Today I bring you the final long-awaited interview in the popular series Secrets of Best-Selling Self-Published Authors. Today's guest is author William Malmborg who is a successful writer of dark psychological horror/thriller fiction. From William's Amazon bio: "William Malmborg has been publishing short stories in horror
magazines and dark fiction anthologies since 2002. In addition, four of
his novels, JIMMY, TEXT MESSAGE, NIKKI'S SECRET and DARK HARVEST, are
all available, as is a short story collection titled SCRAPING THE BONE
that features five previously published and five original tales of
horror. When not writing William caters to the whims of Toby and Truman,
two cats who reside with him in Wheaton, IL."
Who are you and where do you come from? Do you think
that your life experience has gone someway towards making you a successful
author in your chosen genre?
My name is William Malmborg and I live in
the Chicago suburbs. It's hard to say whether or not my life experiences
have played a part in my success simply because this is the only path I
have taken. I came into the publishing world during an interesting
time. For the first five years of my career, magazines were still
printing stories and you submitted everything via the mail. Social
media wasn't a thing yet, and I had my first story published by a magazine
before I had an internet connection on my computer. During the second
half of my career, magazines began to disappear, many of them with stories of
mine that were supposed to be published, and publishing houses began to get
goofy. And then ebooks hit the marketplace, which opened up a whole new road
toward publishing success. Given all this, I think the fact that
my first several years were spent in the trenches of the traditional publishing
world – interacting with editors at magazines, facing rejection with work
that wasn't ready for publication, and having other stories bought and
published that were ready – helped in giving me an edge when the ebook
marketplace arrived.
Did you try to get publishing contracts for your books
early on with traditional book publishers? If so, did you have any success
there or if not what was it that made you decide to self-publish the majority
of your work?
For the first ten years of my writing
career, traditional publishing was the only real route an author could take if
they wanted to make a living. During that time, my short stories sold
frequently to horror and suspense magazines, but my novels had a difficult
time. Just having a publisher agree to read the first fifty pages seemed
a monumental success, and if they then wanted to read the entire thing . . .
well, let’s just say that such was so rare that it in itself was a moment
worthy of celebration.
My novel JIMMY was the one that I strived
the hardest to have published during that early period of my career, though I
did have others, TEXT MESSAGE, SIMPLE LIES and THE MISSING KID, which
publishers looked at as well. Nothing was ever accepted during those
early years of submission, the typical reason being that the editors felt the
serial killers within my novels were too likable, and that readers would have a
difficult time dealing with that. “Who do they root for?” was a
common question they asked. Year after year, this went on, until finally
Don D’Auria at Dorchester Publishing informed me (a year after I had submitted
the novel) that he really enjoyed JIMMY, and that he would like to make an
offer on it. First, however, it needed some rewrites, specifically the
portions of the novel written in the interview format. He wanted the
entire thing as a third person novel. Two months later, I sent him the
new version of JIMMY, one that was actually better than the original version
had been. Following that, sale imminent, I went on to do some
self-imposed rewrites for TEXT MESSAGE, because I felt that would be a good
follow up to JIMMY. This did not happen. Dorchester Publishing
started to spiral toward bankruptcy before JIMMY could be published, and while
I stuck with them for nearly a year, I eventually did the right thing and took
the novel elsewhere.
Following that, thinking other
publishers would be interested in having a novel that had been ready for publication
with another publishing house; I began sending queries for JIMMY to
everyone that was accepting proposals. Each one was rejected. No
one was interested in JIMMY, which really surprised me. During that
period, I began to hear success stories from authors that were uploading titles
to the Amazon Kindle. Intrigued, I did as much research as I could on
this new method of publishing, and then, once I made the decision to jump in,
hired a well-known artist to create a cover, and uploaded it. A few
months later, it was a bestseller on Amazon and had made me more money during
that short period of time than I had made in the first ten years of my
writing career combined.
Why self-publish?
I self-publish the majority of my work
simply because it is the most logical and profitable method of
delivery within the US right now. With foreign language
editions, I still use traditional publishers within the countries where the
titles will be released since they know their markets the best.
Once you have decided that self-publishing might be
your route, what financial and artistic considerations should you keep in mind
before you begin?
One of the biggest misconceptions of
self-publishing is that it carries no overhead. After all, with
print-on-demand, the printer only has to print copies as they are ordered, and
with ebooks, it is nothing but computer code that is stored within a
device. However, there are other costs to consider, upfront ones that are
important in making it so the book will be noticed by the public and enjoyed
once it is read. The first cost; the cover. If you want to be
treated like a professional author, one whose work is going to stand alongside
authors who have major publishers behind them, then you need to have a professional
create the cover. Poor covers are the most common reason why books are
passed over when a potential reader is looking for their next fix. It
doesn’t matter how amazing the writing within is, if people aren't going to
pick it up and open it, it might as well be four hundred blank pages.
Second: editing. You need a professional to look over your work once it
is completed. Mistakes happen and it is nearly impossible for an author
to catch their own when they have lived with the work, day in and day out, for
months at a time. Initial sales via a fantastic cover are great, but
nothing will knock a title down like poor reviews due to editing and grammar
errors. Now, will these two things guarantee success? No.
Nothing will ever do that. But it will make the chances of success more
likely.
What do you see as your most innovative promotional
strategy?
Honestly, I don’t really have a promotional
strategy. I simply write and release the work. Initially, I always
price my new releases at 99 cents, so that the readers who have been with me
from the beginning will be treated to a great deal, but after that, once the
price goes up to my typical $4.99, I step back and let word of mouth do its
thing. The only exception to this is when I’m able to get a book
promoted by BookBub. When that happens, I once again lower the price to
99 cents for the days they market it and enjoy the snowball
effect as the initial sales from the ad bump the title into several top
ten categories, which then brings in more sales . . .
For more of this fascinating interview, please visit Self-Publishing Successfully for full transcript.
For more of this fascinating interview, please visit Self-Publishing Successfully for full transcript.
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