So after four years and four unsold manuscripts, I told my agent I didn't think our relationship was working for us and she agreed. Unfortunately, she also couldn't produce records of the places she'd sent any of those manuscripts, nor did she even hazard a guess based on her memories.

This woman was a professional and well-respected in my genre, and this... disappointment, we'll say... after years of hard work has left me completely uninterested in publishing through the New York/mainstream press route. It's currently the only way to make significant money, since novel advances tend to the $5000 range for nobodies like me, but it only makes that money if you're in the system, which I'm not.

When I think of the reasons I wanted to do this "career as a novelist" thing, reason #1 was: "It will make me enough money that I don't have to do anything else." Which is a nice reason, but honestly I've always been able to do both work and creative stuff at the same time, so it's not like having to have a job (or be a full-time mother, which is now my job) is going to stop me. Reason #2 was because I wanted the cachet of having made it... but nowadays I find it doesn't matter to me. Some people who are published in bookstores write better novels... but a lot of them don't. I don't know what criteria are being used to choose bookstore authors, but they're not based on anything I find important.

If I only ever sell five copies of a novel and make 50 cents, I think that's a better deal than spending hundreds of dollars in postage mailing novels to uninterested editors who will never make them available for anyone to read.

So I'm going to go it alone. Or more accurately, I'm going to go it with you.

Here's where I need your help. The only thing I want out of the money part is that it pays for itself... the printer, the art supplies, some pittance for the proof-reader/layout staff... and that it leaves a little left over for babysitting and maybe a con or two so I can get out and meet you folks. I am totally okay with making five cents. What I want to avoid is making negative cents, because I can't justify that with a new daughter.

So what do you all want to read? The novels? The novellas? The shorts? Do you want them to be available online for everyone, like the Aphorisms? Do you want hard copies? This stage of the brainstorming is important because dracosphynx and I (and probably my team of coder brainstormers on the Manse, like chipotle and tuftears) will use that information to decide how to code the website to make the work available (for instance, the login part is now important, since some of these stories are not okay for minors).

I'm also going to need your help... in terms of word-of-mouth. If you like something, reviewing it or passing it on to a friend is going to matter a lot more to me than it will to someone with a marketing department behind them. Having people post or drop off fliers at cons is going to help. We're going to do this without middlemen, so it's just going to be us.

So... tell me your thoughts. How shall we do this?


Edit: I just have to say, when I made this post I was secretly afraid I would get one or two lackluster responses. To have so many of you saying, "Yes, let's!" is a real relief...!

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