Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: So we're here today with two guests, and if you recall from a former episode with MarcyKate Connolly, we talked about AgentQuery Connect, which was a forum that was very active 10, 15 years ago, where a group of us all met, came together, and all of us have achieved different forms of success in different arenas of publishing. Today I have Matt and Robert who have had success in the indie publishing arena. That is an arena that I dabble in as well, and I wanted to have them come on and talk because Robert is an author and then Matt runs his own publishing company. So if each of you would like to just begin by introducing yourself.
Matt: This is Matt Sinclair, I'm the president and Chief Elephant Officer of Elephant Bookshelf Press. The company I formed 10 years ago, last month, it was 2012, that was our first anthology and the first short story in that anthology was written by our wonderful host, Mindy.
Robert: And Robert Mellette. I write as R.S. Mellette. The books that I have published are through Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, so I'm very happy about independent publishing as none of my stuff tends to fit in the large commercial publishing world. I'm the author of Billy Bobble Makes a Magic Wand and Billy Bobble and the Witch Hunt, the newly out, Kiya and the Morian Treasure.
Mindy: I think you make a really good point about finding a place for books that aren't necessarily fitting inside those pre-approved niches that the traditional publishing industry likes to use to do their marketing. Robert, why don't you talk about that a little bit, like what you write and why you weren't necessarily finding any traction in the trad world?
Robert: It's really weird, the traditional publishing world because you really do have to thread a needle from miles away. It's so hard, but if you just look at Kiya and the Morian Treasure, it came about because I was working on Xena: Warrior Princess, and I was writing the Xena Scrolls for the website, which was basically a way of recapping the episodes, but with modern day characters arguing about the translations of these ancient scrolls So it was kind of fun and tried to get a publishing deal with Universal. Well, Universal Merchandising was fighting it out with Universal New Media about who would own this, and I lost the fight, no deal was made. So I moved the characters into outer space and that became Kiya and the Morian Treasure.
Now, as I was getting it published, I got an agent. I was going to the editors, this was a good book, but the editors would all come back saying – I love this, but it needs a boy character. What do they always say? The girls will read books about boys, but boys won't read books about girls. That's the line and they will not change it. No, I think what you're saying is that girls will read action books, but boys won't read romances, 'cause that's kind of what I was getting out of it, and I wasn't sticking to my guns and being all - no, I will not change my work, it's my work!
I tried, I tried to change it. It would fall apart, I'd put it back together. I tried so hard to meet their standards. It just wouldn't work. I kept getting back – I don't know what shelf it goes on. Middle grade or YA? Its science fiction- put it on the science fiction shelf. Where’s Hunger Games? It's a very frustrating battle, and I don't bequeath those editors. They all have to keep their jobs, they all have to put their kids through school, they've got their things to do, that's their job. But they very much need a Matt Sinclair and Elephant’s Bookshelf Press to relieve that pressure valve. Because I think the audience, they don't want another forced romance, they don't want another, Oh, what boy will she choose book? They want something fresh and something new, and you need Matt to do that.
Mindy: You're right, tat old school mentality that is really entrenched, that won't budge, and there is a feeling that boys don't read books either number one, written by a women or featuring girls as characters. I'm here to tell you that's simply not true. I think trade publishing still believes it, but a lot of my readership is male. My publisher does a very good job of number one, trusting me. Number two, putting gender-neutral covers on my books. Anyone can carry around my book and read it, a boy doesn't have to feel like he's carrying around a girl book. But you're right, there are those... I don't know what shelf it goes on, that's the primary consideration, you're right. They wanna sell books, they've gotta know where they're gonna put it in the bookstore, and if it doesn't fit nicely somewhere that is a roadblock for your book. It is unfair from the creative side, but from the business side of it, it is a consideration. Matt, do you wanna talk about how the indie world can help alleviate that?
