The publishing industry is struggling; anyone involved in the process -- author, literary agent, editor, publisher -- knows this is true. Over the last few years, the publishing industry has experienced more upheaval than usual, what with the advent of Kindles and Nooks and the explosion of publishing without a publishing company, otherwise known as Indie Publishing.
Back in ther summer, I released my agent from our contract. I was looking towards my author-ly future, and I didn't think we were on the same page. She wanted one thing for me; I wanted another. And I was tired of playing the publishing game, namely, that so many other people were in control of what I would write, how I would write it, and how it would get publicized and sold.
I've been contemplating my career ever since then. I have a new book, ready to go, that most of my beta readers loved, that my editor loved. Why not publish it myself? I know a lot more than I did a year ago, before my first book came out, and I feel confident that I can do at least as good a job on the publishing part as other professionals. I talked to a few other authors, authors who have been publishing with traditional houses for years, (No, I'm not going to name names!) and frankly, many of them are tired of the publishing game, too. Some of them are moving towards indie publishing, for many of the reasons above, but also, because, they could make more money. Traditional publishing generally yields about one dollar to the author for every book sold; with indie publishing, the author gets about 70 per cent of each book sold. And you get total control -- of what your book cover will look like, of when the book will be published (You don't get the control with traditional publishing, unless, you're, say, James Patterson :). Of course, indie publishing has its downsides too, for example, that a lot of people don't take it seriously. You can't imagine the number of reviewers who refuse to read an indie published book. (I have a feeling that this is going to start changing soon, as more and more big name authors switch over to, or at least add, indie publishing to their repertoire.)
So all that said, my new book, The Opposite of Normal, will be available, in both print and ebook form, come 2014. As soon as I have more details, I'll let you know. For now, I'll give you just a taste of the plot -- Hannah, the twelve year old Chinese adoptee of a rabbi and his wife, struggles with loneliness when her father moves his family to a new town after the untimely death of her mother. In an effort to fit in, Hannah tries to shed her Judaism -- after all, she concludes, she wasn't born Jewish anyway -- and adopt the primary religion of her friends, Christianity, without her father knowing. And Hannah's brother, a bright seventeen year old high school senior planning on attending an Ivy League college the following fall, finds himself about to lose everything when his Christian girlfriend refuses to have an abortion. Their father, Rabbi Mark Friedlander, struggles to hold together his family and his job as the Rabbi of the local Temple, just as he might find love again.
More posts to follow about this exciting new path in my publishing journey! Thanks for coming along with me!
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