Guest Post: I am an indie author, and proud of it

A BiblioSanctum Guest Post by Ramsey Isler

I am an indie author, and proud of it.

I've been in the independent publishing game for a few years now, and I've watched the industry grow more respectable. In the past, when I'd meet people and tell them that I self-published, they just assumed my book was crap. Now, some of those same people assume I'm pulling in Amanda Hocking money.  But we indie scribes still have a bit of stigma attached to what we do; we're still trying to garner as much street cred as indie musicians or film makers, but we're making great strides.

Many people ask me why I decided to go this route. To answer that question, let me take you back to 2011 when I'd just finished my first novel, The Remortal. I did what most eager authors do; I pitched it to literary agents and editors. I sent off my carefully crafted queries and manuscripts, and waited. Days turned into weeks, then weeks turned into months. Then the rejections started filtering in.

It was disheartening at first, even though I had prepared myself for the inevitable flood of terse-but-polite “No thanks” messages. Then, something interesting happened. The rejections changed to more personal, customized messages. People were actually enjoying the book, but deciding that it “wasn't right for the market right now”. The theme was no longer “No thanks”. It had changed to, “This is good but I don't know if I can sell it.”  This continued for weeks, and then on one fateful day a New York editor sent me an email saying he really liked my book and felt it could potentially be a commercial hit if I just did two things: change my main character from a young man to a young woman, and introduce a love triangle.

I refused, of course. I had no interest in changing my work so dramatically, and I have a great personal distaste for the love triangle trend in young adult fiction these days. I was dejected once again. This respected editor and former agent liked my work, but he still wanted to tweak it to fit “the market”. It took me a few days to get over it, but then I realized something — he did actually really like the book. He had said it could potentially be a hit. The problem wasn't the words I'd written, it was the “market” I was trying to break into.

So I decided to find my own market. I would go indie. Buck the trends. Self-publish.

How is it going so far? It's the hardest, most educational, most depressing, most fulfilling thing I've done. There are days when I do wonder if there are better things I could be doing with my time. It's an immense amount of work, and when the writing is finished that's when the real effort begins. The process of marketing the work is the tough part. Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.

But that process of finding your audience, tough as it is, is also extremely rewarding. There's something remarkable about reaching out to an ordinary reader, asking them to take a gamble on your book, and they come back and say they loved it. It's personal, it's powerful, and it's priceless. And as an indie, you have to do it over and over and over, gaining a fanbase one reader at a time. Each sale is a tiny personal victory, and it's made even sweeter by the fact that you do it all on your own. And many big artists started out this way; Jay-Z started off by selling CDs out of his car, one listener at a time.

Will I publish traditionally? Maybe one day, if “the market” ever wills it. But in the meantime I'm having a great time doing it my way, and being free to tell the stories I want to tell, how I want to tell them.

Ramsey Isler is an author, software developer, and designer who lives in Los Angeles. Isler writes urban fantasy that blends elements of science fiction and suspense. His stories feature young protagonists that are often unsure of themselves, but they find the strength to persevere when faced with extreme circumstances. Ramsey does not write traditional "evil" villains or black-and-white morality tales; he instead opts for antagonists and anti-heroes who have viewpoints and ideals that pose difficult moral challenges for the protagonists, and the worlds they inhabit.

Book Review: Ghosts of ARCADIA by Ramsey Isler

Ghosts of ARCADIA by Ramsey Isler

Genre: Science Fiction, Gaming
Publisher: Self Published
Publication Date: October 2013
Author Info: www.ramseyisler.com

Wendy's Rating: 3.5 of 5 stars - My pixel people have come to mean a lot to me and many of them do reflect me in many ways. Imagine if you could truly create a character within a game system that *was* you!

ARCADIA is the most advanced video game ever created, going well above and beyond the concept of virtual reality by reading the users neural signals to create an impossibly real world. Millions donned the system’s technologically advanced headsets and stepped into ARCADIA, some even creating proxies to handle game play and interactions during their absence. But when ARCADIA is hacked, resulting in the slow leak of roughly twenty million dollars, the system becomes anathema.

The drama has died down since the hacks, but Unwired tech journalist Miguel Naciamento is certain there is a deeper story that others have overlooked. Determined to earn himself another Pulizter, Miguel pursues a few leads, including his former professor, now an FBI consultant on the case, Ivy Yuen, the game’s brilliant creator, and a gray hat hacker still devoted to the game.