Matt: I would also say that they're not wrong. It is hard to identify which shelves books should belong to. I wish Billy Bobble, which is a really great story, I wish I had a better place to put it in terms of shelf myself. The difference is, the vast majority of what we do with Elephant’s Bookshelf Press is sell books online. And so it's a different type of shelving situation, you had Dave Chesson from Kindleprenur on recently. Quite honestly, he saved Elephant’s Bookshelf Press without him knowing it. What was then called KDP Rocket came out, it helped me better identify categories for these books, and I'm still experimenting on every single book. Like I said, we've had 10 years of publishing now, and I recently changed categories on books that I published eight or nine years ago, because there's still ways of getting these books out in front of people. There are some wonderful short stories, and short stories are a hard sell to begin with, but there are wonderful short stories that have barely gotten any readership yet, because I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is the best way to get those books in front of the right readers.
To Robert’s point and to your point, I publish what I love, and the advantage is I have a small little publishing company, and I can choose books that might be difficult to place on the shelf. It might be difficult to market, but I really enjoyed them. I'm literally reading Kiya to my kids at bedtime right now. It is a real issue. I'm glad that I'm fitting a niche, as Robert and Mindy are saying, but I would also like to sell more copies of these wonderful books. My chief objective right now is to find more ways of getting these wonderful books in front of the readers that want them and deserve them.
Mindy: And that is the trick when you are an Indie, because I write underneath a pen name as you know, and I think that the pall that kind of hung over self-publishing and Indie publishing for a long time has gone away. There is a lot of really good stuff out there, equally as good and some of it, if not better, then trad stuff that I come across. But the problem becomes visibility and marketing. So Robert, if you wanna talk about how that comes into play for the author on the author’s side of marketing. When you're an Indie author, what are some of the things that you have found that will work on the Indie side, and what are some things that might work for trad and don't work for Indie?
Robert: It's all the stuff that everyone has said before, you know, if you're researching how to sell your book, you've heard everything I'm about to say. But I'm telling you it's true, you have to find your platform. I 'm lucky–lucky and I worked really hard. There’s still a huge Xena fan base out there. They're fantastic. So a while back, I started joining all their Facebook groups and just saying Hi. That's the other thing. You have to be honest, you're selling a book, you've gotta get in there and say, Hey, I'm selling my book. You can't get on there and go, Hey, I'm one of you guys! Unless you are. I'm actually a fan of the fans, so I get on and say things about that, and I've been posting on there for a while. In Hollywood, this isn't a big deal, I was a featured extra on Star Trek Enterprise, so I went on to the Star Trek Enterprise fan base on Facebook and said, Hey, I'm selling a book. And this was like a year ago, two years ago. I posted about being on Star Trek and people were like, Oh my God, you're a star! And it's like, no, I was just unemployed and I have a SAG card, so I signed up.So on Enterprise, I became a thing.
Now, it was interesting, if I tried to post about my book on the Enterprise Facebook page, it would get rejected. So I would go to my initial posts that said, Hey, I'm here to sell my book, and I happen to have been on Enterprise, and I put notices in the comments, and that would push that up to the top and then people would be able to see what was going on in the comments. So there's little tricks like that. I did spend some money, I decided, you know, if I was a deep sea fisherman, that was my hobby, deep sea fishing, and I went out and bought a boat, everybody would be fine with that. That's your hobby. I went out and bought a boat, not expecting to make any money… maybe I could become a commercial deep sea fisherman, I don't know. I went out and spent quite a bit of money on a PR firm. That's actually going pretty good, but if you're hiring a PR firm - one, you are setting money on fire. You're just hoping somebody sees the freaking fire. Please see the smoke from the fire that I have set with his money.
Now, everybody complains, Well, I hired a PR firm, but I'm doing all the work. They're doing a lot of work too. Half of their job is to just get you to a place where you can do the work. I say it's like hiring a Sherpa, they're gonna carry a lot of stuff up the mountain with you, but you have to climb the mountain. That's helping a lot. And you just have to keep at it. It's a job. I get on Facebook, my wife's like, What are you doing? You're on Facebook. Well, I’m working.
