I write mysteries as well, a police procedural series set in Umbria, Italy, with a protagonist by the name of Alessandro Cenni. In the last month I published four of them on Kindle Direct Publishing, two republished from 2007 and 2008, and a second two which I wrote this summer in a white heat. Sadly, my traditional publisher died shortly after I stopped writing in 2009, and the new regime is not interested in picking up a series where the protagonist will soon be an old man—it’s been a seventeen-year hiatus.
One lesson I learned. If you have a publisher hold her (or him) dear. Hug them, kiss them, take them to lunch. As more and more people self-publish and more publishers merge, the number of traditional publishers willing to take on a first book novelist, or one that disappeared down a rabbit hole seventeen years ago, are fewer and meaner, and I imagine will be gone in a few years as the digital world takes over.
About “meaner.” They all seem to have hired young men or women, straight out of college, who have been told that you never reply to an inquiry in less than three months. Why three months, because that’s the industry standard, and if you reply any sooner, those pesky writers might rise above themselves and believe that they alone are the reason publishers exist. They may be right. With AI and its siren call, perhaps we are just pesky writers.
I won’t be here when digital finally takes over. I’m 84, but writing keeps me active. I get up in the morning and aside from making sure that my detective gets out of whatever mess I stuck him in yesterday, I check my books for reviews and then I go to KDP to see how many pages were read. Today, it’s five o’clock in the evening, so 53 pages and .22 cents in my pocket.
I had a traditional publisher once, a very nice one in fact. When I sent Soho Crime my first novel, The Last Enemy, in 2006, it took less than a week for Laura Hruska, the publisher to call me, invite me to lunch—at a Robert DeNiro restaurant no less—and offer me an advance. It was $6500 and my disappointment showed in my face. That’s when she told me, “no one writes for the money.” I know that’s true now, but until that moment I had visions of talking to Oprah on network TV, of being wined and dined by top publishers, all throwing money at me. Fifty-thousand-dollar advances, even higher, were common in my field of dreams.
At the time, I was a consultant in the telecom industry earning excellent money, but my publisher was right in one respect. I was thrilled that I could tell my family and friends that I was a published writer. Two book parties later, signing customer copies in quaint New York City book stores, going to Boucheron at the publisher’s expense, meeting other writers—it was fun. A less than wonderful review from Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times hurt, but we still squeezed out a few flattering words to market the forthcoming paperback. Then BBC Radio 4 called The Last Enemy one of the twelve best crime novels of the year. So it was a wash, at least for me. English literature had been my field in graduate school and, although of Irish descent, the initials BBC meant more to me than NYT.
Cancer struck, first me and then my husband Miguel, and in 2009 Miguel died. After that nothing mattered, not writing, not book reviews, not money. I stopped writing. No doubt I would have started again had my publisher not also died. Laura was adamant that I had to hand in a manuscript every year in mid-summer to make the fall lineup. I doubt she would have let me sit on my hands (or laurels in my mind) for more than a year without some push and pull.
It's lonely though without someone to hold me up. Just today I revised one of my book covers and after I uploaded it, found that Kindle had uploaded the wrong cover (or was it me!) Laura and her staff took care of all that, and it is a lot of work. But being my own publisher also offers great satisfaction—I design my own book covers, decide that I don’t care if the name of my faithful male lieutenant Michele may confuse an American audience—he is Italian after all. No, I won’t call it soccer, it’s football. I am writing about Italy; now how is that possible without football being at least a minor character. Hmm . . . maybe a football murder in the next.
What I love about Kindle—I can make corrections once the manuscript has been published. I’ve already uploaded corrections to the four covers at least ten times. Whenever I see an email from Amazon I’m sure they’re writing to say—stop it, Grace!— as I’m sure Laura would have done. Kindle is also distracting. Instead of a twice-yearly summary of earnings, you can check every day to see how much money you are earning, and of course I do
One warning for anyone who hasn’t yet published on Kindle. Don’t be in a rush to accept their offer of Kindle Select. You are tied up for three months without the chance to publish on Apple, Barnes and Noble, and the other self-publishing sites out there. You are now in charge, but if you should need some hand holding, give me a call.
To read my books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001JRX0X2
Born in New Jersey to Irish parents, Grace Brophy lived and worked in New York City until 2001. In September 2001, she and her late husband Miguel Peraza, a figurative painter, travelled to Italy to work. In 2004, while still in Italy, she began her first work of fiction, The Last Enemy, a police procedural set in Umbria, featuring Commissario Alessandro Cenni.
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Grace was a systems engineer for twenty years for various telecommunication companies, including Bell Labs, AT&T, and Verizon. Before she began work as a systems engineer, she taught writing and literature at the City University of New York, at Queens and Hunter colleges. She has published four novels on Kindle Direct Publishing: Vendetta in a Graveyard, Vendetta in Paradise, Vendetta in the Vatican, and Vendetta in a Raincoat. She is currently working on the fifth Cenni novel, Vendetta in a Vineyard.
