The title of this post is a little misleading as I have been writing for longer. It has been a little over three years since I published my debut novel, The Broken Doll, back in February 2016. It was an accident really; I’d been writing for fun, and suddenly, the first draft was finished. It was only at that point I started to look into self-publishing. I honestly had no clue what to do at the time.
The Broken Doll is very much an adult book. I wrote it how I wanted to, without shying away from the details. It’s a thriller along the lines of Fatal Attraction, so sex and violence occur throughout. I waited anxiously for the first review to come and was more than a little shocked to see five stars, and the words “I could not put this book down.” It went from there to receive more five-star reviews, which gave me a boost in confidence.
Around this time, I saw a call for submissions for short horror stories, so I tried my hand at this. The story I wrote sold to a publisher for an upcoming anthology, and I knew then what I wanted to focus on—short horror stories. Things have grown quickly since then, and currently, I have released three collections of short horror stories (with a fourth due for release at the end of March 2019), two novels (The Broken Doll and its sequel, with a third coming later in the year), a novella which was released in February this year, and a children’s book which I co-wrote with my daughter.
But, even with a fairly good number of book sales, it doesn’t make much of a dent in the bills. As much as I had hoped to make a career out of it, it never looked like a real possibility. A year ago, my wife and I were running a successful catering business, but unfortunately, she became ill and it was no longer feasible to continue with it. Her illness meant that I needed to be at home as much as possible, with children to care for, so we put together another plan, taking a big risk at the same time.
We built our own small-press publishing house, Red Cape Publishing, and through it now, we are finally seeing the return on all the work. This covers a range of services alongside my own books, including a lot of author promotion services, a horror paperback subscription service, author interviews, book reviews, editing and formatting, as well as Red Cape Graphic Design (my wife’s business) which provides book covers, bookmarks, business cards, and so on.
The focal point of the business has been to help other independent and small-press authors because we don’t see other writers as competition. There is so much to be gained by supporting one another, and there are some really supportive communities online. I’m proud of how we have achieved so far, but I couldn’t have done any of it without the help of other writers giving advice, beta reading my work, and reviewing my books.
Recommended Articles:
