Chace Randolph

Blog Post Number 72 Written and Uploaded on 11-17-2023

It has been more than a year and a half since my publisher shut down, and I have sent about fifty query letters, which, admittedly is not a whole lot of queries relatively speaking. But I have tried, and I have made some major edits to the book, including renaming it and adding nearly 20% more to the overall word count.

So, for reasons I will list in a moment, I plan on researching how to self publish after new years and sometime next year releasing a Second Edition to the opening act of The Descendant Saga, now titled Altar of Scales. I will have to set up a few things like a mailing list, Substack and Patreon as well as get some of the other existing things like my YouTube and Discord straightened out a little better. and get a few followers on those platforms as well, while I figure out how to do the legal parts of the publishing itself and so on.

Anyway, here’s my reasoning…

I have six books written… Two of which have cover art. Art hand painted by my grandfather. Art I love and want to have more of, for the other books in the series. Traditional Publishing usually has a long lead time. On the order of about eighteen months per book. If I am to get the whole series published, say ten to twelve books, if each one takes a year to a year and a half to get published, I reckon my grandfather, who is already seventy, probably wont either live long enough, or be steady enough of hand, to keep painting art for that long of a time period. If I self publish, I can release the books as fast as I can write/edit them. So I can have all of them with his glorious art on the covers.

Besides, if traditionally published, they will provide the cover art. 99% of the time, the publisher provides the art, and the author gets little or no say in it. Often they choose the title too. Unless I go with another small press like the Immerser who I was working with before, they probably wont let me use my own cover art, and a press that small, will probably have no greater marketing reach than I do by myself, so what’s the point. That’s just needlessly giving someone else a cut of my work.

Because A small publisher is going to take a cut, somewhere between 10-40%, and If I get an agent, and a bigger publisher, then the agent is going to take 10-15% more on top of that. If I publish myself, sure I wont have the network, the distribution, the clout. But I will keep 100% of the money I make. In my experience, I feel like, when given ten minutes to talk to a person, face to face. I can make a good impression, I can sell the pitch and I feel like I could make a connection at every library, game shop and book store I visit in person. So even without the reach and clout of a big publishing company, I think I can do the leg work to get more sales anyway. I don’t want my work, to be gate kept by some other agent and or publisher. Sure I may not do as well, but then I will have failed on my own merit, and wont be leaving my books fate in the hands of someone else who will delay, skip emails and not care about it as much as I do.

Plus, like I mentioned, I have six books written, and the plot outlined for the rest of the series, with two more that are already in progress. With a team of editors publishers and agents looking over my shoulder, what if they tell me to change something? What if they don’t like Lydia in the second book, and tell me to replace her with a different character, after she is already written into four books, and becomes so integral to the plot? That’s like a quarter million words that would have to be redone. I’m not cool with that, I want to maintain creative authority over my work, after all, it is my work.

Plus, My current project is an unrelated fantasy book, that I think will sell better in the open market. I will continue querying traditional publishers with that manuscript. I do have one outstanding query, to a big name guy, and I even got to drop a name while I did it. Maybe, it’s a long shot, but maybe I’ll here back from them. And I could get the traditional publishing deal after all. Like I said, it does come with clout, with an existing network of book stores, sellers, podcasts and marketing team as well as experienced cover designers and editors. Those all have their own merits. Given an offer I wont turn it down. That’s why I stated I wouldn’t work on it until after new years. I sent that query yesterday, November 16th. That gives them about six weeks to respond before I seriously start work on self publishing. Perhaps I can get things put together and be ready for release by April of next year, on the anniversary of my previous publisher’s shut down. The only outstanding thing I want to do before hand, is speak to my grandfather / cover artist, after all, his art is one of the major reasons I am doing the self publishing route, and if he’s not willing to do the rest of the books, than it would be silly to forego the traditional publishing opportunities, for the sake of art, I wont even get in the end anyway.

Tell me what you think of this, am I crazy? biting off more than I can chew?