Owen Spendlove is the Canadian author of the new children's book Stanley Brambles and the Pirates Treasure. We caught up with him via email (due to time zone differences) and asked him how it all came about.

 

 

Yes, the official publication date is June 7th. I’m not entirely sure about its availability in the UK, although I’m pretty sure booksellers like Amazon are no strangers to international orders. At the moment, I’m working on getting the book into local stores—starting small, and trying to get the word out. My marketing budget is very, very low, so for now I’m relying on word of mouth.

Being small-time, though, doesn’t diminish the thrill of finally seeing your book in print—especially when it’s sitting on a bookstore shelf. It really is a great feeling to hold in your hands something that you’ve written, something that’s in print, something that is professional and complete.

I’d say my approach to the work hasn’t really changed, although perhaps I feel a tad emboldened, and justified in continuing with writing. Once the book is published and people start reading it, you start to get some real consumer feedback—meaning feedback that probably won’t be tempered to spare your feelings if the reader didn’t like it. It was nerve-wracking when the book first came out, because for a while, I heard nothing. There were plenty of congratulations, and I appreciated those, but what I was really waiting for, was feedback, and for a while, there was pretty much radio silence. But then, after people had a chance to read the book, comments and opinions started trickling in, all positive (so far), some from complete strangers. Hearing that people were enjoying my book was a great encouragement, and it finally let me relax a bit.

Do you have any more children's books in the pipeline? Is there a sequel to Stanley Brambles in the offing?

As of the end of September, I’m a good chunk of the way through the second Stanley Brambles book. I stopped for a while when I started the publication process for Pirate’s Treasure, but since then I’ve gotten back into it, and though I’m still in the early stages of the first draft, I’m liking the way the story is shaping up. It’s considerably darker than the first book, which is a direction I’d been planning to take since before I’d even started, but the story has succeeded in surprising me a number of times. Of course a novel of any length requires planning, but I think I most enjoy writing when I just go for broke and let the story take me wherever it wants. It can end up in some weird places, and I might have to go back and trash several hours of work, but doing it till you get it right is part of the process, too. (Maybe ‘trash’ was too strong a word—I keep everything I write, even if it doesn’t end up in the book.)

 

 

 

 

 

I received somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty rejection letters, plus a number of agents and publishers who simply didn’t answer. This was over a period of about four years; these are small numbers compared to what some authors go through, but I was getting increasingly uneasy with the prospect of sitting on my hands, waiting for publishers and agents to get back to me while time went racing by. They say that all it takes is one publisher, and perseverance is key, but after hearing horror stories from other authors, I started to look for possible alternatives to the traditional publishing process. I briefly looked into self-publishing, but decided that to do it all myself would be costly and time-consuming beyond my means.

 

It was after running an internet search for “self-publishing” that I happened upon what’s called a “Supported Self-Publishing Company”. A supported self-publisher is what I’d call the publishing equivalent of an independent record label. Put simply, the main difference between these and traditional publishers, is that you pay them right off the bat, and not the other way around. For a modest fee, a supported self-publisher will take your manuscript, turn it into a finished, honest-to-goodness book, print it, and make it available to all kinds of major retailers. This may make it sound like these companies will publish any old piece of garbage as long as the money is right, but they really do have high standards of quality. The company I chose to deal with, was Iuniverse, although I did a lot of research on other companies before making my choice. In the end, I went with Iuniverse, because it’s an affiliate of Chapters/Indigo, the major big box book seller here in Canada.

 

The whole process, from sending in my manuscript, to receiving the finished book, took about five months, and cost me a little less than 1200 dollars (Canadian). At the end of it all, I felt like I’d gotten a real bargain; Iuniverse was great, and I could tell that they put a lot of work into making my book into something really good. All this back story serves to point out that, to be perfectly honest, Stanley Brambles and the Pirate’s Treasure was never really ‘accepted’ by a publisher. I guess the beauty of a supported self-publisher, is that you’ll never hear “we’re not interested” or “we’re too busy”. Their business is publishing pretty much everything that is sent to them (with exceptions, of course).

 

What I’m most thankful for, I think, is the opportunity to get my book out into the community, even on a very small scale. It’s been selling, a few people have been talking about it, and as I mentioned, I’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback. I think many authors just want confirmation that their work is ‘good’. I guess for me, the idea of being ‘accepted’ has changed; I’m no longer trying to impress the mainstream publishers—I’m trying to impress the readers.

I didn’t go through an agent, but I certainly tried. I think I tried harder with agents than I did with publishers, but I quickly got caught up in the frustration of the ‘agent paradox’: if you want a publisher to accept you, you need an agent, but if you want an agent to take you on, you need a publisher. I received all kinds of reasons why they couldn’t take me on; they had too many clients already, this book wasn’t quite what they were looking for…and I can certainly appreciate that these people are swamped with hopefuls like me trying their best to get someone to notice their work. The fact is that there’s just no quick or easy way to go about it, and waiting six months for an agent to get back to you, does not feel like time well spent. I would have loved to have managed to get one, of course, and they say you should just keep trying, trying, trying, but I’m glad I decided to take matters into my own hands (to an extent, anyway). As for the future, though, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t keep trying to get an agent—you can publish a book, but publicity is the only way it’s going to become popular.

 

 

 

 

 

I’m really not sure if their perceptions of me have changed. I’ve actually wondered if having a book that’s selling, would make me more attractive to agents or mainstream publishers, although I find it a bit hard to imagine publishers clapping their hands with glee every time they discover a self-published (or supported self-published) author. That’s not meant to sound cynical—I’m just trying to be realistic. Of course it can happen that a self-published author gets discovered—it happened right here in Ottawa, in fact. So, although I finally have a real published book accredited to my name, the prospect of landing a big time publishing contract is still an attractive thought. For one thing, they’d handle the marketing! For the time being, though, I’m just trying to get the word out, get some people reading my book, maybe start to develop some kind of fan base. The perceptions of agents and publishers are, for now at least, on the back burner

 

Lastly, do you have any words of wisdom or encouragement for the rest of us struggling authors?

Believe in your work. If you love what you’ve written, and you know it’s good, then keep that idea close to heart—it’ll help you weather the frustration and discouragement of the submission process. There’s no way to guarantee that your book will impress anyone, but you’ll never find out if nobody reads it.

If you’re serious about becoming an author, just keep at it. Send your stuff out to every publisher and agent you can find, but don’t be afraid to consider alternatives. Supported self-publishing has been a really good experience for me. That doesn’t mean it will be for everyone, but I understand it’s a growing field, and if you’re prepared to do your own marketing, you just might be pleasantly surprised by the results. You might even want to try to do all the work yourself, from start to finish. This takes huge amounts of time and lots of money, but if you’ve got enough of these, and you think you can put together something really great, I say go for it. I’ve worked in bookstores in the past, and there were always local authors coming in to see if our store would be able to take on some of their self-published books, and we did. Not all bookstores will do this (a snooty local independent bookstore refused my book, if you can believe it! The nerve!), but I think you’ll find that many are pretty helpful and sympathetic to struggling authors, particularly local ones.

Lastly, show your work to your friends and family. Who better to congratulate and encourage you on your (finally) having a published book? Throughout this process, my friends and family have been absolutely fantastic, and I certainly owe a major percentage of my book’s sales to them!

 

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