Mindy: I'm working as a substitute, and I will be in the school and a kiddo can come to my desk, and they’ll be like uhhhh, you’re on Facebook. And it's like, I'm working. We're gonna do sustained silent reading for five hours, kids. I'm really curious about your experience with PR, because I think that you're right, people misunderstand what it is and what it's about and how it works. I think it's very similar to an agent because it's your agent's job to get you in front of the editors, but your work still has to sell itself. So I feel like with PR, it's their job to get you in front of people that can get you noticed, but then you have to produce the content or the video, or do the interview, or do whatever it is that's going to get attention.
Robert: That's exactly the case. You're also the one that's getting yourself in front of things, but you've got the PR back up. And that's the other nice thing about having the subtle difference between self-publishing and independent or small press publishing. Matt's a traditional publisher. He's a traditional publishing house, he's just a very, very small publishing house, he's not under one of the Big Five. So for me, it's kind of nice to be able to say, my publisher’s doing this, or my Publicist is doing that. Somebody just reached out, I think on Instagram, and was like, Hey, do you need to help promoting your book? I'm like, Sure, talk to my Publicist. I’m on Facebook working, and somebody said, Hey, I need a novelist to sit in on a panel at WonderCon. I message the guy and gave him my credentials, and he's like, Yeah, let's do that. He was another AgentQuery person. Two cool things happened.
One is that I was at an artist booth, and I was telling them about the book and somebody standing next to me got this weird look on her face and said, I've heard of that. She had not been to the panel, we couldn't figure out how she heard of it, whether she heard of it because of me doing stuff, or whether she heard of it because of the PR doing stuff. I just love the fact that a complete stranger had heard about my book – so something's working. Also, I sat in on another panel and there was a guy from SciFi radio, and he said, if anybody's got an audio book, come up and talk to me. I just finished editing the audio book, which about killed me. And so I went up and I got myself a gig. A lot of writers would say, Well, my Publicist didn't get me that gig, I got that gig. Yeah, but when I emailed the guy, I’m gonna copy my publicist. And two, I had a killer press kit to send to him. I had back up.
Matt: It gives you legitimacy. Someone else thinks that this is a quality book, this is a quality writer. So I think that has a lot to do with it as well. It's some of the legitimacy that you get when you have an agent. Yes, it's an extra level of security for anyone who books you. It's a good investment.
Robert: That's the other thing too, is that just because you have the money to hire a publicist. I’m not rolling in it. No, I just had some money saved up. Just because you have the money doesn't mean a Publicist is gonna take you on. I got turned down by three or four different Publicists because they didn't do SciFi, they didn't have space. It's like getting an agent, they've gotta like your work.
Mindy: I have not taken that step of hiring an outside publicist yet, it's something that I considered multiple times for different books of mine. I've never been in a position where I've had the money that I could just be like, Yeah, I'm gonna spend it on this. And I've heard wonderful success stories from people that invested that money and did very, very well because of it, and then I've heard from people that really felt like they had just thrown their money down a black hole. So you've gotta do your research, you have to know that the people that you're giving your money to are going to be worth it, and that they've got those credentials themselves. But also like you're saying, you've got to be ready to do that work. It's them laying the groundwork for you to be able to prove yourself, you still have to show up, and prove yourself.
Robert: You work your behind off on PR, Mindy, so you're doing a lot of the work and you've done it for so long. You've got your own ground work. There really is a thing you have to figure out for each different platform.
Matt: And Mindy has established a brand as well. Whether she did that consciously, I think her books are all consistent. They can be different genres, but they all sound like Mindy McGinnis. And that's very much to her credit. And that's how her publicity efforts appear to be too, and that's what we're trying to do with Robert's books.
Robert: The other thing too, is you write so fast. Oh my God, you write faster than I can read. But also, I’m dyslexic. So, you know.
