I’ve made no secret of my fascination with the Bloomsbury Group. In September 2022 I even made a pilgrimage to the twinned country homes of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell—Monk’s House and Charleston Farmhouse respectively—perched near each other by the South Downs of East Sussex, England.
The Downs are beautiful and rolling and sparsely peopled (i.e., heaven)—I confess the word “SHIRE!” was screaming in my head the whole time I was biking, walking, picnicking, and blackberrying along my merry way to and fro the B&B where I was HQ’d.
Monk’s House is splendid, obviously, but the more modest of the two since it was just Virginia and Leonard, no kids. VW’s writing hut sits through a garden within a ramshackle little orchard, steps away from sweet little St. Peter’s Church, and a stone’s throw from the River Ouse.
Charleston Farmhouse, by contrast, was practically an artists colony. Residents included Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive and her lover Duncan Grant, his lover “Bunny,” and their children Julian, Quentin, and Angelica (who later married Bunny, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax).
Visitors included a cavalcade of family, friends, lovers, painters, and writers including Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Roger Fry all depicted in biography, TV, and film, not to mention the Substacks (Victoria K. Walker’s Beyond Bloomsbury, for instance), blogs, societies, reading and writing groups, lecture series, journals, exhibitions, and tribute bands focused on their work. OK I made that last one up.
I admit forthrightly I am envious of the “Bloomsberries” and not just in a My dottie old aunt died and left me an income of $40,000 a year kind of way.
Nor is my infatuation centered on their talents and fame. Except for Virginia Woolf, the rest of this extended friend-support group are practically unknown outside of the UK; even VW herself was nearly forgotten until the upswing of feminist criticism in the 1970s. Really, the only of her novels I return to again and again is Orlando, which is like reading a different book I don’t entirely understand every time I read it.
No, besides the cottagecore settings, it is exactly that friend circle which surrounded the sisters, a loose association of old chums and new connections based on shared artistic and political beliefs, which has been hitherto quite hard to come by in my life.
To imagine a network of people with whom I could share so many interests and values has been until recently just a dream…
But I was supposed to share with you the reasons why I’ve decided to independently publish my next novel, Watrspout, too.
Last year in the run-up to publishing Lamb, I asked Jeffrey Yamaguchi of Book Publishing Brick By Brick for help on my marketing—and was immensely pleased with the result, I must add. We developed an independent publishing plan that I could also replicate for a second release in the coming year.
Lamb of course was a serial novel published on Substack, and the intention was always to publish independently. For Watrspout, on the other hand, I had already tried to find an agent and go the traditional publishing route to no avail.
As we got deeper into things, though, Jeff encouraged me to do a little tester with a new round of querying—that’s what we call submitting to an agent rather than a publisher. Perhaps just ten or so new agents, he suggested, just to see, because a big difference between the first time I queried and now was the platform of Ford Knows Books and Qstack I’ve been building over the last three years, something I lacked during my first round of querying.
If you need to get up to speed on why an author platform is important—
I set myself a goal to start this new tester round of queries on Sept. 1st last year, but when the day rolled around, and then a week went by, and then a month, it became clear my heart wasn’t in it.
I’d already absorbed the idea that the odds of getting an agent through a cold query maybe weren’t any better than the last time I tried. Also, there was the thought that even if I were successful, I’d be entering a new phase of editing, feedback, submitting, and waiting which could take years. I wondered how that would fit into my new thrust to write two follow-up novels to Lamb and package them as a series for a direct sales strategy which I learned about at the Indie Unconference last year.
My verdict: Not very well.
I’ve read enough stories about authors who get publishing deals which never earn out—that is, earn enough in royalties to meet the advance they received and begin to turn a profit for their publisher. Many deals nowadays include a right of first refusal on a second book, so the author must submit their next one to the same publisher. But if their first book wasn’t profitable (and most aren’t) the likelihood of the publisher taking a chance on round two is muted.
Many authors who go the traditional publishing route but don’t end up with a best seller their first time out are often dropped by their publisher, and sometimes their agent, and end up having to do the whole dance all over again. Starting from square one when you’ve put all your eggs in trad publishing is very disheartening, and a setback many don’t recover from. And so.
#1 Reason to Publish My Second Book Independently
To develop my independent publishing and direct sales capabilities so I am not at the mercy of a traditional publishing environment which always chooses profits over the career of the author.
That doesn’t mean I’m never going to try for an agent and a publisher in the future, only that when I do, I will also always have my own path for publishing my books and engaging with readers that doesn’t depend on the gatekeepers.
There are other secondary reasons of course to put together my own pipeline and backlist of titles.
⭐ The marketing of a direct sales operation just makes sense.
