Why don't you publish traditionally?

I get a version of this question every few weeks, usually from a reader who liked one of the books enough to look up who wrote it. Why isn't this published by a real publisher? Why is one person doing all of this alone?

I want to answer it honestly, because the honest answer isn't romantic. It isn't a story about rejection letters and finally proving everyone wrong. I never queried an agent. I never sent a manuscript to a publishing house and waited by the mailbox. I looked at the traditional path early on, decided it wasn't built for the kind of writer I wanted to be, and went the other way.

Here is what traditional publishing tends to ask of an author. Pick a genre and stay in it. If Still Water sold well as literary crime, the expectation would be another book like Still Water, then another, until the name on the cover became a genre unto itself. I understand why. It's easier to sell a reader something they already know they want.

But I didn't want to write the same book four times under four different titles. I wanted to write a city that runs on souls, and a sheriff investigating his own daughter's disappearance, and a man learning to trust the person paid to break his heart. Different genres, same question underneath all of them: what does it cost to finally be seen by someone, and is it worth paying?

A traditional publisher would have made me choose. Indie publishing let me refuse to.

None of this was quick to admit to myself

Here's the part I don't say often enough. I'd been writing for years before any of this existed as anything but a folder on a hard drive. Manuscripts finished, half-finished, shelved and returned to, in most of the genres I've since published under Elias Keane. What I hadn't done was let anyone else read them. Early this year I decided to find out whether that was worth changing: whether readers would enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. Self-publishing wasn't just the practical choice at that point. It was the only way to ask the question and get an honest answer in months instead of years.

The pen name did the rest of the work

Writing under Elias Keane instead of my own name meant the work could stand apart from everything else in my life, including a day job managing costs on energy projects that has nothing to do with gaslamp fantasy or sports romance. It also meant nobody was deciding, on my behalf, which parts of "Elias Keane" were marketable enough to lead with. I decided that. Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending isn't a tagline a committee handed me. It's the thing I actually believe fiction should do, and I put it on the front page myself.

Speed matters more than I expected it to

I didn't anticipate how much I'd come to value moving fast. Since committing to this earlier in the year, I've put out a new novel or novella roughly every few weeks across four series, and that pace only works because most of those manuscripts were already written, sitting in that folder, waiting for someone to finally send them out. A manuscript gets pulled out, edited, produced in four formats, and it's live within weeks. Readers who found The Hollow Clock didn't wait a year and a half for The Hollow Cathedral. They waited a few months. That pace is only possible because there's no acquisitions meeting standing between a finished book and a reader who wants it.

I'd rather answer to you than to a sales meeting

The part I didn't expect, going in, was how much I'd like knowing my readers directly. The First Light Club, the giveaways, the free novellas that exist purely to say thank you for being here: none of it runs through a publisher. It runs through a mailing list I built and a website I control with an email that I directly manage and answer. So when I get an email asking whether I'm really writing The Hollow Asylum, I get to just say yes, and then write it, because you asked. And I love that connection.

That's the trade, as I understand it. Traditional publishing offers reach and a certain kind of validation. Indie publishing offers speed and a direct line to the people the books are actually for. I picked the second one, and several books into finding out whether readers would meet me here, I'd pick it again. Don't get me wrong, never say never. There may be a future where I do both but I for now I think this way is working. Now I just need to master the art of marketing!

Yours, Elias

P.S. Speaking of what indie publishing lets me do on my own timeline: The Hollow City, the third book in the Hollow Clock Saga, lands July 29th. If you've been waiting, now's a good time to lock in a preorder so it's already on your device the morning it goes live.