Use All the Ways: Publishing

The author copies of The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller arrived last night. This is the novel that started me out on Substack when I serialized it here beginning in 2022. (It's still available to read or listen to with a paid subscription.) I also used Draft2Digital to create an e-book that's available in all the places from Amazon to my public library. And finally, last month, when I'd taken one of my good pain pills, I wondered why I had never made a physical copy.

Maybe it was my ex-feminist bookstore owner hatred of the effects Amazon is having on publishing. Was it snootiness about having been published by university and literary presses and not wanting to be known as a "self-published author?" (Although, it is different. For one thing, the presses I’ve published with have liked my work well enough that they’ve paid me an advance and used the resources of their business to publish the book. As for The Sacrifice Zone, you just have my opinion to go by.)

But I tried. Over a four year period I queried one hundred twenty-eight agents and all the presses I knew about who accepted un-agented submissions. I gave up reaching out, and I gave up in my heart—the novel must be profoundly flawed. Then Substack began a campaign to entice us writers. They paid famous authors to serialize their writing on the platform, and said we'd be following in the tradition of Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and James Joyce.

So I reread The Sacrifice Zone. It didn't suck. I revised it yet again. Gotta say, this time I fell in love. And the serialization began. No, nothing remotely viral-like happened, but it was way fun, and this newsletter continues to generate a $50 yearly subscription here, an $8 monthly one there. For an old writer on a fixed income, this is not nothing.

So that day last month when I was a little high and hurting less, I poked around on the Draft2Digital website and created a physical book. I decided on the cover, the back cover text, the biography, my author photo, matte or glossy, and the format. I designed a colophon (publisher's logo) for the spine of the book and was inordinately pleased with myself.

Copies arrived last night. The cover! Cedar Key is a place I go to write. The Sacrifice Zone's cover photo is the view from outside my hotel room. (One of the very, very few accessible choices.) Who knew what would become of this quick photo I took of the Gulf waters with the Crystal River power plant stacks wavering in the sunset? It was years before this novel was even a twinkle. The cover text is plodgy, the internal layout is a bit amateur, and the colophon design needs work. Yet I grin each time I touch the book. Matte was the right choice. I open it at random and read a few pages. I still like it.

The book is lovely and hefty and makes me happy. I made this. In all the ways. Anyway, here it is. Available to be ordered directly from me. Available to buy on Amazon. Available to be reviewed. Available.

Audio Version: