Self-publishing fiction has changed over the last few years. With more time at home, some authors have found themselves in a position where they have ample time to devote to writing and publishing. Then, learn all the things they need to know to put their work out there; if they can do it themselves.
It’s typically a time thing. It takes a lot of time, not only to produce published works to put out but to learn how to do it properly. And as you’ll see from my journey, there’s a sort of lightbulb moment that some authors have when they realize they can do a lot of these things themselves.
Years ago, while I was writing my first novel Nightface far before thinking about publishing it, seeking a small press or self-publishing it, I was foremost a reader. I read a lot of books.
From time to time, my mother and I would stumble upon books that might be weren’t written very well. And there was no way to discern if that was a shortcoming from the publisher and editor or the author if it was self-published. Self-publishing wasn’t really “a thing” at the time.
In Northern Ontario, we heard about this book called Frozen Beneath, and then the subsequent novel Minnow Trap by Brian Horeck, who was a Northern Ontario author. We were intrigued because, like many people, we heard about this book from a billboard that was on the drive between Mattawa and North Bay. They were quite a famous thing, these billboards. Frozen Beneath was the first one it proclaimed “Frozen Beneath”, written in big weird typography, and a picture of an alien and a spacecraft.
My mother, being the alien fiend that she was, was drawn to this, and we looked for this book but couldn’t find it in the local chain bookstores. It wasn’t until we went to our local used bookstore, Allison the Book Man, did we find boxes of this book.
We also discovered Minnow Trap, which had its own billboard, and we both read it. It wasn’t super good. There were a lot of shortcomings. The characters were caricatures of bad late-night television. The plots were flimsy, pulled like taffy from one end of the book to unsatisfying ends.
I had at the time being reading some Richard Laymon so I was used to this sort of campy horror. I understood that sort of pulp renaissance that was going on then, as it is again now, and I was used to characters that didn’t ring 100% true. Minnow Trap brought that to a whole new level and if you are curious, you can look up the reviews on Amazon where some readers don’t hold back with the criticism. And you will see in the lower star reviews, a lot of conversation about how this book is not well edited and years later the author himself would readily admit it definitely needed a pass or two with an editor or developmental editor, or something. It was his second book.
I hadn’t read Frozen Beneath, my mother did. She also went on to read Minnow Trap 2. So in her, he had a fan for better or worse. The billboards themselves were key. The billboards are exactly how so many people heard about either book. Frozen Beneath sold about 10,000 copies in its first few years, mainly being marketed through the billboards and being sold at bait and tackle shops around Northern Ontario.
Not a very traditional way of distribution at all.
It took a year before it was available in other popular brick-and-mortar bookstores. Minnow Trap actually reminded me quite a lot of The Troop and The Deep by Nick Cutter, with lakeside settings, so I’m very curious if he’d read Minnow Trap or other Horeck.
At any rate, the synopsis for Minnow Trap, which now says best seller on the cover;
“One summer on a Northern Ontario Lake, three long-time fishing and hunting buddies stumbled onto some strange circular engravings upon a rocky plateau. They soon discover some bizarre and frisky little creatures caught in a minnow trap in a remote beaver pond. It is only after a few more occurrences that a Russian army officer convinces them that all of this is extraterrestrial, related to similar events also occurring in Latvia. It quickly becomes an international dilemma with a worldwide support team behind them and as the chaos erupts, they find themselves in a horrifying fight with other creatures with only their individual skills and knowledge of their hunting area. Can they read the world of this hellish nightmare?”
That synopsis spoke to us, rambling as it was. After seeing the billboards and reading the back jacket copy he had a sale. I can’t mention the billboards enough.
You can definitely go into Google and search for “Minnow Trap billboards” and see pictures of these billboards that dot the Northern Ontario landscape. That an author paid money to erect billboards, numerous billboards, and subsequent billboards because he changed the copy, the design, they were personalized depending on location and were reused for forthcoming books.
