
You’d think after the success of Harry Potter and Twilight, two books that practically created a new way of looking at their genre you need to ask why anything that isn’t mainstream is immediately dismissed. Yet it still is. You’re told as a writer to be original, but then given generic ways of submitting because agents and publishers don’t want to take a chance on new writers.
Here we find a small indie publisher, The Writers’ Coffee Shop, out of Australia finding a different kind of romance that had been missed and dismissed by the big houses. Less than a year from its original publication date it has the big houses drooling and clamoring to take over the contract. Now with Random House taking over the trilogy you can find the formally print on demand books in every major book store and at the top of the New York Times best seller list.
Will this trend continue? A good book is a good book. Even with limited advertising you can become a bestseller because your characters will infect the brain of those who encounter them on the page. The big six have tried everything from Authonomy, generic calls out authors, and blogs to try to find the authors who can’t find representation to no avail.
Maybe the young indie publishers who take chances on us nonconventional writers are the new slush pile editors. As long as the indie publishers are getting compensated for having a broader mindset I say good for the big publishing houses. They can look at the best sellers from indie publisher’s list and try to clamor when it’s too late, because that actually puts the writer in control.
The writer at an indie house gets treated differently. There is no dictatorship they must bow to. Instead there is a team that works together with the writer to keep their characters true. Suddenly the writer will have six houses bidding for their publishing rights and no longer will the author have to take the scraps tossed down to the lowly new authors. They will get the top deals because they proved themselves on their own.
Guess now I need to do my Rebel Yell. I may not have the big houses behind me, but I have real people and real readers. My books don’t fall into a formula and I’m glad I’m embraced by a publisher who believes in me instead of one trying to fit my round butt in a square hole.