Tag: Publishing

Self-Publishing Colloquium

April 29, 2022 / / 0 Comments
Photo by Saliha from Pexels

I’ve been invited to participate in a Twitter self-publishing colloquium by fellow writers Paula Johanson and Celu Amberstone.

Honoured to have been asked, I readily agreed, and then promptly went to the dictionary to figure out what a “colloquium” is, and whether Paula had spelled it correctly. I mean, what the heck kind of word has “uiu” in the middle of it? I should not have doubted her. She spelled it correctly. I cannot spell it correctly without saying the letters “uiu” out loud as I’m writing it.

And what is it? “An academic conference or seminar.” I guess you can have those sorts of things on Twitter, especially now that Elon Musk is running the joint. (With him there apparently you can have, do or say anything you like, world order and democracy be damned.)

It may sound like I’m being a bit flip about the whole thing. (That’s cause I am. ) But the flippedness ends now. (Not really, but a little bit.) Cuz I am in fact pleased to have been asked to participate and have every intention of taking it seriously, or as seriously as I’m able, which is every bit as serious as is required without being one iota more serious than that.

And what exactly are Paula and Celu asking of me? Initially, a series of ten tweets accompanied by a brief blog post (you’re reading that part right now) about the whole (hang on while I recite the letters out loud) “colloquium” (it didn’t work; I had to scroll back up in this post to get the order of the letters right).

But wait! I haven’t even really explained what it’s about.

According to Paula (who should know as she’s the one putting this whole thing together) it’s about “self-publishing your own fiction, and things you have learned.” And for me specifically: “What was it like preparing your father’s book and publishing it? What kind of reaction and feedback are you getting? What skills that you learned working for the CBC are you bringing to your self-publishing?”

So that is what I will be tweeting about tomorrow, Saturday April 30th around noon EST with Paula and Celu.

Paula adds: “I’m sure there’s lots you have in mind to say.”

Perhaps… but not right now. It’s Friday afternoon! And I have to walk the dog, after which I’m going out for wings and a movie with the guys. As you can imagine, there hasn’t been a whole lot of that sort of thing the last couple of years. Now that the damnpenic (sic) is over (hey, I can pretend just as well as the rest of our dumb elected officials) I can do that sort of thing again.

And tomorrow?

Our Twitter Colloquium on Self-publishing, hashtag  #SelfPubCol. I hope you’ll join us!

The Deer Yard Status Three Weeks In

December 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments

My sister Susan Rodgers and I published the Kindle edition of my father’s collection of short stories, The Deer Yard and Other Stories, on Dec 9th 2021, less than a month ago. The paperback edition came out the following day. We also distributed an ebook edition via Draft2Digital to a whole range of other distributors such as Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and so on. A couple of weeks later another we published another softcover edition via IngramSpark.

We published it using my own imprint, Donovan Street Press, in association with my sister Susan Rodger’s company, Bluemountain Entertainment. Because Dad is an author from Prince Edward Island, and Susan’s company is also based in PEI, we are hoping to use grant money from PEI for this purpose, though that has yet to be confirmed. If that doesn’t pan out, the entire enterprise will be financed by me, which is perfectly fine, and the least I can for Dad, who has certainly done much more for me during my life.

Dad is eighty-seven years old and has been writing stories like those included in The Deer Yard his entire adult life. He’s had lots of time to perfect the tales. Editing them was mostly a question of correcting grammar and punctuation (as he put it, he spent his career teaching physics, not English grammar). He did have a penchant for writing in the passive tense that I took the liberty to address. Beyond that my ethos was just to make the stories shine, and change as little as possible. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere it felt very much like mining precious gems. I just needed to wipe the soil off and polish them up a bit.

We didn’t have a launch, virtual or otherwise. Dad wasn’t really interested in that. He just wanted to get the stories out there. We got the word out via Facebook to family and friends. There might have been a few texts, a few phone calls. An email to a writing group or two.

When you’re publishing a book you need to choose which categories it belongs to. Generally you start with a couple, though there are ways to get it into more categories. For The Deer Yard and Other Stories, I chose Short Stories and Family Life. Amazon determined it belonged to Canadian Short Stories. Niche categories like that are important because it’s easier to rank higher when there isn’t much competition. If you search Google for Hot New Canadian Fiction right now you’ll see that The Deer Yard ranks #38 and #39 for the Kindle and print versions. If you narrow it down to Hot New Releases in Canadian Short Stories you’ll see that it ranks #2 and #3, after sitting comfortably in the #1 and #2 positions for the last couple of weeks, beating out collections by such luminaries as Stuart McLean and Margaret Atwood. It is #8 in the Most Gifted category, having once or twice soared as high as #6.

You might think, gee, it must be selling thousands of copies to be ranked so high, and perhaps I should leave it at that. Smoke and mirrors. But that is not the reality of publishing, certainly not Indie publishing. The Deer Yard and Other Stories has achieved those ranks having sold fourteen ebooks and sixteen physical copies on Amazon, and an additional six ebooks on Kobo, for a total of thirty-six books and earning approximately $158 for Dad and a third of that for Amazon and Kobo. Still, that’s not bad for a book by an unknown author by an Indie publisher launched with zero fanfare and out less than a month.

