Depending on which online outlet got there first, today and tomorrow (July 23 & 24) mark the one-year anniversary of my debut novel Moro’s Price, from Loose Id LLC.
I still can’t look at the cover without getting a small jolt of startled unfamiliarity: “Wait – that’s mine!” 
I can’t look at the buy links on Loose Id or Amazon without a stunned little grin.
It’s been a happy, confusing, bittersweet, and ultimately hopeful year. First, the book has done far better than I’d feared it would. My sales are modest, compared to the powerhouse authors of the erotic romance and SFF genres. But I have had better sales than many authors (in those same genres) who perhaps didn’t choose their publishers as carefully – or got as lucky – as I did. I’ve had bad reviews, like every author. But every good review made me do a Snoopy Dance in happy solidarity (“Oh, look, someone actually understood me!”)
I’ll have a quiet-ish celebration with a few good friends, as we share some dark chocolate, good wine, and the Chinese takeout from Red Dragon that is our standby for all impromptu shindigs. Most of them don’t know what I write, don’t care – and that’s good enough for me. We’re not celebrating my book, but my persistence, my ongoing joy in what I do, and my dumb luck.
I got lucky with the explosion in digital publishing, and the arrival and growth of the erotic romance market. I benefit – though I certainly didn’t see it that way then – from the decades I spent writing for aimless fun, writing for technical markets, and writing (still unsuccessfully) for the mainstream SFF market. From the agents who said ‘no, go the hell away’, the ones who said ‘no, but here’s the reason why I won’t represent you’, to the agent who gave it a fighting chance for five years before agreeing that we just didn’t match up, to the wonderful quirky agent who agreed to help me out on a contract issue and became a good friend and mentor.
Back in 1987, when I wrote the first sentence in my very first (and thankfully unpublished) novel, the publishing world was vastly different than it is now. Mass-market paperbacks ruled genre fiction. Advances were big enough to mean something. A debut writer or a talented and diligent mid-lister could make $20K to $35K a year on mass-market genre sales and advances, with a nine-month to one-year turnaround on written sequels. Literary agents were nowhere near the gatekeepers they are now, and publishers actually found some treasures in their slush-piles.
That world is gone now, to the lament of some folks and the cheerful ‘good riddance!’ of others. For better or worse, many publishing advances have dropped to token levels. Authors have to promote themselves more diligently (something that I suck at, for various reasons), and write faster (which Real Life sometimes does not allow). But e-book royalties are far better than the pittance that mass-market authors got twenty-five years ago. Whole new vibrant genres have opened up. Fan communities are breathtakingly dedicated to their favorite authors, characters, and worlds. Effective self-publishing is a resource for many authors who might otherwise never be known; even if superstardom will elude most of them, they have a better chance now than they did in the Paperback Age.
It’s a Gold Rush, post-1848. I’m coming in around 1851 or so, but there are still glittering seams to discover. I’m looking forward to the next adventure.