He had websites too, which at the time was not something authors did. He was really breaking the mould. This otherwise unknown author Brian Horeck, who was, if I dare say ridiculed in a lot of corners, because of his entrepreneurial nature, had self-published a book before it was even popular. He had funded his own campaign to advertise these books in a very unorthodox manner. And now he is somewhat a hero of mine because that is something that authors are being pushed into.
Gavin Gardiner and I talked in our interview about what he’s had to do and what was unexpected as far as the social media aspect of being an author. He himself sent this fantastic package to me as a reviewer. That sort of work wasn’t the thing that we expected authors to have done, say 15 years ago. When traditional publishing was really all there was. No doubt Horeck went around to these bait and tackle shops all by himself with a truckload of books. I’ve heard rumours he had an entire garage full of boxes of books because he got them printed himself and paid. I don’t know what for, say 10,000 copies. The 10,000 copies it sold is because he himself went and had them printed. They were bound professionally; they were indistinguishable from any of the Dorchester paperbacks lining the shelves.
Horeck was really far ahead of his time, and a model, so to speak, for the authors to come.
Two years later, when I was shopping my book around and stumbled upon Post Mortem Press, a small publisher who was just looking for new submissions as they wanted to branch out and publish more horror. They also had a quasi vanity publishing package available. This is a model sometimes adopted by a few small presses. Not the more popular small presses but the very small and micro publishers. They publish a book like any other press, but they will also offer a promotional package that the author pays for.
There is a hard and fast rule in many people’s minds that authors get the money they don’t give the money, and that is a great tenant to hold up. That is an excellent rule to have as a budding author. The money flows to the author, not away, as they say. Then you take the Horeck model, where every single iota of that book’s publication and promotion was out of pocket. It was 100% self-published. If you can blend those models, then why not? That is something now closer to the norm, especially in the past couple of years where things have drastically changed.
Self-publishing is really just another facet of that, or small-press where we get the help of a traditional press, and a little more marketing know-how. Perhaps some traditionally published authors lament the fact that they are expected to do most of their own promotion, but with smaller authors, it now comes with the territory. Books don’t grow wings after submission, nor will publishers relentlessly promote a book after the initial launch. This is more than apparent in self-publishing where you, the author, are the book’s wings. Even with a traditionally published book you, the author, may drive the initial launch.
There are millions of articles and talks and videos about that misconception and how much legwork an author has to do and many authors get burnt out doing it. Then you have those special breeds, the Brian Horecks if you will, who are totally capable of that, whether they are self-publishing, published by a small press, or published by a large traditional press. They just have an entrepreneurial nature. They are very proud of their little book children, and they’re very good at interacting with the public.
Then there’s the money equation. BookBub is something that is open to us from traditional popular books who see very popular titles on BookBub and unheard-of titles, self-published titles, small press titles. It all depends on if you can pay for that promotion. And if you lucked out in the lottery that BookBub is, you submit your book; you pay your fee, and then if it gets chosen, they honour your fee and promote your book to their probably millions of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, depending on the genre. There could be millions of subscribers for romance, so they send out your $1 book deal out to millions of people. If it’s horror, maybe 15,000 ardent horror fans who love buying horror. So, BookBub costs money and is just one example.
A lot of these ads we will see of related books on Amazon or advertising banners on popular horror websites, plugs on podcasts, all of that advertising cost money. That is one place where the playing field isn’t very level. Yet, producing a book that looks professional, reads professionally, has been edited, has a wonderful cover design and great paper with good solid binding is not out of reach anymore.
It can cost, but doesn’t take the vast amount of money Horeck must have paid out since I know little of economics related to scarcity, production value, supply and demand, but it is plain to see he had all of these things in place before there was KDP or Createspace, Lulu or IngramSpark.
I honestly don’t know how he did it.
I can’t imagine what it cost.
Billboards aside.
