Adventures in Hybrid Publishing

in 2017, I signed up with dream agent, Juliet Mushens. Publishing deals followed swiftly – with the fabulous team at Point Blank (the literary crime imprint of Oneworld) for the Jaq Silver Series, with Sandstone Press for stand-alone Phosphate Rocks and with WF Howes for the audiobooks of five novels over five years.

I was devastated when, in 2021, Sandstone Press went into liquidation. The only upside was the opportunity to take back my rights for Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects.

I’d long wondered about dipping a toe into the world of self-publishing but it wasn’t an easy decision. The lovely team at Vertebrate, who’d bought the Sandstone Press business, were offering me continuation on roughly the same terms as Sandstone. I could sit back and do nothing.

Phosphate Rocks is an odd little book, hard to categorise and even harder to sell. At its core is my interest in how real people interact with science and engineering, innovation and technology. Inspired by Primo Levi’s book, ‘The Periodic Table’, it’s also partly autobiographical, drawing on my own experiences as a female engineer in a Leith Fertiliser Factory. The structure is that of a crime fiction story; there’s a chewy mystery for the police to solve.

Phosphate Rocks got great reviews, from Forbes Magazine to The Communist Party (Marxist Leninist) Newsletter. It was a Literary Review best crime novel of 2021 and book bloggers like Grab This Book championed it all the way to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Then, a wonderful chemistry teacher, Dr Carpenter, started using the book in her A-level classes and invited me to come and chat.

That’s when I decided that the best person to nurture the book was me.

So here goes…

Thanks to KOBO who were the fastest and easiest of all the platforms I’m going to use, I am now officially hybrid – both conventionally and self-published.

I’ve made mistakes but I’m learning a lot. I plan to share some of the useful stuff over the next few weeks.

Watch this space!

Continue to Mistake #1 – Rights

Jump to Mistake #2 – ISBN

Jump to Mistake #3 – Book Covers

Jump to Mistake #4 – Typesetting

Jump to Mistake #5 – ebooks

Jump to Mistake #6 – Print books

Conclusions

Fiona

PS: KOBO orders open HERE. Zero sales and counting…

The Story Continues – Adventures in Self Publishing