Introducing: Overdue Books!

If you're wondering where I have disappeared to these last few weeks, I have been working on a thing!

And gave it away in the title. Welcome to Overdue Books!

Sonia, you ask, did you... did you start a publishing company? I mean... yes? Sort of? Not really? Except yes? Let me explain.

Overdue Books is my imprint. It's the publishing company I set up to publish my books exclusively. I needed something to create a little distance between myself and the books I publish; sort of a invisible wall for me, with an eye to the future.

When I said I was serious about making a real go of this writing thing, that my stubborn arse has planted my heels and refused to yield to failure, I meant it. I'm slowly building the structures that I need in order to make this more serious. I've kinda been floating through with my head in the clouds. It's great for writing, but for trying to run a business (which I must if I'm going to self-publish my books)? No. That's a terrible way to do things.

So, I'm going to be running my self-published books as if I was a publisher, and those books were someone else's that I agreed to publish.

In truth, I've been thinking about doing this for quite a while. A couple of things pushed me to do it. The first was the idea that something might happen to my current publisher. What if no other publisher would republish my books? Where would that leave me? I don't like the idea of my books floating around the aether without control over their destiny. I happened to be talking this over at brunch with a good friend. Immediately following the meal, as I opened my apartment door, I decided to go ahead. Overdue Books was born.

The name was decided long before I believed I could make a proper go of it, and I mentioned it to my friend. She loved it. So that was an easy decision. That was the imprint name. A day following the decision to do it, I had come up with the logo. Do you like it? It was so simple and fun to create. To be fair, after the name, the logo kind of created itself.

I have a website, and established my socials for the business. You probably have enough to be following as it is, but if you're interested in connecting with the business online, all of the socials I have are listed on the website's About page. I will, over the course of the next few years, work to migrate my books over to Overdue Books. This will mean unpublishing, fixing up and republishing under the new imprint.

I've done it with my first title. The Dying God & Other Stories is now officially published under Overdue Books. It has been released, but will be a KDP Select exclusive until October 27th... Or will be as soon as I fix the bug that is making it unavailable on Amazon.com, but is available on all the other Amazon stores. I'm hoping that enrolling the book there will give it a boost and gain some visibility before I reach for a wider distribution. I'll be doing this with all of my titles (save my serials, because I cannot go through my blog posts and unpublish them all - which I would have to do in order to ensure it is exclusive to KDP as per Amazon's terms).

Many thanks to Éric Desmarais of JenEric Designs Layout Services for doing a beautiful job with the new interior of The Dying God & Other Stories. It looks beautiful and I'm so grateful. The print book will be releasing with the wider distribution happening at the end of October. A good thing, too, as the book cover needs a few small adjustments.

I'm intending to run this like a proper business. I will be paying myself a royalty, with the remainder going back into the business in order to help develop my books. I will eventually have a separate bank account for it, but I there is little need for that currently. I do not think I'll be earning enough to warrant that. Yet. I'm not hopeful for a lot of sales (they've been historically very poor), but if ever I manage it, the first order of business will be to hire a marketing manager. One day. A girl can dream.

Part of separating myself from the publishing venture is to help me with marketing. I might do better marketing my own stuff if I start treating myself like a client, instead of, uh... me. I'm not sure if the little psychological trick of that little bit of separation between myself and my books will work, but it might. I'll try, in any case.

I fully intend on being a hybrid publisher - self-publishing and traditionally publishing my books. I believe in my current publisher, and will publish with them for as long as they'll take my manuscripts. But sometimes, I'll publish my own stuff too, and for that, I need to right structures in place.

Now, I have absolutely no intention of opening Overdue Books to submissions from others. I won't say never, because who the hell knows, really? But I have no plans to do that whatsoever; not least of all because it would be something of a conflict of interest, seeing as how I'm on the board of a different publisher. Perhaps way down the line I'll be in some kind of position to do that, and only after I've finished my tenure in my current board position.

Will this new venture work? Um... judging by past performance, it'll be a struggle. But I'm not content with just floating along and hoping for the best. It's time to buckle in and knuckle down.

So...

Welcome to Overdue Books. Open imagination.