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The year was 2006, not that long ago, though in this breakneck changing world of the Internet and technology it seems like ages. I had a very successful writing career with my ebooks, primarily through Ellora’s Cave. Folks kept saying, “You should go with a New York House. Get an agent. Then you’ll have finally made it.”

I ignored these murmurs for a while. I do this part time, and ebooks are nice because you write them when you want, submit them, and wait (unless you are self-publishing, but that’s a blog for later in the week!) While they did give advances, something not usually done with ebooks, I had heard the New York Houses (Harlequin, Avalon, etc) give you contracts with deadlines—it all sounded very stressful. But the murmurs persisted, and I think I bought into the notion that the printed novel produced in the traditional manner by a big old established publishing house was somehow more valid, more worthwhile and legitimate than the same work being published in ebook format. I think this was a general perception, though over the last several years that concept has markedly shifted, dramatically evening the playing field or even tipping it in favor of ebooks.

But back then I finally bought into it and decided to find an agent and take the plunge. I was referred by a fellow author to a woman in California. I live in New York, and in retrospect, it would have been wiser to find someone I could actually meet for lunch. I discovered the chemistry between you and your agent is very important. While we had a reasonably cordial rapport, she was across the country, in a different time zone, and, it turned out, really didn’t have a lot of time for me.

I sent her two manuscripts, Cast a Lover’s Spell, a paranormal romance about a warlock and the mortal woman he falls in love with, and The Perfect Cover, about a straight guy who pretends to be gay to get a really cush gig at a Caribbean resort. She sent them off, shopping around. They were both rejected. She sent The Perfect Cover to a guy at Avalon who it turns out rejects ALL m/m written by women. He routinely scrawls across it, “Doesn’t have a gay voice”. I did go on to sell that one to EC, and it sold extremely well, and even won Erotic Book of the Year on a review site for 2007. She sent Cast a Lover’s Spell to someone who said it was well written, but “too complex” for the romance market. It turned out later I really hadn’t done my homework in finding a good agent. She was good, I am sure, but she didn’t specialize in erotic romance and indeed, knew very little about it. She didn’t have the contacts she needed to get me in the door, and she didn’t really understand that product.

I retreated, returning to what I knew—ebooks, and yes, licking my wounds a little, thinking I didn’t have what it takes to make it “Big”.

In hindsight, I am SO GLAD I didn’t break in. The contracts and advances so often lock an author in, and put them under lots of pressure to produce a book that is going to be on the shelves for maybe six weeks before it’s pulled for something new. While an advance is nice, unless you’re a big shot, they are usually pretty paltry, and the royalties are abysmal, compared to ebook royalties.

As the market has shifted dramatically from print to ebook, and more and more folks are carrying their libraries on ebook readers, it makes even more sense to continue with this venue. I am so glad I remain footloose and fancy free, beholden to no one but myself!

That said, I do take my books to print, along with ebook, but on an on-demand basis, so there are almost never returns, and no reserves withheld (40% is the standard in the traditional print market – held against the 80 cents or so per book you get with a traditional paperback, so you end up getting like 40 cents per book sold! Not enough to buy a loaf of bread!)

I’ve taken this whole thing a step further, setting up my own publishing imprint – Romance Unbound Publishing. I’ll talk about that at length in my next entry. Till then, I would love to know your patterns of purchase – do you prefer ebook or print? If you buy the ebook and really really loved it, will you buy it in print for your library?