Interestingly, Publisher Rocket (software that helps you analyze the competition and pick categories and keywords for your indie books) tells me that The Deer Yard and Other Stories has 15 competitors in its categories and is on track to earn $2602.00 this month. The former is probably close to the truth, but we are a long way off from earning the latter, I can tell you.   

In fact, the book will no doubt take a while to earn back the investment we put into it, even if the PEI government does come through with their grant. The Deer Yard and Other Stories cost just over $800 to put together. Here’s the breakdown:

Cover Design (all formats): $401.16

Cover Illustration: $100

Vellum (Publishing software, one time expense): $361.59

Total = $862.75

My daughter Erin drew the deer. I believe in paying people for their work which is why she got the $100, though she would have done it for free. The cover itself was designed by a professional, Valerie Bellamy, using Erin’s illustration. The publishing software, Vellum, went on sale days after I purchased it (d’oh!) so I could have saved some money there had I been smarter and more patient. Beyond that, it doesn’t cost anything to upload your book to Amazon and Draft2Digital. IngramSpark does charge a small fee, but I belong to The Alliance of Independent Authors who provide a promo code waiving that fee. 

So, just another $2444 in Royalties between now and end of day tomorrow and we’ll have lived up to Publisher Rocket’s rather optimistic projection. Something tells me we won’t quite make that. But I’m perfectly happy with where we’re at. The important thing was getting the book out there and a physical copy in Dad’s hands so he could hold his first book.

Everything else is gravy.  

Other Times and Places Now Available!

January 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments
My collection of (mostly) previously published short fiction now available

I’m excited to announce that my short story collection Other Times and Places is now available!

Other Times and Places is a collection of seven of my short stories, six of which have been previously published in various magazines in Canada, Australia and Greece (one piece is new to this collection).

The blurb on the back says:

What do a thief, wizards, a platypus, ghosts, soft drink salesmen, God, the devil, and a spaceman all have in common? Together they will make you laugh, think, sleep better, open your mind, spark your imagination, and quite possibly improve your complexion* as Joe Mahoney brings them all vividly to life in this humorous and thoughtful collection of seven tales of the fantastic.

*Individual results may vary

I’m pleased that the collection was edited by, and includes a forward by, Dr. Robert Runté, a towering figure in Canadian speculative fiction (maybe all speculative fiction, as far as I’m concerned). Dr. Runté is himself the author of many excellent short stories, as well as the editor of many fine books, including several by best-selling fantasy author Dave Duncan (who once called him “the best editor I’ve ever worked with”), and my previous effort A Time and a Place.

Because I’m a lousy salesman, I like to make it clear to folks that no one is obligated to purchase or read my work. I will still be your friend, your colleague, your brother, your son, your nephew, whatever it is that we are to one another.

I just won’t talk to you anymore.

Kidding! Of course I’ll continue to talk to you if you don’t purchase or read my work (I’ll just pepper our conversation with more expletives than usual).

But seriously.

Should you actually be interested in purchasing a copy of Other Times and Places, you have several options. If you like e-books, you can get this Kindle version.

If you prefer print, right now you have two options. You can order it online here for $7.00 plus shipping (don’t worry, shipping is only about one hundred bucks or so). Or if you know me personally I’ll have copies available which will also go for $7.00 (Canadian).

It’s also available on Amazon.com and hopefully soon from Amazon.ca (for some reason it hasn’t shown up there yet).

As always, anything you can do to help spread the word is appreciated. Add it to your To Read lists on Goodreads, publish reviews, talk about it, blog about it, hire planes to skywrite about it, make television and radio shows about it, hey, I’ll leave that part up to you and your eminently good judgement.

I hope you like it.

D.G. Laderoute’s Out of Time

October 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Out of Time

Out of Time

I stumbled upon a nice post on novel writing just now by Canadian author D.G. (David) Laderoute. I like his advice on how to write a novel:

…put a bunch of words onto paper, so they form a complete story that other people will want to invest their time and energy in reading.

That’s pretty much it.

Sure, one could go into all the mechanics but what’s the point. Most people will never get past putting the bunch of words onto paper. If they do get to that point, and invest enough time into it, and have enough natural ability, they’ll figure out the mechanics themselves.

I suppose I didn’t actually just stumble upon David’s post. First I stumbled across mention of his forthcoming novel by Five Rivers Publishing called “Out of Time.” I love the title–it’s one of those great dual meaning titles. (I would say double entendre but there’s nothing salacious about this novel.) It’s, as Dave puts it:

Author David Lederoute

Author David Lederoute

…a Young Adult Fantasy, the story of two boys–Riley, who lives in present day Canada on the shore of Lake Superior, and Peetwonikwot or “Gathering Cloud”, an Aboriginal boy from the same region but hundreds of years earlier, in pre-European contact times. These two meet across the gulf of time separating them and, together, confront a powerful evil that threatens both their worlds.

I’m a big fan of books featuring time travel.

I also love this book’s cover art, pictured above, by artist Jeff Minkevics. It’s a unique style, with great use of colour. To paraphrase what David Lederoute himself has written about the cover art, it captures what the story is about without giving anything anyway, and does so in an intriguing fashion.

Artist Jeff Minkevics

Artist Jeff Minkevics

I haven’t read the book yet. It hasn’t even been released yet. Five Rivers is publishing it November 1st. I plan to pick up a copy. Just based on the title, the cover, and the engaging nature of David’s informal writing that I see on his blog.

Here’s hoping he blogs more.

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