Mike Markel on ePublishing
Today’s willing victim is Mike Markel, who published ‘Big Sick Heart’ through Books For A Buck.
It’s just another job to police detective Karen Seagate and her partner Ryan Miner. Because Karen is the chief’s least favorite cop, she gets lots of lousy assignments and providing security to a couple of guys debating stem cell research is one of those. Listening to the two debaters go on about football for hours afterwards while she’s stuck drinking club sodas (and dying for a real drink) is the icing on the cake. But when one of the debaters, Arlen Hagerty is murdered that night, what had been a boring job becomes a high-profile case.
Working with her young partner, Seagate has to confront a host of her own issues, starting with a broken-down family and her own drinking. With the chief breathing down her neck, trying to push her in directions that bring him favorable publicity rather than moving the case forward only makes things worse. As Seagate moves forward with the case, her own life goes more deeply into crisis mode.
There are plenty of reasons why someone would want to kill Hagerty. His wife or mistress are obvious and had plenty of opportunity. Then there’s the man whom Hagerty pushed from his job as he clawed his way to the top. Or could it be the politician he’s been blackmailing or his fellow debater?
Author Mike Markel combines police procedure with an intriguing and sometimes disturbing character in Karen Seagate. Markel’s writing drew me into the story, made me care about Seagate even when she engaged in self-destructive behavior, and gave me convincing red herrings to chase after as the real killer threatened to slip away entirely. This is Markel’s first published novel (he’s published a number of non-fiction works) and it looks like the start of something very special.
Tell me a little about the first book you had published.
I’m happy to do so, but first I want to ask whether you mean literally the first book I published (a study of the English man of letters Hilaire Belloc) or my first novel.
I think for this probably the first novel, though my follow up questions is going to be “Did the way you published your academic works feed in to the way you approached publishing fiction?”
Big Sick Heart, published by BooksForABuck.com a few weeks ago, is my first novel. It is a series novel (I am at work on the sequel) set in a small town in Montana. The main characters are two police detectives: Karen Seagate, a largely dysfuntional 42 year old single mother, and Ryan Miner, a highly functional 28 year old Morman man. The differences beween these two characters’ outlooks and life experiences are the basis of their dramatic tension. The case they are working on is the murder of the president of Soul Savers, a Christian right advocacy group. At the core of the book is the issue of the ethics of stem-cell research.
This is my eighth book. My first book was an academic study of the early twentieth century man of letters Hilaire Belloc. I worte that book out of an admiration for Belloc–and a desire to earn tenure (I’m a college professor). The process of writing these two books couldn’t have been more different. For the Belloc book, my dissertation director had a former student who was the editor of this academic series, and he needed a book on Belloc. I auditioned and got the job. For the novel, I wrote it for my own pleasure–and found it difficult to get placed, largely, I think, because of the state of the publishing industry. My publisher, Rob Preece of BooksForABuck.com, a small independent who focuses on e-books but also publishes print versions, impressed me because he read my ms carefully, offered excellent suggestions, and was completely professional in all my dealings with him.
Although I would be lying if I said I did not dream of a contract with a major publisher (an advance, a tour, etc.), I’m happy now to be with Rob because I think this is the moment for indies and for e-pubs. If I succeed, it will be because of the quality of the book and my efforts. I can’t really ask for more than that.
For more insights into my reactions to the process, please see my blog, Fears of a First-Time Novelist, at http://mikemarkel.blogspot.com.
How did you find out about booksforabuck in the first place? Were you a customer, was it reccommended to you, or did you find them while researching publishers?
I found them by searching for mystery publishers on the Web, then by checking to see how many books they published and whether they seemed to be available on Amazon etc.
What kind of publishers did you approach prior to acceptable by booksforabuck? Did you specifically look for epublishers, or did you approach print as well?
I went the old-school route, with a prestigious agent. She submitted the ms to 10 mainstream publishers, but when none of them committed, that was that. So I started looking for publishers who accepted unagented mss. That’s how I found BookForABuck.
Does your agent still get a cut, even though you submitted it yourself?
No, the standard arrangement is that she gets a cut only if a contract is reached with a publisher to whom she submitted it on the writer’s behalf.
Do you have any more books in the works? If so, would you go through your agent again, or straight to bookforabuck?
Yes, I’m working on the sequel. And no, I think my agent is my ex-agent (because she spent time–unproductively–trying to sell my book).
I feel lucky to be published, so I hope Rob at BooksForABuck will have me again. His choice will depend on how well–or poorly–Big Sick Heart does for him.
How did you feel about going with an epublisher rather than a print publisher? How did your expectations differ (if they differed)?
I had mixed feelings about going with an epublisher. On the one hand, my dream was to go with a well-known print publisher with a marketing budget, blah blah, but I also think we’re at the dawn of a new model for publishing, so that epublishing might turn out to smart in the long run for me.
About expectations: I try not to have any. Like they say, if you want to see God laugh, tell Him your plans.
How long was the process from submission to publication? What were the major milestones for you?
The whole process took about seven months.
About one month after I submitted the ms, my publisher suggested some edits. I delivered them in about three weeks. Then I waited about three months before he accepted the ms.
There were a couple of months of me neurotically making fairly minor copyedits, the publisher creating the various e-formats and the print version, me neurotically looking for more typos, etc. Then a few weeks of me not liking the cover art, suggesting revisions, back and forth.
Finally, in late May, the e-versions were published, then, a few weeks later, the print version.
What kind of post publication support, in terms of promotion, have you received? What kind of promotion have you done yourself?
My publisher has no budget set aside for such things, but he has agreed to some ideas I have suggested, such as price reductions and a contest with a prize of $100, which he said he’d split with me. I think the idea is that if the author wants to try something and is willing to split the cost, he’s game. He understands that taking a smaller profit is a reasonable investment, although he doesn’t have any up-front money.
Do you know yet what’s worked best for you, in terms of promotion?
I have no idea if anything has had any effect at all. (Feel free to make that sound less pathetic, if you can.)
Without access to an alternate universe, it is pretty hard to tell! Is there anyone you’d particularly recommend epublishing to, and anyone you’d suggest avoid it?
That one is easy to answer:
Do epublish if you get no offers from print publishers and/or you have skill in self-promotion and don’t mind calling your own work great. (One guy on CreateSpace invited the world to read his new self-published book, which he called the greatest book ever written, thereby pissing off everybody from God on down.)
Don’t epublish if you think you’re a writer and somebody else should be responsible for marketing what you write.
Might have to agree to disagree on that one 🙂 Though that is pretty much limited to Romance, one of the early adopters of epublishing.
I think that’s everything I wanted to ask. Is there anything you’d like to add?
Please make a modest effort not to make me sound like a complete idiot!
Big Sick Heart is available to buy from Books for a Buck (complete with money back guarantee and an awesome competition), Amazon, and Barnes&Noble. You can also follow Mike on twitter, as @mikemarkel.
