't quite right for the general public, that were good but didn't fit a niche or a genre. Stories like my 'Coaxial Noose', which was declined for publication for "being a good story, until it became incoherent at the end, and turned into a script...".
I like to write weird stuff what can I say.
Going with the videogame adage of 'it's not a bug, it's a feature' I decided to make an anthology of misshapen stories, oddities and genre-bending misfits. I had a few in the drawer, so to speak, but there wasn't enough to make a proper release so I opened it up to my friends, a creative bunch of people who I knew would have something just right for such a compilation.
Very kindly they let me have their stories - I even reached out to Dermot Jelfs from a chance recommendation from Facebook. I was upfront with them all: I couldn't pay them but I would split any and all royalties per author, making it very clear that this was not going to be an awful lot.
That said I was going to try my best to give the book a decent launch, but first I had to make it.
Having put out 'The Haunting of Manor Lodge' should have prepared me for the second book, but it eventually proved to be a lot tougher than I had expected. 'blank tapes', which at that time was still titled 'Bad Meat', was going to perfect and that meant there was lot of hard work coming my way.
Next time I'll talk about wrangling authors, formatting manuscripts and creating a decent cover as well as what I learned and the mistakes I made.
