Welcome to the Great Self-Publishing Experiment

In which I do it completely weird and ass backwards and ignore the tried and tested methods of self-publish success stories like Amanda Hocking and JA Konrath.  I’m a smartie like that.

For those of you who don’t know me, which is everyone everywhere as Dan Brennan is a fictitious pen name, I’m one of those types that likes to have their cake and eat it too.  So even while I query other works under my real name, I decided to self-publish The Infinite Circle series of mine on the side.  I’m using a pen name in case somewhere down the line there’s reason it might interfere with traditionally published works, and just because I want one.  I chose this series to self-publish because its YA urban fantasy, which I think is pretty saturated and on the way out with the big publishers, and because the stories in it are more episodic in nature than most of my projects.  There’s an overall story arc to the series as a whole, but the individual books within it are intended to be more stand-alone, and I think self-publishing will give me more flexibility when it comes to deciding how many books it actually ends up being.

As a possible point of interest, I’d like to mention that while I am querying agents with other works of mine right now, ‘Burning Daylight’ is not a failed or trunk novel that I’m self-publishing because agents passed on it.  I never queried any agents with this novel – and it actually never occurred to me too.  I always intended to take this one a different route…not necessarily when I wrote it, but when I finished it, edited it, I always kind of knew this story was meant to go a different route, even if I wasn’t totally sure how to handle that yet.

How I self-publish is going to be a bit different though, I decided.  At least to start out.  I’ve decided to begin by publishing the first book ‘Burning Daylight’ as a free serialized novel.  I’ll be updating regularly until the whole thing is up.  It’s already complete and I’m currently working on the sequel ‘Ill Met By Moonlight.’  When it’s all up on this site, I’ll add a Kindle version and publish it to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords and all related sites and versions for a price of ninety nine cents.

Obviously, it’ll already be available for free, but the Kindle version will feature a new cover, an excerpt of the next book in the series, and will overall be a much easier read than having to navigate the site webpage by webpage.  I think that’s worth ninety nine cents to anyone who might want to reread or who comes late to the party.  I’ve always intended the first book to be a loss-leader, a free or cheap sample of my work to anyone who doesn’t know me from Adam.  It’s not that I undervalue my work, but I’d rather be more accessible than make a little extra money per sale.

All books after ‘Burning Daylight’ will be priced at $2.99, leaving room for occasional novellas at $1.99 – the price point continues to be a tricky subject for self-published authors anywhere, but I’m of the philosophy that as long as one has a clearly defined reasoning for their price points and sticks to it, readers appreciate the transparency.  Self-publishing is about finding the balance between the writer as artist and the writer as businessman, so I hope you’ll cut me some slack if you decide I’m doing it wrong.  😉

I’ll be using this blog to post thoughts on self-publishing in general and different models and how other authors are doing it, as well as hopefully to link to self-published authors who could use some more attention.  And of course, I always have thoughts on YA and the other genres in general, but I have a blog under my real name for that and so likely this one will remain more focused on the self-publishing realm.  Please feel free to contact me at danbrennan310@gmail.com with any questions or comments you have in general, and comments on chapters of ‘Burning Daylight’ as I post them are ALWAYS welcome.  I hope you enjoy, and go ahead to the main table of contents page for ‘Burning Daylight’ here!