The slow burn revolution

Have you noticed how everything in our lives has to be turned into some kind of competition? Looking through the TV schedules this week, even allotment gardening and blacksmithing have fallen prey to this trend.  How depressing.  Making a garden - or an allotment - isn't a quick fix.  Plants take time to grow, and you can't rush the seasons.  They happen when they happen.  

This same trend seems to have infected the world of books.  Follow any of the major publishers on Twitter and you'll be bombarded with a constant stream of tweets shouting about how brilliant their latest release is.  Except that sometimes they're not.  

And sometimes it takes time for the word to get out on the street that a book is good.  By which time the paperback has been pulled from the bookseller's shelves and pulped.  There's no room for the slow burn in the world of mainstream publishing.

But there is in the world of self publishing.  My novel Panthera : Death Spiral might not have become an overnight million-seller, but that doesn't matter.  Read some of Mark Coker's research into how self-published writers make good.  It can take up to three years for a book to be discovered and for sales to take off.  My novel will be on the website for that time and longer, for anyone to download when they find it.  And by using CreateSpace to produce paperbacks that means they're available at any time too, printed on demand when needed.  I'm part of the slow burn revolution.

That's why so many authors are now pursuing a hybrid publishing strategy. Yes, they still want the mainstream publishing deal.  It validates us as writers in the eyes of the world.  And it gets our books into the major bookshops, something that's a challenge for self-published authors.  But unless that author has a big dollop of luck and becomes an overnight success, those books aren't going to stay on the shelves for long.

And when they've been pulled from the shelves after three weeks my books will still be available on Amazon.  In the end, the tortoise might well outdo the hare.