I was born Jeffrey Alan Rice on a crisp autumn morning in
Maryland. The last of the leaves were turning, though the mountains were still verdant
with evergreens. Blue crabs scuttled through the foliage, gathering acorns for
the long winter ahead.
Skip ahead 31 years. I got laid off because of a contract
lost due to government budget cuts. It was a few months before I could find
work, returning to writing freelance articles for livestrong.com. As a fiction writer, and a somewhat early
adopter of the e-reader, I’d been hearing about the changing world of
self-publishing, and with a lot of free time to learn new skills, I decided to
give it a shot. I had some previously published stories I could put out as a
collection, a novella I figured no one would want because it’s a novella, and a
play script I figured on similarly.
Though I’ve never hidden my name (it appears a couple of
times on this blog and in the front matter of all of my books), I chose to
self-publish under a pseudonym for several reasons. One was that I’d published
hundreds of articles for livestrong.com under my own name, and I thought it
would overshadow my fiction web presence. Since I wrote through Demand Studios,
and they got laid low late last year by a change in Google’s algorithms that
marked their content as worthless content-farm garbage, I needn’t have worried.
Well, about the name thing. Monetarily, though, that changed Demand Studios to
end most of their work and I was suddenly competing with literally hundreds of
other health and fitness writers who’d had all the work they wanted for months,
and then one day had none.
There were other reasons for using a pseudonym. I wanted to
teach creative writing, and I thought that if I were going to write in fiction
genres dramatically different enough to warrant using separate names, my real
name should go to publications that would go good on the CV. I had over a
hundred submissions out to literary journals at the time. After those and
another hundred all came back as rejections, I’ve since decided to not concern
myself with that so much right now. It’s not where I’m going to see success at
the moment. A handwritten rejection from The Missouri Review really hit that
home: “I’d be surprised if TMR ever publishes a zombie story, but yours was
certainly interesting enough.”
There was fear, too. I’d been working towards a writing
career for a decade at that point, and during that decade, self-publishing was
a huge taboo. I don’t know if I’d use a
pseudonym now, as there currently isn’t a break anyplace in the spectrum of my
work between horror and literary. There’s no brightline divider, and I suspect
there never will be. But one benefit of beginning with a pseudonym is that I
will ditch the name if I ever need to, if I bomb in BookScan or something. I
don’t have to worry about a bad book or two ruining my career, even if BookScan
continues to have a big impact on a writer’s sophomore+ contracts.
For the past year, my writing-related community has really
grown. I’ve met a lot of awesome people. Some only publish traditionally, some only
self-publish, but most do a bit of each. The “hybrid” author, I’ve heard us
called. One thing I’ve learned is that every writer’s situation, strategy and
goals are different, and that it’s better to learn about the new environment and
plan the best strategy going forward than pre-judge and spend time lamenting and
looking backward. Yeah, a deluge of $0.99 novels makes it hard on the rest of us,
but any energy spent fretting about it is wasted. I’m way more likely to get
worked up about aesthetics than business, anyway. We’re all just trying to get
by.
After so much rejection, one of my goals was to get a
publisher to notice me. Instead of waiting, I’d act. I needed to feel like I
was moving forward. And along the way I gained peers and readers whom I can
thank for what will hopefully turn out to be the next big phase of my career.
Because enough of them started talking about my books and including them in
their best of 2011 lists to get the attention of basically my dream publisher,
horror juggernaut DarkFuse.
When I got a message from the editor of their novel imprint,
my heart started pounding, but I told myself that it wasn’t going to turn out,
that things never turn out, that it’s all hard work, and it’s all about the
work and that there’s no reward, because I was terrified of how low I’d sink if
I let myself get too hopeful. So many times I’d watch my stories get set aside
from the slush at lit journals, and it just hurt worse when they got rejected.
But I didn't get rejected, and they'll be putting out my novel The Hoard in November.
Some people talk about the industry having changed so much
that they’d never do anything but self-publish, but a horror writer would have
to be crazy not to seriously consider a deal from DarkFuse / Delirium. Besides
the experience and the clout, their terms are set to address the issues of the
modern publishing landscape. Unlike the dinosaurs, instead of trying to not notice
the approaching asteroid, they’re evolving. For instance, they got big into
e-books years before the boom. They weren’t caught off-guard and scrambling, or
worse, attempting to sabotage their e-sales to wring the last juice from an old
model.
So if this book does well, I hope to publish a lot more with
the various imprints of Shane Staley’s company, for sure. In that case, I won’t
be self-publishing much long horror anymore. But I’m still an Abominable
Gentleman, and hope to torment humanity with short fiction alongside my evil
fellows for a long time to come. There could be other collaborations. And it’s
likely that I’ll be putting out the third Vampires
of the Plains book myself.
And if I decide to take the plunge into a really unrelated
genre, I might make up a new name and see if I can’t do it all over again.
To the regulars: since I made a general announcement about
my deal, I thought there might be some people I know who are new to the site,
so I figured I’d recap.
