My publishing journey:
Navigating this new world of publishing has been a difficult one to say the least, but an interesting one. I’ve always loved reading. When I was ten an adult friend of mine gave me a copy of “The Hobbit” to read, and I was immediately hooked. Reading “The Lord of the Rings” for the first time was an amazing experience. It was before any movie had been made, even before the animated move. I had no idea what was going to happen. I feel bad for anyone who sees the movie and is deprived of the opportunity to read the books and absorb the story in its pure form, without knowing what’s going to happen. After that I moved on to other books: Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, basically anything I could get my hands on. I think what turned me on to writing was the frustrating way some books ended and I imagined how I would have done it. TV shows did the same thing to me. The original Battlestar Galactica ended with them finding Earth, in a most disappointing way. I often imagined what I would have done, it would have been a lot different. Writing my own stories gave me complete creative control.
I wrote my first story when I was a Junior in High School. It was called, “The Revolution of Arlandia.” I wrote it with pen and paper. When I found my parents old manual typewriter from the 70s, I typed it up. After I got a job working as a busboy in a restaurant in Sandpoint, Idaho, I bought myself an electric typewriter with autocorrect. That was a life-changing event! I attempted to write a new story when after I joined the Air Force, at Norton Air Force Base. I had no plan, didn’t know what I was doing, and at a certain point I got stuck. I had no idea how to end the story. Over the next twenty-years, I read a ton of books, and I would occasionally revisit the story with no ending and add to it, but to this day I never ended it.
In 2007 I took an assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. I arrived a week early and they weren’t ready for me. I had nothing to do, so I sat at my desk and created a timeline for a new story. It was very detailed with a beginning, middle and ending. After that, work, travel and family took up my time. I put that story away and forgot about it.
Three years later, I moved to Scott Air Force Base. As soon as I got there, the Air Force changed the high year tenure of all ranks. I thought I was going to be able to stay in for twenty-six years, and they shortened it by two. I had to retire in less than a year.
I was already having a horrible time with depression, having moved from Norway to Illinois. I often compared it to moving from heaven to hell.
Bored and depressed, I pulled out the timeline I created in Norway and started writing the story. Two years later, I had a finished manuscript to a story I named, “The Ruins of Arlandia.” I tried to publish through a traditional publisher, and got a dozen or so rejection letters. I wanted to feel a physical copy of my book in my hands and I wanted to go to conventions and sell it. The publishing market was already changing rapidly, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I found out how easy it was to self-publish. I discovered CreateSpace, a publishing company that was part of Amazon.
For my first book, I paid CreateSpace to edit the book, design the book cover and format the interior. I also paid for some basic advertising services. I think I paid three thousand dollars for that first book. A friend of mine that also self-published books advised me to publish smaller books and make it into a kind of serial. I took his advice, which in hindsight was terrible advice. The original book one was very small. When I took it to conventions, if they didn’t say it out loud, I could see it in their expression, this book is small. That led me later to merge books 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4 together to make the five book series into a trilogy.
I digress. Overtime, I found a way to make publishing less expensive. I felt that the editing service CreateSpace provided was not worth the expense. The changes they recommended were minimal. I found I could pass the manuscript around to people I trusted, for them to read and edit. One was a school teacher, the others were avid readers. That eliminated the need to pay Amazon to edit. Next was the book cover. Book one had an excellent book cover. But the cover for book two, Inferno, was terrible in my opinion. So, I went looking for my own. I tried a website where you could pay someone to design a cover for you. That didn’t end well. I never got a good enough picture, and occasionally someone would steal an image from a well-known franchise. Finally, I found a website that sold royalty-free images. They had hundreds of thousands of pictures. I could buy them for about twenty-dollars, and they were royalty-free. That’s where I found the covers that I used for the rest of the books. That left formatting. Fortunately, Amazon posted instructions on how to format the cover and interior text. Best part of that was I did it for free. So what first cost 3 – 4 thousand dollars, I was able to publish a book for less than fifty dollars.
It was very fulfilling to have physical copies of my books. I went to conventions from Missouri to Ohio with my youngest daughter. We had a lot of fun, met celebrities, made a few friends, and even had a tiny fanbase. Fans who said they only went to the convention to find me and buy the latest book in the series.
Unfortunately, with every convention I sold less and less books. At one point I even had a hard time giving copies away for free. It became a heart-breaking, soul crushing experience. I couldn’t deal with it anymore, and stopped going to conventions all together. I decided I would focus on writing, until I figured out what to do.
In 2019 I decided to go back to school and get a writing degree. I enrolled at Southern New Hampshire University, an online school, and started taking classes. Now, here I am, it’s February 2021 and I am going to graduate at the end of June, this year. I’m anxious for school to end. I had already finished the rough draft of book five. Once school is over, I’m going to go back to the Arlandia series and finish it.
Also, in my creative writing classes at SNHU, I had to write a short story, and I wrote one about space pirates. It didn’t take long to connect it to the Arlandia Universe. The characters in that story came to life for me, and I must write a book about them. I plan to make their story into a separate series. Who knows, there might even be a possibility of a cross over event.