Okay, so this has come up a few times recently and I guess it needs an explanation. As much as anything, I’m writing this so that when people ask in future I can send them here.
I’m very much a hybrid writer – that means I work with bigger press when I can, small press otherwise, and I do some self-publishing. These days it’s becoming ever more common to work this way. Sure, we’d all love a Big 5 publisher to buy everything we put out and nurture us and send us on champagne junkets all over the world. But that’s only the reality for a very few. The vast majority of writers, even if we do sell to a Big 5 publisher, may enjoy a period in the sun and then not sell to one again. Or maybe not for a while and then get another stab. This business is not a straight line rising upwards. It’s not a job where you start at the ground floor and steadily get promoted up. It’s a random, chaotic series of rises and falls and hopefully, over many years, the trend is generally upwards. But nothing is guaranteed. So a lot of us end up in this hybrid situation where we have a variety of publishers and maybe some self-publishing too.
Back in the primordial past of the mid-00s I first played around with a bit of self-publishing. At the time, ebooks and print-on-demand were new and exciting. I enjoyed it for a while. I enjoyed it so much that I set up a small press. I used it to publish a couple of my own things, and a handful of other books. It was called Blade Red Press, and I commissioned a logo for it. The logo went on the website and on the spines of our books. Here it is:
However, after playing in that sandpit for a while I realised that I didn’t want to be a publisher. I wanted to write and operating a small press took far too much of my time and attention. So I wound the whole thing up. I went on to working with publishers and enjoying that relationship. But this industry is forever in flux. Over the last few years I’d started thinking about maybe self-publishing a few things again. Firstly, I’d had publishers fold and take books with them – so it’s clearly not safe to have too much in one place. Secondly, with self-publishing you have entire control and all the profits. Thirdly, I’ve been at this a while now and have enough of a following that perhaps self-publishing wouldn’t be so much work this time around. But I still wasn’t sure how to go about it, or what projects I might self-publish. Then the whole nonsense with THE ROO came about. A novella, written in part as a joke, all for a bit of fun, so I decided here was the thing I could use to start a bit of self-publishing again.
I dusted off all the old skills, called in some help, relearned a bunch of stuff and set to self-publishing THE ROO. Now for me, a book doesn’t look right without a small logo on the spine. It doesn’t look finished somehow. So I thought, why don’t I dig out the old Blade Red logo, just for a bit of nostalgia, and put that on the spine? So I took the text off, and this is the logo you see on THE ROO. Then I decided to do a standalone version of my wuxia fantasy novella, GOLDEN FORTUNE, DRAGON JADE. So I used the same logo again. I decided this would do two things: 1. It would look right, fulfilling my need to have a logo on the spine of a book, and 2. It would clearly indicate anything I’d self-published. All my self-published work will now bear this logo. It’s on the spine of THE GULP too. Here’s how it looks now:
And here’s where the next bit comes in. The page of a book called the TP Verso (the reverse of the title page) is where all the disclaimer and ISBN and other information goes. This is also where the publisher is named. So for fun, with THE GULP, I added 13th Dragon Books under the ISBN on that page. That’s the publisher, because that’s me. I’m the 13th Dragon. Here’s why. Within my kung fu style of Chan Family Choy Lee Fut (the website of the school I run is here), at the top there’s our grandmaster and the Jeung Mun (or Keeper of the Family Style), Master Chen Yong Fa. Master Chen has disciples, who are his most senior and trusted students, and we’re responsible for protecting his legacy and spreading that to all the schools around the world. First, there are the golden dragon disciples, then the fire dragon disciples. There are further disciple levels after that, but let’s stay focussed. There are currently 15 dragon disciples – 3 Golden Dragons, then 12 Fire Dragons. Over time I’m sure more people will be promoted to this level, but that’s where we stand currently. I was the 10th fire dragon named, or the 13th dragon overall. So that’s me, the 13th Dragon. And it ties in nicely with that sweet dragon head logo from way back when. And 13 is a good number, it lines up nicely with horror and all that. See how it all fits together? The whole thing pleases my sense of synchronicity. That’s why my self-published stuff will bear that logo and have 13th Dragon Books listed on the TP Verso. I’m not hiding the fact that this stuff is self-published, and I will list it as such in anything that requires a publisher to be listed (like awards submissions and all that). But I just think it looks right to have a logo and I like the idea of naming it.
And yes, there’s also one tiny little other option here that I’m not really looking at but maybe considering for some potential future possibility… I don’t even want to admit to it… Okay, I will. Setting this up means that if I do ever reconsider starting up as a boutique micro-press, everything is already in place. I’d just need to register it as a company and sling up a website. I am definitely not suggesting I’m planning to do that, but it’s nice to know I can if I choose to. Which I won’t. Shut up.