Tag: Indie Publishing

Journal

7 April 2020

Right, then. Tuesday. It is Tuesday, yes? The weirdness is setting in. I’m sitting in my flat pondering ways to break every rule I know about publishing, and marvelling at the fact I’m coaxing folks to come along for the ride. My inbox is filled with freshly signed contracts, my messenger services filled with chats about future projects. And for all my bluster about breaking rules, I’m going back to resources from 2005 when the publishing paradigms of RPG gaming splintered thanks to ebooks and thinking about the ways to transplant them into 2020. This has largely involved picking up an idea that’s been kicking around my computer since 2008. The nice part about everything going mental is that there’s really no reason going full tilt at ideas that seem interesting, rather than second-guessing whether they’ll pay off. Brain Jar Press is on the verge of getting its own online identity. The webpage is getting some attention. We’ve launched a

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Profit and Loss

I went and updated my profit-and-loss statements over the weekend, and noticed that I brought in as much from my RPG publishing books as I did the more recent Brain Jar Press releases. It’s tracking to do the same this financial year, although I’ll be doing my damnedest to keep that from being the case in the first half of 2019. All this means, in essence, the work I did over a decade ago is paying off more than than the more recent fiction work, simply because the sum total of effort I put in was checking the sales report. All the hard work was done in 2006, when those books came out, while the Brain Jar books required writing, layout, upload, etc. I’m making a note of this because I’m revisiting my business plan for Brain Jar over the next month, figuring out how I’d like to adjust things based upon the last twelve months.  There’s a bunch of

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me