As a gamer, ARCADIA’s concept appealed to me, though I would have loved to experience, through Miguel, some of the more involved games the story implied existed (… okay maybe it didn’t imply it… I just want to go virtual reality questing, okay?). The concept initially made me think of Ready Player One, where a similar system exists (though more easily accessible to the 99%). While I was initially disappointed that the ARCADIA system didn’t seem to involve more elaborate games, I came to appreciate the more Facebook/app like games that it employed. Considering how popular these games and apps are in our current reality, Isler’s implementation of them within such an innovative system makes sense as the focus.

Another major concept in ARCADIA that I liked were the proxies. My pixel people have come to mean a lot to me and many of them do reflect me in many ways. Imagine if you could truly create a character within a game system that *was* you! With this in mind, Isler’s prologue immediately grabbed me, beginning at the end of Miguel’s memoir as he says good bye to his proxy.

I think there were certain aspects of the proxies that could have been explored more, but everything still worked well within the story. My preconceived notions about this book continued to be derailed as Miguel explored more and more of ARCADIA and got to know the personalities involved in its creation and continued existence. This ended up being a very sweet, very human story that I really enjoyed.

Wendy's Book Haul: Santa!

Parents who stress over Christmas like I did last year might be a little envious of this week's book haul. This represents the the last of my Christmas shopping for my daughters. Six gorgeous hard cover books! My eight year old will love them, and while the five year old isn't so big on reading, the Elements of Harmony My Little Pony book will give her lots to look over while she watches her favourite show.

Yeah okay... I did grab a few digital and audiobook titles for myself too... damn Amazon sales...

New Author Spotlight: Ramsey Isler

Ramsey Isler has figured out how to keep himself busy, balancing his professional techiness and column writing with his many novel writing projects. Somewhere in there he also finds time to blog about the geekier things in life, publishing and more.

1. What are your favourite books and how have they influenced your writing?
When I was 12 years old, I committed to reading Stephen King's The Stand during my summer break from school. My much older brother had read it and I decided, as little brothers often do, to take interest in the same things he liked. The Stand is a massive book at around 1200 pages (I read the uncut edition), and to my twelve-year-old self it was the equivalent of trying to scale a mountain. But I did it. I'm sure many would question whether King's graphic tales are "appropriate" for a kid that age, but I was mature enough to understand and enjoy the way King created a realistic fantasy (and the nightmares only lasted a couple days; no problem). That book really started my interest in writing and reading contemporary fantasy.

As a bona fide geek and engineer by training, I've also always been a fan of sci-fi. Shortly after college I really got into the Star Wars expanded universe novels, and discovered a book called Traitor by Matt Stover. Most people probably wouldn't expect something as seemingly trivial as a Star Wars story to have a huge impact on a writer's life, but this one really changed the way I write. It was more than a sci-fi story — it was filled with complex, mature philosophy and raw emotion. The plot focuses on Han and Leia’s son Jacen, a young Jedi trying to find his place in the universe as he struggles with reconciling his Uncle Luke’s teachings with a violent and cruel alien enemy. Jacen eventually becomes an unwilling student of Vergere, an avian alien who was a member of the Old Jedi Order back before Palpatine took over. She takes Jacen on a far different spiritual path than his Jedi teachings ever did — a journey that deals in many moral gray areas — and she does so through remarkably cruel tutelage. Throughout the book, you’re never quite sure what her motives are, but there’s a definite method to her madness. In the end, Vergere is on the side of the protagonists, but it's not clear if you can call the protagonists the "good" guys, or if the antagonists are really the "bad" guys. It's all a matter of perspective, and each character has elements of both light and dark. That book has become my guide for writing stories that go beyond simple black and white morality tales. I strive for something more thought-provoking instead.

2. What authors have inspired you?
As mentioned above, King and Stover definitely had an impact on me. Although King is often classified as a horror writer, he really is a master of many types of speculative fiction and he's done some remarkable work in my favorite genres. The Dark Tower series is another of my inspirations.

Neil Gaiman has also been a big influence through what he does beyond his novels. He is a remarkable speaker and a wise tutor with plenty of practical advice that has guided my writing career.

Maya Angelou has been an inspiration since I was in grade school, but I came to appreciate her work more as I grew older. Her work taught me that you can say something extremely profound with only a few words. There's an art to telling a big story in small passages. Her poetry provides many lessons on efficient storytelling.