Mindy: Yeah, I do write fast. What's interesting, 'cause you're just seeing the trad side. So it's like I write very fast, but then if you consider it- since 2018, under a pen name, I put out (with other writers... Let's be clear) With co-authors, I've put out about 20 books. I write very fast. It is a skill that I have built over time. It's partly because I was working full-time. I think I was probably five years into a trad career before I was able to say, I am gonna work from home. And it was still not an easy decision, it was a risky move, and I've been able to do it. For the longest time I was writing in stolen moments. I was writing in the doctor's office. I literally had my feet in the stirrups, getting my Pap last year with my laptop across my knees and they're like, Are you good? I'm like, I'm great. You do what you need to do. That's who I am and that's how I operate. So when I do have free time, I'm like, Well, I'm gonna write and I can write 3000-4000 words in about an hour and a half.
Robert: I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
Matt: I'm basically the anti-Mindy. This is the first book we've published since the pandemic. A big part of that is because the majority of what I did for Elephant’s Bookshelf was at lunch time at my day job and on my commute to and from New York City. People ask, where is your office? I said, first car in New Jersey transit from the 609. That's where I did almost all my Elephant’s Bookshelf work. And then on my 12-hour EMS shift, I would put in several hours twice a month, and that was how I'd get the advertising research done. Stolen moments is the right way to put it, you do what you can when you can, and to the best of your ability.
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Mindy: So tell me a little bit about getting started as an Indie, I know that you were just getting your feet underneath you, and that things were going pretty well, and then the pandemic hit.. So just tell us a little bit about EBP in general, how you built it and how it's going today.
Matt: Well, the two of you are part of the beginning of Elephant’s Bookshelf. It started with two other writers, Rob Grindstaff has been doing a good job of promoting his new books, also was part of my initial team looking at the short stories that became Spring Fevers. It started from AgentQuery Connect. We just shared some messages between myself and Rob and Cat Woods - ebook publishing is getting pretty hot, this is interesting, we should look into this, and let's all collect writers that we trust, basically have them write some short stories and let's see what we can do with it. And for years before that, I have been thinking about creating a magazine, like basically a literary journal, 'cause I work in the magazine world essentially. So the idea of just organizing it appealed to me and I said, Alright, I'll serve as the publisher, I know more about writing than I do about publishing. I don't think I actually said How hard could it be?
Robert: Oh, the number of times I have said that about something.
Matt: From there to “how hard could it be” is something that emerged over time. I quickly realized that I had to spend a lot more time learning how to be a publisher, becoming a better editor and still trying to write as best I could. In terms of the fiction, personally, I don't wanna say I lost a decade, but I spent a lot less time writing than I would like, and I know that I'll get back to it, I have ideas that just don't leave my head. 5000 words here, 10000 words there. I know I will be able to complete them. The publishing journey is something that continually evolves, you're continually learning from every success and from every failure, and from every mistake. And I spent a lot of money just trying to get the right tools to get these books out in front of people. I think the best part is just learning, I enjoy learning.
Mindy: How did the pandemic affect the small publishing world? What has it been like? How did you have to shift?
Matt: When the pandemic struck, we had just had our first writer event, if you will. Basically, Valentine's week 2020. Four writers, myself included. promoting the last short story collection, Flight, which was science fiction. And Robert actually briefly contemplated flying in from California for it, which shocked the heck out of me, I'll tell you. I wasn't even asking him about it, as he lives in California, but we had a great time. We had a great response with the Q and A. I felt like we were really developing a readership, just right in front of my eyes there, and I could see where it was going, and one of the other writers, he and his wife and I went out after the event. Elephant’s Bookshelf is gonna really take off now, and then within a month, we had the pandemic taking away everything. As I said, it was difficult for me to find time to do things, to promote things, it made advertising more crucial. And we did okay, initially. You had more people with time to read, but reaching them was just as difficult, and then you couldn't go out and promote in the way that I was just starting to enjoy doing. It was hard, I suspect that's true for many other independent publishers, and probably some had greater success 'cause they had more time to concentrate differently.
Mindy: One of the things that you have to do to balance is of course, where you're putting your time. That's the biggest thing for me as a writer who also is self-published, the money that I'm putting into it is a question on the self-pub side, the time is a question on the trad pub side, but you kinda have to balance both of those things.
