Hello from Down Under

Well, as this is my first post here at Publishing Renaissance I thought I’d better use it to introduce myself and talk a bit about my writing and publishing experience. I’m under some pressure to write in a cool accent, after a brief intro in the Week In Review post – I’ll have to let my crazy UK/Australian spelling be my accent. It’ll help to colour my posts.

I was born in the UK and have always been a writer – it just took me a while to realise that. I got into trouble at about age 7 in school as my teacher was convinced that my parents had written a short story that had been set for our homework. After much protestation on my part, and a call home, my teacher was eventually convinced that it was all my own work and I had to read it out to the class. It was an epic (for a 7 year old – about three pages) about this guy that goes back in time and has a hard time escaping the dinosaurs he comes across – I was always destined to write speculative fiction. After the class a number of classmates came up to me saying how much they enjoyed my yarn and I learned just how satisfying it was entertain people with a tale of your own devising.

I continually wrote stories and poems from then on, all of which were, naturally, bloody awful. But it was good training. As a teenager I played role playing games with a fervour and loved writing game campaigns for my friends. I started on my first full length novel at about 15 and began many others since, but never seemed to finish one.

By my mid-twenties I’d had enough of working in crappy nine to five jobs. My other passion in life is Kung Fu. I’ve trained since I was about 12 years old in various martial arts and, having not done well in school and quitting at 17, I got a series of low end jobs that gave me enough money to pay my training fees and that was all. Eventually that wore pretty thin and I headed off around the world, travelling. Or, as I prefer to think of it, walking the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu.

While travelling I decided that I wanted to actually be a writer and pursue my Kung Fu training – those were the things that were important to me. During those travels I also met the lady that was to become my wife. Skip forward to now and I’m married to a wonderful girl, I teach Kung Fu and Qi Gong for a living and I write.

I started my first complete novel, a contemporary dark fantasy called RealmShift, while travelling and finished it several years later, once I’d settled in Sydney, Australia. I got myself an agent, shopped the book around and was very nearly picked up by one of the big trad houses. They changed their mind at the last minute and decided against publishing me. I was over it for then and decided to shelve the book and work on the next one. Maybe some more writing would give me the incentive to get back out on the submissions trail.

Then I discovered the wonders of POD and learned how easy it was to produce your own work. I thought I’d give that a go. So I self-published RealmShift through Lulu.com. I sent it out for reviews, got some great responses and sold a modest amount of books. And I really enjoyed being in control. My biggest issue was the high cover price that companies like Lulu enforce. When everyone gets their cut, the book is expensive – especially for a 130,000 word (nearly 500 page) novel like RealmShift.

So when the sequel, MageSign, was written and ready, I decided to take one step further. I set up my own indie publishing company, called Blade Red Press. I signed up directly with Lightning Source (cutting out the Lulu middleman) and issued a new edition of RealmShift along with the first edition of MageSign in January this year. After everything I’d learned through my Lulu experiences I was able to make these new books a far better product and the cover price came down from $23.95 to $15.95 for the trade paperbacks. They are both also available as Kindle editions for just over $3 and a variety of other ebook formats at Smashwords.com for $3.50. They look great, they’re getting really good reviews and they’re selling pretty well. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could be happier, if they were selling in even bigger numbers, but you know what I mean.

Blade Red Press has since produced the novel of another Sydney writer, Michael Fridman, in the form of his alternate history story of ancient Baghdad, Maggots Of Heresy. We’ll soon be opening for short story submissions to produce our first anthology of emerging writers and will be looking to pick up some more novellists before too long. Blade Red Press is going to publish quality dark speculative fiction, using all the modern tools such as POD and Amazon. Rather than act like a trad house, we’re going to act under a similar model to Lulu, iUniverse and the others but with some important differences. We won’t publish just anything – only things within our chosen genre and only things with real merit in the writing and story. We’ll make a more affordable route of self-publishing available to writers, but they’ll have to produce quality books and stories before we’ll take them on. Then they’ll have to promote and market their stuff. We’ll help by promoting the press as a whole, but individual authors will see success or failure through their own efforts. I firmly believe that models like this are going to be the way of the future and I’m very excited to be a part of this fast growing indie publishing world.

I’ve been traditionally published in some forms – I’ve written for print magazines, freelanced for websites and had a few short stories bought and published in various places. I’m still regularly writing and submitting short stories as I’m a massive fan of the short and I’ll always get a buzz out of selling a story. It also helps to build my profile as an author. Meanwhile I’m going to continue to produce my own work through Blade Red Press and hopefully help other good writers out there produce theirs.

You can learn all about me and writing at my website, which also has a number of short stories, a novella and the first three chapters of RealmShift and MageSign, along with my blog. Drop by and have a look – feel free to leave me a comment. I’m looking forward to contributing here at PubRen in the future and sharing my publishing stories and experiences with all of you.

Feel free to ask me about anything – if I don’t know the answer I’ll make one up. I am a fiction writer, after all.

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