It was a very different model of self-publishing back then. Now when I think of self-publishing, some names come to mind like Kealan Patrick Burke, or David Moody, who have really made a name for themselves and have the flexibility to be a hybrid author where they publish traditionally and/or via self-publishing or own their own publishing companies on one hand, or in the do art or marketing for other authors on the other. So there are many different tactics with the hybrid model of being a self-published author or a small press author and to have been picked up by a large publisher. This skill is inherent in a self-publishing author who has an idea of cover design or is not afraid to approach those with the skills or perhaps pay a designer for that amazing cover art. The skill of being able to self-edit, or hire editors or not be afraid to engage beta-readers. All of these skills weren’t top of mind so many years ago when Minnow Trap came out in 2005. When Frozen Beneath came out the billboards had dotted the landscape for a few years before that, so it was a relatively quick turnover, piqued interest in readers and entertained those who looked on his writing as an oddity.
I was somewhat confused at first, being a debut author with my fresh vampire novel picked up by a small press in 2011. We had worked together somewhat on the initial cover art. The covers changed four times since then, of course, but that first cover I did have a little input on although it was designed and created by the publisher using a stock photo. They also had a promotional package at the time, even though I knew little about it, save that it reminded me of the Brian Horeck situation, At that time I did not hail him as a hero.
I thought of him as an entrepreneurial man who was an author second, that had paid out of pocket for all of these things. And I hadn’t quite heard the money flows to the author, not away from the author mantra yet, but I did have a reaction because I myself had no money to pay for the promotional packages and I thought I’d risk losing money or paying for tasks I had thought a publisher did naturally.
I opted to not take the path that looked in my mind as the Brian Horeck path. The path of being an author ridiculed, paying to play. As I said, a lot of people thought it was foolish of him whether they had read the book or not. Sad when I think now about what a pioneer he really was. With the self-publishing model that he’d forged of clay dug up from the lake bed himself. Really forward-thinking stuff.
So then, I was reading through my promotional packages I could have had from Post Mortem Press; it wasn’t overly expensive when I think about it now; priced out of reach for me and I really did not want to be in the realm of vanity publishing, which is where I felt that fell. Indeed, in the first few years after publishing Nightface some people had thought it was a vanity press endeavour that I had paid to have it published. I didn’t really know how to take that except for telling them that no, Post Modern press is just a small press. But to them, since it wasn’t an imprint they were familiar with, it felt like a vanity press and it was very weird to me how the two could be so closely related for readers, yet so different in my mind.
It was maybe a year after I had had my own printed books in my hand, or more accurately boxes of my own printed books, and been to events as an author and meeting a lot of other small press authors I had realized that my book was published through Createspace using Amazon.
Being a journalism student at the time and working a lot with layout programs to create the newspaper and having come from a graphic design background, I realized I could do all of this myself.
It was a very strange moment in 2013 to have realized that a lot of these small presses use things that authors can do themselves. And I think a lot of authors have that exact same watershed moment where they realize they are capable, given the time that they could effectively create the exact same thing that the publisher is.
If they are doing a lot of their own promotion, if they have the knowledge of design or pagination skills and know how to layout a book in Word even or Adobe InDesign, they can do exactly what the small publisher does.
There is a certain amount of pride saying that you are published by such and such publishing company, yet if no one’s heard of it, which was my case with my first novel, or people assume that it is a vanity press endeavour anyhow, then why not do it yourself?
Years later that I had the rights to Nightface reverted and I did add it to my self-publishing list which was sparked with the publication of the Pray Lied Eve series.
In years between the release of Nightface in 2011 and publishing my own work, I had Pray Lied Eve picked up by Hora Moria, which was a very small experimental press that I worked closely with. I’d done the layout, pagination, press copy, photography, and learned a lot. When the rights reverted to me after two years, I had already self-published that in a way because I had done all of that stuff that, related to my lightbulb moment, my initial publisher for Nightface would have done to put that book out. So I had a pretty good idea of how physical publishing can work.
Granted, I do wish I had the money to hire graphic designers. I see some beautiful cover art, especially on the Horror Writers Association group page on Facebook, where a lot of cover artists will show their most recent offerings, and I really should be going that route, but the cost is sometimes an issue. On top of that, my wanting to learn and experiment the same way I do with a lot of my technological endeavours took over. It is a lot of experimentation on my part and trying to throw myself in the deep end of that learning curve.
