This Crazy Writing Life: Learning The Stuff They Don’t Tell You—You’re Not On Your Own
One of the things about modern technology that drives me absolutely batty is when you follow instructions and they don’t work.
Press the X key while holding down the Control key and this will take you to the Input Screen…
You execute the keystrokes exactly as instructed, only the Input Screen is nowhere to be found. So you search YouTube for helpful videos, Google the problem and waste an hour reading websites that don’t help, then you finally find a Subreddit called r/InputScreenproblems where somebody’s posted that you have to be sure to hold down the X key with your little finger while crossing your eyes and tapping your left foot or it won’t work.
The reason I bring this up is I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to untangle a problem I encountered while indie repubbing my latest out-of-print book. My intention here is not to promote the book—I’ll do that later—but to present this as a case study in the kinds of weird problems you can run into on this convoluted journey to successful indie pubbing.
First, a little of what movie folks call backstory…
Sometime in the very early 2000s, Otto Penzler emailed and said he’d taken on a side gig scouting for the British publisher Severn House. Severn House’s business model was selling to libraries, but they had made the strategic decision to expand into general trade publishing. Did I have anything he could show them?
At the time, I was working on a really dark, uber-graphic serial killer novel. How I wound up working in that coal mine is another story, but I put together a pitch and sample chapters, forwarded it on to Otto, and he liked it well enough to send it on to Severn House. They offered a modest hardcover deal and I, of course, jumped on it. The book came out in 2005 and sank like a boat anchor. If memory serves, the first printing was 1500 copies and there never was a second printing (which means if you’ve got one and I ever get to be a famous arthur, then you’ve got a rare collectible).
A couple of years later, an agent I was with for only a short time (another story we don’t have time for here) sold the paperback rights to Harper Collins in what was, by my standards, a sweetheart lucrative deal. The editor who acquired the book was an incredibly bright young woman from Chattanooga who’d gone to New York to achieve her dream of a career in publishing. Sharing a Tennessee connection, we hit it right off. I flew to New York, we made nice, had a fancy lunch in an expensive restaurant…
All was well. I had great hopes. The book was a standalone suspense/thriller, tailor-made for the movies, and was titled By Blood Written. The one-sentence logline:
A New York Times best-selling author bases the plots of his blockbuster novels on murders he commits himself.
Finally, I thought, that elusive breakout book…
Then, three months before pub date, my young enthusiastic editor takes a job at another publisher. The book’s orphaned, pub date rolls around, nobody notices, and the book’s come and gone faster than a Harlequin romance.
The book never earned out its advance, the agent and I came to a bad place (I’ve had a number of agents, but she’s the only one I ever fired), the book was remaindered, and the only evidence that it ever existed are the cartons of yellowing mass market paperbacks in my garage.
Fast forward a decade or so. I was just dipping my toes in the indie pubbing world by bringing my out-of-print backlist (which was growing fast) back into print. Maybe, I thought, I could make something out of By Blood Written. So I wrote Harper Collins and requested a rights reversion. By then, I hadn’t seen a cent or even a royalty statement in well over a decade, maybe a decade-and-a-half. By offering me the remaindered copies at less than a buck apiece—hence the aforementioned cartons in my garage—I assumed that meant the book was effectively out-of-print.
So imagine the surprise when Harper Collins answered my request by telling me exactly where I could put my request (and just in case you need a clue, let me say that place was a tad uncomfortable).
I was gobsmacked. The book was making neither of us any money. What possible use could it be to them? And it’s not like I’m some prestige author that’s adding value to their catalogue. The person in charge of that department, though, was adamant. There was an eBook version available, so it was still in print.
An eBook is a digital file, I argued. It has no physical existence; it’s a series of 0s and 1s on a hard drive. “Out-of-print, get it? Print!”
No matter. This woman was a hardass. She had the power, and she was happy to use it.
So every year or so I’d email her again, have the same old argument with the same old result.
Then, in late 2024, Harper Collins announced this person was retiring. Emboldened, I wrote the person who took her job. Two weeks later, I got an email back: Sure, no problem. Reversion letter attached…
Are you still wondering why I call this column This Crazy Writing Life?