Not unlike a newsletter platform such as Substack where you “own” your mailing list and can take it with you if you decide to go another way, direct sales allows you to stay in contact with your readers. When they buy direct, you have their contact info and can reach out to them when you have a new book out and for the other little goings on and slices of life that make the author-reader relationship so rewarding.
This is something you absolutely do not get when you sell through any retailer. Even trad publishers aren’t privy to that jealously guarded information. If you sell a book through a bookstore or Amazon, you have no way of reaching out to the reader who loved your book—they have to either actively seek out the subsequent titles you publish, or you have to hope they’ll stumble over it by chance through the marketing efforts of the retailers which are decidedly not concerned with cultivating your long-term relationships but with their own bottom lines.
Direct sales lets you stay in touch with the people most likely to buy your books: readers who loved your last one.
⭐ I firmly believe that faith in yourself will sustain you over the long haul—and that is not built by committee.
There’s this awful “pick me, pick me” vibe coming out of trad publishing, and conversely, a kind of Winners Circle mentality which seems to beckon the lucky ones who land an agent, a publishing deal, or a bestseller.
Of course every author who goes that route should be rightly pleased and proud of their accomplishments, but the fact that there remains a disdain for independent publishing tells me that the “old way”—like Old Money—loves to look down on people who have done things differently, and that there is a retroactively applied standard which fails to acknowledge luck, timing, or connections, and the army of editors, designers, and marketers who polish up the chosen ones for the market in ways that independent authors can’t always afford.
It stinks and I don’t like it.
Believing in yourself requires a long-term approach that doesn’t wait for a gatekeeper to tell you you’re worth it.
That doesn’t mean you think you’re a misunderstood genius or that the world is out to get you. It does mean you can be proud of your independently published work and also recognize that you can always do something to tweak your approach, improve your craft, and walk the creative path rather than waiting for a parade to come along and seat you in the Grand Marshall’s car for a turn that may not last.
The Bloomstack Life
I’ve been ruminating a lot lately on the parallels between the Bloomsbury Group and the network of authors and creators I’ve met on Substack. We offer support and encouragement and develop relationships, which feels a hell of a lot like a virtual Bloomsbury if ever one could exist in our latter day dystopia.
While Substack the platform is focusing more on TV and video, shortform Notes, and betting on big names, the writers of Substack still seem to find and help each other—with a blurb, a review, a Comment, a Restack, or a just a shoulder to lean on.
Books are being serialized and published, small presses are being born, interviews and conversations keep proliferating among the citizens because deep bonds really are being forged, and there remains so much potential for all of us when we band together and just … care. It’s that simple.
I’m mesmerized by the idea of an organic dialogue between author, book, and readers—something that leaps off the page and connects me with others—a circle of writing and reading with all of you.
And every time I’m tempted to think of my writing, books or newsletters as mere products, I’m trying to flip the script and imagine instead a drawing room with a nice little fire and a bunch of cookies. I can’t deal with the constant hope or dread of deals, contracts, and laurels; I can deal with friends sitting around having conversations in comfy chairs.
There’s already more of you than can fit in the room—I guess we’ll just have to take turns sitting on the floor and each other’s laps.
Thanks for being here as Ford Knows Books heads into year four.
-MTF
Additional Resources
A video from The Shit About Writing Team and an article inspired by it:
You’ll Have an Easier Time Publishing If Your Novel Has THIS...
Eva Langston’s post from last week caught my eye (thanks to Andrea Bartz)—inspired by her read on a The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing podcast: If you can come up with a really easy-to-pitch premise, a really easy way to describe it, you can still write the books you want but grab the attention of an agent or editor.
And here are some sobering statistics courtesy of Abigail Monti:
“…the number one selling book across all Books-A-Million stores recently sold fewer than 800 copies in a week across more than 200 locations. Decades ago, a new Dan Brown could sell 5,000 copies in the same time without breaking a sweat.
That difference says something important about how attention works now. Sales are spread across far more titles than they used to be. Instead of a few massive books soaking up all the oxygen, hundreds of smaller successes are happening at the same time. The pie hasn’t disappeared. It just gets sliced into many more pieces.”
—from Alex Brown’s Maybe I Overshared: What’s Happening in the Book Market Right Now - What Books-A-Million’s CEO and recent sales data reveal about how books move (via a Note shared by Jane Friedman)
I don't at all blame you for the choice to stay indie! At this time in my career, putting out second, third, fourth etc books, I did the same. And things are worse now than they were then (although also better, I suppose, if there are more slices of the pie to be taken; every cloud!).
I would also love to have an in-person literary salon going on in my house or the house of one of my richest associates, haha!
Cozy fires and cookies are where it’s at! I’ve met so many authors this past year tangled in a web of algorithms and keywords and BookScan numbers. It’s enough to suck the soul right out of writing. Meanwhile, the hearth over here is warm and laps are ample.:)