Matt: And you have to balance family. One of the things that I loved about the pandemic, and it sounds weird just to say that sentence, is I got a chance to coach my daughter Kathleen's soccer team. And that's the time I wouldn't have had if not for the global pandemic. That was valuable to me. You're absolutely right that it's a give and take in terms of time and where your priorities are at that point in time. I think that from a writer standpoint, there's probably stuff that will emerge from these two years that I can't even imagine right now. I've often wondered even before the pandemic, how is it that people forgot basically about the flu pandemic a little over a century ago? There's very little in writing in the novels of the time, I couldn't imagine that happening after this pandemic, we're seeing writing with The covid story as a key element already.
Robert: They did outlaw spittoons.
Matt: You can no longer spit on the sidewalk.
Mindy: You sure can where I live. And then I wanna say really quick, you talked a few times about your short story collections that EBP has, so I have a short story in each of the collections that is based on seasons. I always see The Fall, which is called The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse. I'm looking at my Amazon author page right now. Your author page is listing like what's selling the best, Right? So right now, there's $1.99 Kindle deal on Heroine, so it's in front, followed by my book that tends to always sell the best no matter what. Then my two newest. Two that I did not expect to see sitting here – my fantasies are here, which is surprising. I've been doing a lot of school visits, so that's probably why. Even before one, two, three… in front of three of my trad pub books is The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse, which is the short story collection from EBP. That one is always showing up for me, it seems to always be doing well, what do you credit that to?
Matt: Honestly, I think one of the big things that I would credit that to is, if you remember the final story in that collection was a short story written by a South African writer named Judy Krume. The story is very dark, it's basically about the South American shaman, the tribe is restless, if you will, and it's very graphic, and I remember I was thinking, Alright, don't put my story after that. I was like, You know what, no one will ever read my story, if I did that because people are not going to read past that story. So it became a quick decision as to where to put it. Judy sent a copy to one of the Good Reads groups and said, I think this would be an interesting book for you to review, somehow got them to make it their book of the month, and that was what got it, the initial bump. That's how I see it. That's 2012. We published that 10 years ago in the fall. I tried to publish it on the Mayan calendar end of the world, that was the pub date, and ironically enough, it was also when Hurricane Sandy wiped me out in New Jersey. We did a little bit of publicity right after that, calling attention to the fact that the publisher's home was knocked off the grid for two weeks, just as this book was going live. I had Jean Oram push this across, I went up to my first aid squad, which had a generator and sent her a quick email just saying, here's all the files. Can you finish this? It's already done, I just had to basically press Publish. And so she did that because she was the editor for that particular edition. Got a little bit of a bump from the Good Reads group.
And then again, I mentioned KDP Rocket. I got good categories on that particular one, it's a post-apocalyptic story, as you alluded to earlier, Robert, it had a shelf, it was easy to publicize. Honestly, it was one of the reasons I chose to do science fiction for Flight. It's one of the reasons I chose to do urban fantasy, which actually the urban fantasy didn't really do well. The Horror collection has done okay at times, that is a cover issue, probably need to change that cover. The Fall has done very well, it's been very consistent, and I owe that basically to readers. that's what it comes down to, there's an audience for that type of story, that type of book.
Mindy: The last thing: where can listeners find you online? Where they can find Robert, your books online? And then Matt where people can find EBP and where they can find Kiya and the Morian Treasure, and if they're interested in submitting, where they can submit.
Robert: Best place to find me is on Facebook, RS Mellette. As far as where to get the book, you can get the book anywhere books are sold. So go down to your local independent book store and have a chat with them and have them order it. Bezos does not need to send another celebrity into space. He can, that's fine. I don't care, but I just assume that that local bookstore owner gets to feed their family.
Matt: And you can find Elephant’s Bookshelf Press at Elephant’s Bookshelf Press dot com. That's the primary place. You can also, if you're a writer and you're going to send something to be considered, you can send it to submissions@elephantsbookshelfpress.com. As Robert said, wherever fine books are sold.
Robert: And even some so-so books.
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