3. Describe your writing process. How do you handle writer’s block and other challenges?My writing process is very cinematic (in my mind, at least). All my stories start out as cool ideas that I envision as "scenes" in my head. Then I develop these major scenes in the manner of a theatrical director choosing a setting, moving set pieces around, and guiding the actors to deliver the best performance. Then, once I have a series of juicy scenes that encompass the main plot points, the rest of the story develops organically from them. I very rarely know what a story will be from beginning to end when I start writing. It all develops during the process of coming up with these scenes and connecting them to each other.

I don't really get writer's block in the sense of not knowing what to write next. My writing challenges come when I know exactly what I want to say, but I have to ensure that it all make sense and fit in with other parts of the story. I despise plot holes, and I really dislike speculative fiction where elements aren't explained adequately or the rules of the world aren't consistent. But I also understand why so many writers are guilty of these things, because it is HARD. It's hard to create fantastical worlds and fill them with believable characters, events, and inventions that just intuitively make sense to the reader without having them think too much about it. Much of writing is actually about thinking, and the most difficult parts of my writing come when I just have to sit down and hash out all the logical and factual issues with a part of my story. It can take a lot of time, but the story always comes out better because of it.

4. What are your future writing plans?I'm currently finishing up my new novel, Clockworkers. Here's the plot in a nutshell: an entrepreneurial young woman inherits a special gift from her father - an elf. She puts him to work building products for her luxury watch company, but she soon discovers that there are certain dangers involved with employing elves. The book puts a brand new perspective on elf tales. The European-based work of Tolkien and the Grimms dominate what we think of as "elves", even though almost every culture in the world has some sort of native folklore about mystical little people. Part of my motivation for writing Clockworkers was to show a more diverse elf cast, but I also just love creating modern folklore, and elves are a topic I've always wanted to explore and reinvent. Plus, I always wanted to write "scary" elves; there's always a tiny bit of Stephen King in my writing.

I'm also working on a sci-fi novella. This one is about video games, artificial intelligence, death, and what happens when all three collide. Look for it on digital book stores in Summer 2013.

There's also an impending sequel to my second novel, The Ninth Order. Sequels can be tough to write, and I want to spend a lot of time getting this one right, so it probably won't be out until next year. But so far it's proving to be very fun to write, and that usually means it will be very fun to read too.

Book Review: The Remortal by Ramsey Isler

The Remortal by Ramsey Isler

Immortality is boring. This is one of the aspects of stories about immortality that I enjoy, but not many of the stories I’ve read deal with this. Or rather, they don’t focus on the desire of an immortal to move on. I was attracted to The Remortal specifically because this was the plot of the book. An immortal, Van Giles, is tired of his life on earth and wants to ascend to something greater in the unknown beyond. To do so, he needs a successor to kill him and take his place as an immortal. In a street teen named Telly Gonis, Van sees a good person in a bad situation and determines Telly to be the perfect choice.

There are other immortals in the book, each descending from a noble line, including the White Lotus Society, Julius Caesar and Spanish nobility. They are not entirely pleased with Van’s choice of successor. Nor are the pleased with Van’s choice to ascend in the first place. Or with Van in general, for that matter. There was potential for the story to focus too much on the concept of upper class versus lower class but, while the other immortals do have concerns, I really liked the way Isler let the others deal with Telly personally and come to their own conclusions beyond mere snobbery. I also liked the way Telly is torn over his loyalty to Van and all the choices that became wrapped up with the ascension process.

Van begins as a mostly likeable character with rational motivations, but once Telly agrees, Van’s “training” process reveals a cruelty that the other immortals already knew existed and fear will pass on into the afterlife. Van’s influence, along with the training and abilities Telly gains during the ascension process, change Telly from the innocent young man he was. Again, it would have been easy to turn this into a simple case of “Van is actually evil and Telly must free himself from that evil influence!” but I appreciate that Isler made things more complex than that.

Telly has to come to terms with his new self, his motivations, the choices given him by the other immortals, and Van. He also has to deal with the fate of his best friend, Mattie. Telly is presented as a reasonable character who does have a good heart and is able to show emotion without the story dwelling longer than necessary. There is one particular plot point with the Tree of Life that I’m not entirely certain was necessary to Telly’s progress, but otherwise, I enjoyed Telly’s journey and liked that I wasn’t entirely sure what Telly would choose to do in the end. I also didn’t expect the other immortals to make certain decisions in the end, though I suspected Telly’s friendship with Mattie and the circumstances of Mattie’s health would play a role.

3.5 of 5 stars