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Happy Tuesday, Novelspotters. Josh Lanyon here, and if you missed yesterday’s post, I was sharing my publishing history in the hope of maybe inspiring or at least encouraging some of you who have met with a few roadblocks – or towering cinderblock walls – in the path of your writing career.

So where were we? Oh right. I was struggling to write The Hell You Say, the third book in a gay mystery series about a Los Angeles bookseller and amateur sleuth – even though it looked unlikely I was going to find a new publisher for it because my former publisher -- tottering on its last legs – still held the rights to the first two books.

To top it off I was pretty bored by the direction gay mystery as a genre seemed to be headed. To cut a long story short, I decided it was time for Josh Lanyon to move on, and I shelved the half-started The Hell You Say, thought about making a success of the day job, thought about buying a house, and thought about getting married.

All of which I did.

And then four unrelated but synchronistic things happened: George Bush got elected and the country seemed to slide back about two decades in sophistication and tolerance; I started writing again – though strictly for my own pleasure; I read a book called The Gay Detective Novel by Judith A. Markowitz – and I was listed in there with all the other writers who I considered…well, old timers. And then the fourth and most important thing happened. I…Googled myself.

Yeah.

I was famous. Okay, on a very, very small scale. But…holy crap. Used copies of my first book were going for hundreds of dollars on Ebay and Amazon. My books were frequently cited on favorite gay slash (slash?) sites. There were all kinds of little informal reviews and comments – most of them ridiculously flattering. And all these people wanted to know when the third Adrien book was coming out. They seemed to still believe that there would be a third book.

Who knew? Not me. I was astonished anyone remembered Fatal Shadows or A Dangerous Thing at all. Let alone cared when the next Adrien English story came out.

So. Huh.

What now? I was in a quandary. I’d pretty much given up on Adrien – and yet there was that half-started manuscript, and I knew it was good. The best one I’d done – maybe the best writing I’d done ever. I wanted to tell that story. Adrien was my favorite character; the character closest to speaking for myself.

Did I have anything to lose by finishing that half-started book? I could do it just for fun, right? And if I couldn’t find anyone to publish it, I could always…self-publish it, right?

Or not.

So I started back to work on The Hell You Say. And I contacted my old publisher to see if I could get the rights back to the first two books, and what do you know? They agreed. So I started studying the market again, but I liked what I saw even less than the last time I’d looked. So I tried two of the leading gay publishers, and neither was interested in even seeing a proposal, which was certainly a little disappointing, but I’d already noticed that the GLBT mystery market was pretty much flooded. And I’d been gone – in publishing terms – a long time.

Too long, according to conventional wisdom.

I decided not to pursue traditional publishing any further. Instead, I would self-publish, keep all control, and put out exactly the book I wanted to and within the same year. And then I would see from there what happened. At the very least I would have satisfied the fans who had been patiently waiting for – by then -- three years.

I began to promote The Hell You Say. I rejoined a number of mystery and GLBT discussion lists, I set up an Amazon plog and began to correspond with readers, and I talked to my good friend, Kevin Burton Smith of the Thrilling Detective Website, who designed me a website, a book cover, and offered to let me use Thrilling Detective as my publishing homebase, as it were. I was back in the game.

And from the moment I had a website, I began to get letters from readers. Just one or two a week at first – but for someone who hadn’t had a book out in three years? I thought that was pretty cool.

But how do you promote a book for a series that has been out of print for years? The success of writing a series hinges on the availability of your backlist. I decided to re-edit the first book, Fatal Shadows, and give it away as a free PDF download on my website. By then I was vaguely aware of the e-book market, and while it hadn’t occurred to me to try and publish my own work that way, I thought a number of potential readers might give the third book a try if they knew they could print out and read the first in the series.

I completed The Hell You Say in December ’05, and submitted to iUniverse a couple of weeks later.