My Writing History and Permuted Press part 3

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

    So, I was now an accepted author publishing with a reputable publisher. The guys who did the SAW movies versus, say, the guys who did Harry Potter but I've always been an iconoclast anyway. I was the Goth who wore colors in high school.

    Hehe.

    Acceptance of my books was a heady feeling. I was so excited by it, I submitted Cthulhu Armageddon despite the fact I'd been convinced it needed more work. This time, Michael responded within the week and said he LOVED it. He wanted a seven book contract for it.

    Wow.

    It was around this time I got acquainted with Permuted Press' style of doing things. Basically, it was of the "bean bags and cappuccino" versus cubicles. The Permuted Press author group was a collection of truly colorful and fun guys. Michael L. Wilson would often comment and give advice. We also had a wonderful tele-conference where Michael explained:

    1. What Permuted was.
    2. What is its marketing strategy.
    3. Where we fit into all this.

    We also had another teleconference with Joanna Penn (The Creative Penn) who told us about how to market out books. Awesome lady, btw. I really need to need her "Lara Croft meets Christian artifact" books sometime.

 

    What's interesting in all of this is Michael L. Wilson told us a lot about what was going on in Permuted Press but quite a few authors, flush with the promise of success, weren't paying attention to what was being said.

    Myself included.

    What was said by Michael L. Wilson during the teleconferences were that Permuted Platinum was very successful but the primary focus of Permuted Press was going to be its ebooks. Print was a dying industry, in his opinion (and the investors) so they were going to focus all of their efforts in that respect. They were going to be exploring other avenues like their own indie film studio and audio books but ebooks were where it was at.

    EBOOKS.

    Remember EBOOKS.

    Ebooks are the Kobolds in publishing's Monstrous Manual. Everyone uses Kobolds and the game couldn't function without the little trap-laying bastards but no one really LIKES Kobolds. They're not like orcs. Everyone loves killing orcs. Even if Kobolds are the source of EXP you need when you're low-level, you really just want to get to killing orcs.

    I've lost you with my D&Disms, haven't I?

    It gets worse as Permuted Press was something of a bind because while ebooks are a great source of money for both publishers as well as authors (more on that later), quite a few of them were under-performing. Permuted Press was doing great with their top-sellers but a great number of the catalog just wasn't selling what they'd hoped.

    There's reasons for that but I think it boiled down to a number of factors: market saturation, inexperienced authors with no social media platforms, massive competition from other e-publishers, and Permuted Press' own quick-release schedule. Either way, Permuted Press was both doing well and not what they needed/wanted to be doing.

    What did the authors hear? Films! Audiobooks! Platinum for the top sellers (which will include me-obviously)!

    Which brings us to the kerfuffle.

    In part 4.