Like many, too many, my road to becoming an author wasn’t an easy one. I wrote in a variety of genres from 1979 to 1994 and after thirteen novels, and more than a hundred rejections, I quit…vowing never to write creatively again. Well, never turned out to be almost a decade, as I couldn’t suppress the itch any longer. Over those eight years, a story had been growing in my head and I decided I would write it on just one condition: that I wouldn’t seek publication.
My plan was to write something just to please myself and to share with a few friends and family. My youngest daughter was struggling with reading (she’s dyslexic), so I wrote a fantasy series with her in mind (Lord of the Rings is what ignited my passion for reading and ultimately writing when I was thirteen). Those books (written from 2004 – 2008) became my debut series, The Riyria Revelations. After reading the third book, my wife insisted my writing “just had to get out there.” I refused because I knew that path led to darkness and despair, so she picked up the gauntlet on my behalf.
After about a year, Robin had amassed her own pile of agent query rejections (more than 200 if I recall), but she finally found an agent to represent the series. After a year with no offers, that agent closed her office to care for her terminally-ill husband. Robin considered self-publishing, but also sent the first manuscript to a few small presses that didn’t require agent representations. One of the four, Aspirations Media Inc., offered a no-advance contract which I signed.in early 2008.
AMI was well intended, but also strapped for cash. There were times when the warehouse refused to ship my books to bookstores because of outstanding warehouse fees. One cold winter’s day Robin and I actually drove to Ohio and purchased several hundred copies of my own books to clear the publisher’s debt and return the titles to bookstore shelves. In March 2009, a month before AMI was supposed to publish the second book of the series, we learned they didn’t have the money for its press run.
Because there were already events planned for April (bookstore signings and bookclub meetings) our only option was to self-publish. We reclaimed the book’s rights, edited, formatted and used print-on-demand, barely making the April 1st release schedule. Because we wanted to maintain a release every six months schedule, the only choice was to continue to self-publish. About a year after AMI’s release of the first book, I sold out the first press run and as they had no money for a second, the rights for that book reverted and we self-published it as well.
Self-publishing in the early years wasn’t very profitable, but as the number of titles I released grew (along with the popularity of ereaders), things got better. By the time the four book came out I was selling a respectable 1,000 copies a month and with the release of book #5 the first month’s sales jumped to over 2,500. With just one book left in the series, Robin wondered if it made sense to try New York again.
By this time, I had a foreign rights agent who had negotiated a number of overseas translations. She agreed to represent the title for English rights and Robin and I figured it would take six-months to a year before anything would come of it…and more likely than not, nothing would. Teri submitted to seventeen publishers and within a week had interest from about half of them. Orbit (fantasy imprint of big-six Hachette Book Group) made a pre-emptive six-figure offer with an accelerated release schedule. We agreed.
Now, this is where the story gets really surreal. The time is November 2010, no one knows about the Orbit deal (it wasn’t made public) but I, like many moderately successful self-published author) saw a remarkable increase in sales. I was suddenly selling 10,000 – 12,000 books a month and earning $45,000 – $55,000 for each of those months.
In March, we announced the Orbit deal, which unfortunately would delay the release of the last book. In August and September, my self-published books were removed from the market, to make way for the Orbit editions. They took the six-book series and re-published it as three, two-book omnibus editions. The books came out in back-to-back months from November 2011 to January 2012.
During 2011 and 2012 I wrote four novels. One was a contemporary fantasy called Antithesis, which was actually a rewrite of a novel I had written in 1986 called Wizards. I wasn’t satisfied with its result and it still is sitting in a drawer. Two of the novels were prequels to my Riyria Revelations, which I also sold to Orbit. Again, they released the books in consecutive months of The Crown Tower came out in August 2013 and The Rose and the Thorn in September…coincidentally on my birthday! The two novels tell the origin story of Riyria and how Royce and Hadrian met, their first few jobs together, and puts them on the path of a friendship which will eventually form bonds as strong as steel. The fourth was a science fiction novel called Hollow World which I had no intention to write.
Hollow World has its own rocky road. It was pushed to the top of my writing queue (I always have about eight or nine novels just waiting their turn) purely by accident. I was asked to contribute a short story to an anthology (for charity). When my wife read the submission, she was awestruck…but felt it had so much more potential if expanded to a novel. Several people in my writing critique group gave similar reactions, so I wrote a different short for the anthology and set about expanding Hollow World.
Much like my Riyria stories, Hollow World poured out of me with effortless abandon. Concepts and themes that had been forming over decades fit like perfect puzzle pieces. When it was done, I considered it one of the best things I ever wrote…but also recognized that it was (a) controversial (b) hard to confine in most genre definitions (c) would probably be a “hard sell.” to mainstream publishing.
