My publisher is dissolving. So what’s next for me?

Gone at the end of the month.

On Friday I received some disheartening news: Booktrope, my publisher for the past two years, will be going out of business on May 31^st. The news hit me and the rest of my fellow Booktropian authors pretty hard. While there were recent signs of problems, I hadn’t expected things to take this particular turn.

Pretty much everyone involved is grappling with various emotions: frustration, sadness, anger, fear, confusion. Because of Booktrope’s creative team business model, it means some difficult decisions for both authors and support staff (editors, proofreaders, designers, managers). Aside from saying that I hope we can all somehow manage to come through this in some sort of positive way, I won’t expand on my feelings on the matter here.

What I do want to talk about is what this means for my own novels, both those already published and those to come. (As you’re here on my blog, I assume that topic holds some interest for you—and I’m glad it does. I wouldn’t be where I am now if it weren’t for readers like you.)

I retain all of the rights to my books. My hope is to be able to get them out in self-published form such that there is zero time during which they’re not available. Keeping them in Amazon’s search metrics, with their current rankings, associations, and reviews (especially Zeus Is Dead) is an important first step. At the moment I’m working on re-learning just how to do that, and coming to various arrangements with people that will enable me to do so. They may go entirely ebook for a time before the paperbacks return, if I decide to put them out in paperback at all. (There are far more ebook sales than paperback.)

Nothing is certain just yet, but that’s my goal.

As for A Dragon at the Gate, my plan is to remain on schedule with its publication. Without Booktrope behind me, I will have to foot the bill for the editing and cover design myself. I’m already looking into that. (I’m happy to say that Amalia Chitulescu will still be doing the cover, so the series will have a nice uniformity to it.) It may only be an ebook release, at least at first, but I’m not yet certain. Once I iron out the financial elements of what it will take to get the book in your hands, I’ll have a more concrete release date.

I don’t yet know what form the Zeus Is Dead sequel will take. I still have to write it, of course. I may self-publish that too, but depending on the first book’s success rate, it may very well attract a publisher. I’ll just have to see.

There’s also the matter of an unpublished fantasy manuscript that I haven’t yet told most of you about. But we’ll see how that goes.

So that’s where things stand, at least with me. I’ll be okay. I think I’m probably coming out of this better than a lot of Booktrope authors. I feel badly for everyone involved. As you might imagine, I have my own thoughts about how all of this came to pass, but I’m keeping those thoughts to myself. I will say that I enjoyed the majority of my Booktrope experience, and was happy to meet so many talented and helpful people, both on my creative team and off.

Lastly, with regard to Geek Notes (a.k.a. this here blog thingy), I do hope to get back to more activity on here soon. I’ve had some recent health issues (nothing serious, and I’m coming out of it), so my focus has been elsewhere. Obviously this next month will be rather hectic as I try to manage the transition out of Booktrope. But very soon I’ll be starting on the next Percy Jackson book, getting some other geeky stuff up and going, and even (finally) getting back to the Farscape rewatch.

So keep watching! And if you want to grab a paperback of any of my books, now is the time to do so, while they’re still available from Booktrope!