Anyway, onward, through the fog…
The book was originally published over twenty years ago, so I decided to rebrand it as a historical. I wanted a cover that was an homage to the gritty, pulp fiction covers of the Forties and Fifties-era paperbacks. I found this fabulous cover artist on Fiverr.com and reached out to him; the result was a cover I just fell in love with. I retitled the book, from By Blood Written to Blood Plot. I was out of ISBNs, so I bought another package of ten and went to work (we’ll talk about ISBNs in next month’s column). I did an editorial pass, but truthfully, I was pretty happy with the book, and it’s already been through two sets of editors at two different houses.
As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, Atticus is my go-to eBook formatter, and now that they’ve added print formatting/typesetting to the app, I was able to pull all the interior formatting together in one place. I hit one minor hiccup when my cover artist told me he only did eBook covers and didn’t know how to do a print cover (I was going for trade paperback and a hardcover), so I had to go back to another graphic artist I’d worked with before who was kind enough to build the print covers based on somebody else’s art.
It looked like all the ducks were finally in a row. The plan was to make the book available on Amazon as an eBook in Kindle Unlimited and trade paperback. Amazon does hardcovers now, but they only do case laminate (which is where the cover is printed directly on the boards rather than a separate dust jacket) and that’s not right for this kind of book.
Then I’d upload the trade paperback and hardcover files to Ingram as well, so that brick-and-mortar bookstores could order the book (remember, bookstores won’t order from Amazon because they can’t get the wholesale discount, and the books, while technically returnable, are a PITA to do so).
There’s a lot of moving pieces here. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with a mind of its own.
And it was at this point I made my big mistake…
In all the other books I’d republished, I uploaded the eBook to Amazon first, mainly because I knew that was where I was going to move the most copies. Then, since I was already on Amazon, go ahead and knock out the print versions as well. Then slide over to Ingram and take care of those uploads.
But for some reason or other—maybe because I was enamored of the cover—I went to Ingram first. I uploaded the trade paperback, then the hardcover, with their own new ISBNs. I set a May 5th pub date, and I checked the “Extended Distribution” box. It all went pretty smoothly.
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
I moved over to Amazon, uploaded the eBook, and it was approved quickly. Great… On the KDP bookshelf dashboard, there’s a little button that says, “Create Paperback.” I tapped that, uploaded the files, set the May 5th pub date (meaning the book was available for pre-order) and leaned back in my office chair to savor my victory.
Then Amazon kicked the trade paperback files back. You can’t use this ISBN, the bot told me, it was already in use. Say what? I went back, made sure I hadn’t mistyped something, uploaded the file again, and it was promptly kicked back with the same error message. Frustrated and desperate, I went through the convoluted maze of getting someone to help me. Finally, I got an online chat agent that was either a human being or a really sophisticated AI app.
There’s not enough room left in this month’s column to describe all the craziness it took to untangle this mess, so I’ll fast forward right to the end.
I screwed up by checking the “Extended Distribution” button on Ingram. I’m not even sure I know what Extended Distribution really means, but I never thought I’d cause problems by choosing that option. After all, distribution’s what you want and the more extended the better, right?
In this case, though, by uploading the files to Ingram and going with that option, that meant before I had a chance to upload the files to Amazon, Ingram had shot the book over there. So when I tried to upload a file with the same ISBN, that caused the problem. It was already in the system.
The fix was finally given to me by my friends and colleagues in Novelists, Inc., most of whom have been doing this a lot longer than I have. What I had to do was pull the book down from Ingram, give that a couple days, then re-upload the book to Amazon, give that a few days to resolve, then send the book back to Ingram. Never check Extended Distribution on Amazon, they advised, that only causes problems. Only go with that option on Ingram after you’re fully set up on Amazon.
The takeaway from this is the technological demands on indie pubbing can get pretty convoluted and tangled up, but persistence and a willingness to ask for help can eventually get it all unraveled. In my case, the great mentors on Novelists, Inc. helped. If you’re not in that group, though, there’s an r/selfpub subreddit that’s really helpful. Facebook groups are a great resource, too. Just keep digging, researching, and pounding away at it.
And never, ever, ever give up…