So the three ways of printing a book became very close and overlapped in my mind; a vanity press model used in a self-publishing method resembling traditional publishing as close as possible, following the signposts in the ground left by small publishers.
Many small presses use the exact same tools that self-publishers. They, of course, have a team of editors or beta readers, which are also available whether you are self-published or not for zero money or lots of cover design. You can design your own covers given the skill or training and tools to do so. The pagination is more a process than skill so you can take courses to learn how to do that or with the advent of something like Fiverr, Upwork or Reedsy you can find somebody who will do a great job. So when I first entered the author-life, these things were all very separate and cryptic to me as far as facets of…
- self-publishing, which nobody did;
- vanity presses, which you better not do;
- small publishers, which no one really heard of…
and then traditional publishing, which at the time you would think is the only game in town. They were erroneously immune to the stigma where you expected shoddy quality and bad editing from the other kinds of books. Readers who stumbled upon errors in small, self, and vanity published books took that as the rule, that those books were of lesser quality by default, and were blind to similar errors in books printed by large popular houses. This is still the case, in many respects.
Those ideas have all sort of coalesced and homogenized in my mind, where there is traditional publishing from the Big Shiny Old-guard Publishers, and this sort of amorphous blob, this Borg Chip of self-publishing, small publishing and vanity presses intertwined and ever-changing.
You would see articles published up until the last couple of years saying basically “traditional publishing, shoot for that. Get an agent. Don’t forget about small press if you fail, then maybe self-publishing, but only if you have the skills and the money and vanity publishing, just avoid that” in various ways. Those ideas are changing. Likely because those ideas are very interchangeable.
The involvement of the author in all of those facets, even traditional publishing, has never been so open. To be able to have involvement with all the things from typesetting, pagination, editing, design, photography, marketing; all of those things and authors can have varying degrees of involvement with where 15 years ago, there was no way.
There was their way, or the Brian Horeck way.
For many, many years.
I looked at self-publishing as a terrifying thing before I did it myself and realized it wasn’t so bad. This was also the secret that some small publishers hid. They were in effect self-publishing books for you. If the author paid any amount of money, then it was very close to vanity publishing. So there’s no reason to disparage one method or hold one up over the other. There is really not a lot of difference between methods of publishing when done well. Today, I look at my bookshelves and there are very few books on my shelves from the “Big Five” publishers. A lot of what is on my shelves is from small presses, a fair amount of what’s on my shelf is self-published and it’s really impossible to discern one from the other.
You probably have some indie work on your shelves too. I don’t mean as an avid reader of small press horror, but the casual reader. An article caught my eye on theconversation.com entitled “50 Shades of Grey 10 years later: Self-publishing wasn’t novel then, but now it’s easier to reach a niche audience” because it is about self-publishing ten years ago, with the idea that self-publishing didn’t necessarily exist. When you look at nearly twenty years ago, Brian Horeck was shopping around Minnow Trap and planning his way into bookstores under his own steam. There is a large, weird gap in between the idea of self-publishing as a viable method of printing a book in the public mind and for authors and readers who were having an ear to the ground far before the subject of the article burst onto bookshelves.
This is a fantastic place to be for authors. Going forward, I’ll embrace a little more of the Brian Horeck method, just maybe not spending so much money or having a garage full of my own books and selling them at bait and tackle shops. But as with Gavin Gardner sending that fantastic package, and other authors we see doing so many other innovative and experimental creative things to promote their own work I’m just really glad that all of these things have sort of coalesced into horror publishing.
Brian Horeck passed away in the fall of 2018. According to his now-defunct website, Frozen Beneath 2 was listed as coming soon. There is no published book by that name, but you can find all of his other work on Amazon and in bookstores. I’ve not seen a billboard in some time, as they seemed to come down month by month and replaced with other advertising since his death.
This transcript was generated by https://otter.ai and my original essay appeared in the October issue of Typical Books Monthly Magazine.