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Hamilton Beck's avatar

Chinese cookie comments meant to be helpful, though they may not seem so ...

Add a scene suffused with guilty pleasure that gets your book banned in Boston. Or Alabama.

Time spent writing (and rewriting) is productive of good results. Time spent worrying about the number of subscribers produces only anxiety.

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Chris J. Karr's avatar

Good luck!

It's been over a year since I was tossed into the self-publishing waters with Weird Fiction Quarterly, and while we've largely nailed down the production aspects of self-publishing (give me a ring if you would like to chat about getting your work into the various markets - I spent a good part of April on this), our challenge now is finding and engaging with an audience that actually purchases what we're producing. We've gotten nothing but praise for our latest Folk Horror installment, but sales do not reflect that. (To be fair, I was ALSO slow getting the ebook versions out after print was available.)

I've been talking with some other indie publishers in similar straits and I think we're looking at pooling resources and cooperating to identify the kinds of quirky bookstores around the country that would be good candidates for having customers that dig what we're doing and growing organically from there, instead of trying to find success in the flood of other stuff (esp. in the age of AI authorship) saturating the general market. Happy to loop you in once we have something worth looping you into.

I'd also be careful about extrapolating too much about what Substack subscriber numbers say about future success selling books. Substack and books are two very different information products with very different audiences. I've bought books from authors I've not interacted with on Substack (didn't like or comment their posts) and I've yet to purchase books from authors I have interacted with, preferring to consume their writing in smaller chunks. I'm sure that having a large audience helps get the word out when the book is available, but I'm not sure that a small Substack audience says something in the other direction.

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