As expected, Orbit turned down Hollow World, like Riyria, Robin was convinced his book had to “get out there” so we decided once more to self-publish. Times had changed, self-publishing had grown into a viable path for publication, but we would only self-publish if we did it “right.” This meant hiring the same industry professionals that the big-five use to release their books. For the cover, we wanted to use the artist that had created Michael’s French edition covers. For structural editing, Betsy Mitchell was a perfect choice. Formerly editor-in-chief for Del Rey for a decade, Betsy had edited more than 150 novels, many of which were award winning and best selling. For copy editing, we selected two people who had three master’s degrees between them, edited multiple New York Times bestsellers, and award nominations for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree awards. Our goal was to make the self-published work indistinguishable from the big-five released titles. We anticipated this would cost about $6,000.
Robin came up with the brilliant idea of using a Kickstarter. We decided to ask for $3,000 figuring we would foot 1/2 the bill for Hollow World and hopefully readers would chip in the other half. Plus, we thought that was a goal that we should be able to reach. We were wrong. The Kickstarter ended up earning more than $31,000 and funding at more than 1000%.
After the Kickstarter, another major publisher stepped forward with an attractive five-figure offer for Hollow World. The problem is they wanted the standard rights: print, ebook, and audio. Having the wide distribution of print is attractive, but we have seen a lack of innovation from publishers with regard to ebooks. Most still insist on DRM encoding, have no provision for bundling with print editions, and aren’t willing to experiment with Netflix style models for book buying (such as Oyster and Kindle Unlimited). We turned it down. But Robin had a wild idea that we could get a print-only deal…and she was right. Award winning Tachyon Publications came in with a much smaller advance offer, which was fine with us. After all, they were only getting one of the rights (and not even the piece of the pie that we expected to be the biggest income producer). Similarly, we sold the audio rights to Recorded Books, and have also received translation rights for several countries.
After Hollow World, I returned to the world of Elan with a new series, The Legends of the First Empire. You see, I have 8,000 years of history about the world my Riyria stories are set, but only I know about it. I loved toying with the idea that history is written by the victors and the “actual” events probably played out much differently than people think. I also like the idea that it’s actual deeds of ordinary people who make the difference. And so I started writing what I thought would be a trilogy about Novron, the love of his life Persephone, and how the First Empire was formed. The idea behind this series is it would be standalone and no knowledge of Riyria would be necessary, but for those that did read the other books would have a few ah-ha moments as they see the origins of certain things and learn what I’ve been “less than honest” with the history they are familiar with. Well, three books turned to four and four became five and now it’s finally fixed at six books. But the good news is I’m done with them now.
In 2015, I released the third book in the Riyria Chronicles, The Death of Dulgath. Because the first two books of the series did a nice job showing Riyria’s origin, this one left me free to explore completely new ground. As such, The Death of Dulgath is a standalone novel and provides yet another way for people to start with the Riyria tales. It also provided me with the ability to provide a bit of a bridge between The Legends of the First Empire and modern-day Elan. There are some Easter eggs in that novel which won’t mean much on first reading, but those who read it after the new series, they’ll see little winks and nods for “being in the know.” Like Hollow World, this project was also launched by a successful Kickstarter and became the 3rd highest funded, and 2nd most backed fiction project in Kickstarter history.
In 2016, I released the first book in The Legends of the First Empire series, Age of Myth. This series goes back 3,000 years to show the founding of the First Empire and tell the true stories about Novron and the first war to save mankind. Apparently, history is written by the victors and the actual accounts are quite different than the people in the time of Riyria know about. Age of Myth was my most successful launch to date, passing 115,000 sales before it’s anniversary date. It made the Washington Post’s Hardcover Bestseller list. This series requires no prior knowledge of Riyria to be fully enjoyed, but for those that read both, they will see some nice Easter eggs between the two.
In 2017, the second book of the series, Age of Swords, released (July 25, 2017) and it outperformed its successor in terms of pre-orders and initial sales. It hit the USA Today bestselling list as well as the Washington Post’s Hardcover Bestseller list. Also in 2017 (December 5th to be precise), I launched another standalone Riyria Chronicle. The Disappearance of Winter’s Daughter is an adventure that takes Royce and Hadrian to Alburn and the sea-side city of Rochelle where a wealth whiskey baron’s daughter has disappeared and more than one ancient myth terrorizes the town. This launch also included a Kickstarter that surpassed either of the other two.
In 2018, the third book in the series, Age of War, released (July 3, 2018), and for the first time, I hit the New York Times Bestseller List (and once more made the lists for USA Today and Washington Post’s hardcover list). The retail release of Winter’s Daughter went live in October.
In 2019, I’ll be releasing Age of Legend (July 9, 2019). For this title, I’m returning to my self-publishing roots, but leveraging the distribution chain of Grim Oak Press to get the hardcovers into the nationwide bookstore chain. The last two books of this series are slated to release in February and May of 2020.
So what am I doing now? Well, I’ve signed a new seven-figure, three-book contract to write what is tentatively called “The Rise and the Fall.” This is a series that takes place between Legends and Riyria and shows the fall of the First Empire. The plan is to finish writing the series by early 2020, and we’ll release the books starting in the summer of 2021.
Thanks for visiting my site and I hope you’ll checkout some of my stories. And if you do, please drop me a line at michael@michaelsullivan-author.com I’d love to hear what you think of the tales.
Michael.
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