The old is new again

When I found my agent–the wonderful Lauren Abramo–she wasn’t sold on self-publishing.  She did like my writing, though, and she was pedaling my book Fallen Angels, an urban fantasy.  Editors wrote nice notes about it but didn’t like having a human detective and a serial killer thrown into an urban fantasy.  That only encouraged me to write more books, but ones that didn’t include mortals mingling with supernaturals.  And those didn’t sell either.  Editors said that they had too many urban fantasies, that the market was glutted, and they didn’t want any more no matter what they were like.

Lauren still believed in my writing, so Sharon Pelletier at the Dystel & Goderich Agency formatted my manuscripts and loaded them online as e-books.  That was years ago.  And I didn’t do anything with those books–no ads, no blogs, no marketing–so they just languished.  But I’ve started playing with supernaturals again with the Muddy River series.  And it made me think of them again.  So a while ago, I asked Sharon to make Wolf’s Bane free for five days, and she told me that some of their authors have asked to have their books back to self-publish, and that Dystel & Goderich would be happy to send me all of the files for my urban fantasies and let me load them myself on Amazon.  That way, I can reduce prices, pay for ads, and have a lot more freedom to market them.  I jumped at the chance.

So far, we’ve only removed the three Wolf’s Bane books from Dystel & Goderich, along with the three Fallen Angels novels.  Little by little, I’m hoping to swap them all over to self-publishing by me.  There are a lot more, so I’m only going to bother with a few a week.  I’ve started with books.  The two Empty Altars novels and my very first book that Lauren took–Fabric of Life–will be next.  And then I can start on bundles.  I love writing short fiction, and I let myself write a wide variety of series.  Death & Loralei is about Death, who materializes into a man when he comes home to his own home with his wife, Loralei.  Christian and Brina has four medieval stories about a castle trying to defend itself against vampires and other supernatural villains.

Transferring them from Dystel & Goderich to me is going to take a while, but it will be a labor of love.  I’m not expecting huge sales or finding an army of fans.  I’m just glad that the books will no longer be thrown into the digital wasteland of forgotten stories.  It’s nice connecting with them again.

I’m still pounding the keys for Lux.  I can transfer three books at a time in my spare time, and they won’t litter my Judi Lynn page.  I wrote all of those as Judith Post.  It’s sort of nice to keep them separate from my newer works.  Between writing and transferring books, I shouldn’t be bored for a long time.  Hope you have plenty of things to keep you excited, too.

Happy Writing!