Storytelling has been in my blood since I was a boy. I progressed through cartoons, songs, shorts and then finally I came to the big one: writing a novel. I love my history, particularly late antiquity, so I chose to delve into the twilight years of the Roman empire and write Legionary, a tale of Rome’s last soldiers and their fraught lives.
From the outset, I had lofty and sometimes ludicrous images of where my efforts might take me. At worst, I could laugh about it, say I had given it a crack, sup my drink and look to the future. But what if . . . what if all the nights and weekends of plotting, planning, writing and redrafting led to the Holy Grail: a publishing contract? A glossy, embossed stock of my books on the shelves of high street stores. People sharing the highs and lows experienced in a world I created. The chance to tell stories for a living. Is that not the goal of every writer out there?
Well, my journey took me on an unexpected path. I gathered an impressive collection of rejection slips from publishers and agents. I considered redecorating my writing room with them — there were certainly enough of them — but thankfully my wife talked me out of it. After this, there was a hiatus, a spell when I was ready to lift my drink, laugh off my ambitions and move on, but that wasn’t quite as simple as I had expected: the need to write was not for moving on, the ideas were coming thicker and faster than ever. But without a publisher, what use were my stories?
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It was purely by accident that I stumbled across the possibilities of self-publishing. A Kindle for Christmas, a scratch of the head at the “publish your book here” link on the Kindle storefront, and a bit of research and prose polishing later and I was there, finger hovering over the “publish” button. Legionary went from forgotten manuscript to live and available across the world in a matter of seconds. I think that moment redefined terror for me.
The response was slow at first, but soon I noticed sales rising, and took heart in messages of support from those who had enjoyed my book. There were certainly lessons learnt in those early days: editing, proofing and presentation are vital to the success of any novel, and self-published works are often lamented for their flaws in these areas. Fortunately, I’m a swift learner, and I managed to catch and correct the glitches in that first edition. Now I employ a dogged editing and beta-reading process to hone my prose; I hire a professional cover-designer to catch the eye; and I devise snappy titles and beguiling blurbs, all to ensure readers receive a quality product and a good read. And that’s what led me to think about where I was on my journey: done well, self-published books are indistinguishable from their traditionally published counterparts.
I was selling well enough to put bread on the table — and beer in the fridge — and I found that many readers who got in touch were completely unaware that I wasn’t with a publishing house. More, the healthy rankings of Legionary and my subsequent works led to a literary agency taking me on. Soon, my books were sold to publishing houses in Italy, Greece and Russia. The glossy, embossed hardback editions were here at last, and when I next get the chance to visit one of these countries I’ll be going into the bookstores to stand, admire and grin like a fool.
So what next? A mainstream UK publishing deal still eludes me, and it would seem like the natural next step. However, the publishing world is in a state of flux at the moment, with ebooks and print vying for supremacy and giants such as Amazon and Hachette engaged in wars of attrition. And, in a recent and intriguing twist, many mainstream authors are actually moving in the opposite direction to me, choosing to self-publish their work in pursuit of the greater degree of control, vastly reduced timescales and potentially healthier profits that come with this discipline. So, on the cusp of achieving the dream, is it fading before me? Is a mainstream UK book deal no longer the prize it once was?
The answer is simple: it is and always will be a great boon for any author to have his or her work selected by a big publishing house. Equally though, self-publishing is a healthy avenue and one that has conceivably reinvigorated the industry as a whole. Perhaps hybrid contracts — where a publishing house produces the physical edition of a book and the author self-publishes the ebook edition — might become the new writers’ aspiration. Regardless, the current uncertainty has prompted me to re-evaluate my goals. Instead of chasing publication via one particular paradigm, I’ll be focusing instead on the one constant that matters to readers: being a storyteller and writing damn good stories. If I can do this and my books make their way before a reader’s eyes — by whatever means — then everybody wins.
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Gordon Doherty’s latest book, Legionary: The Scourge of Thracia, is available online now; www.gordondoherty.co.uk