[00:00:01.590] - Sunyi Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean. [00:00:03.690] - Scott And I'm Scott Drakeford. [00:00:05.910] - Sunyi And this is the publishing Rodeo podcast. In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books, and subsequently each of our careers, went in very different directions. [00:00:21.970] - Scott That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry, over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival? [00:00:30.650] - Sunyi In this podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career. [00:00:38.490] - Scott Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they're really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets, we'll be sharing real details from real people. We'll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances and more. Welcome to the Publishing Rodeo, where we say the quiet part out loud. Today we have Nick Eames or Nicholas Eames, if you're reading his book cover, author of do you want to give your own introduction and pitch yourself? [00:01:15.700] - Nick Eames Sure, yeah. I'm author of a series called The Band, which right now contains a book called Kings of the Wyld and a sequel called Bloody Rose, which can be read in any order. And that's about it. I'm working on a forthcoming third book called Outlaw Empire. [00:01:28.550] - Scott Outlaw Empire? I don't think I knew that. I have no idea where my Kings of the Wyld copy is, but I did find Bloody Rose and put it… mine are conveniently behind top shelf. [00:01:38.980] - Sunyi I know where mine is. I bought it and then everyone in my gaming group has borrowed it off me, so it's with one of them at the moment. [00:01:50.530] - Scott I'm pretty sure my dad stole mine because we don't live in the same city anymore. So when he buys book or borrows my books, they're just it's a big dad favourite. [00:02:00.380] - Nick Eames That one. Got big dad energy. [00:02:02.860] - Scott It is, yeah, indeed. Dads of all sorts. [00:02:09.010] - Nick Eames Well, thank you both. All right, well, for having me on this podcast. I'm a huge fan of I haven't got too too many episodes so far, but I've ravenously devoured every single one of them and it's an honour to be here. [00:02:18.500] - Scott Yeah, I mean, this whole podcast has been really wild. Just because Sunny and I kicked around the idea for months, maybe even over a year, right before Sunny was like, all right, fuck it, we're doing it. [00:02:33.520] - Sunyi We're more threatening each other, like, complain we're going to start a podcast and whine online. [00:02:39.490] - Scott Yeah. So, I mean, we've been kicking around the idea, but then we just finally did it and threw it out there. And we expected just a handful of people to even care, but taken off a little bit, and we're both big fans of yours, so when you reached out, that was kind of a oh, wow, this might be real. [00:03:01.050] - Nick Eames You'll land some bigger fish than me. If you haven't already, that's for sure. [00:03:05.930] - Scott It depends on how you define bigger. But no, it's definitely fun to have you here. Sunyi, or I suppose Nick, unless you have a better agenda. I'm very interested in hearing, Nick, just your journey into publishing and whatever you want to say generally about how you found the industry, both good and bad. We're not going to pressure you to say anything in particular, but you're also welcome to speak your mind and we certainly won't cut anything in edit. Yeah, let's hear it. How did you get into publishing? [00:03:39.040] - Nick Eames Well, I was an aspiring author for a long, long, long time. My story was definitely not one of overnight success, that's for sure. I went to school for theatre and then I thought, well, to be an actor, you need to rely so much on someone else's goodwill in order to break into the industry. I'll just be a writer instead. Turns out that's exactly what you need times too. Pretty much. So, yeah, I started writing probably when I was about 25 years old, is when I think I really I mean, I was writing when I was younger too, but 25 years old is when I'm like, I had the book I was going to write. I started writing pretty much all the time. And I wrote this just massive tome of a book that ended up being about like 350,000 words, if not more, inspired by the authors I was reading at the time. It was like, George R. Martin, obviously, and Robert Jordan, Stephen Erickson, and it was a hot mess, especially when I first finished it. And so I kind of restarted it over and over again and I tried to send it out. [00:04:34.810] - Nick Eames I was telling my brother the other day, there was a day, one of the happiest days of my life was when I wasn't even done my book. And I started submitting it, obviously, because I was an idiot. I got contacted by this agency called the New York Literary Agency, and they were like, we want to publish your book. Here's an editor we recommend. You have to pay them, blah, blah, blah. And I was obviously pretty naive at the time. By the end of the day, I did my research and realised they were a complete scam. But for a little while that morning, I was like, I'm being published, it's happening. And at this point, I was about twelve years away still from being published. It was in fact, not happening at all. So, anyways, I wrote this book for years and years, and then right near the end, about like twelve years into it, I had the idea for Kings of the Wyld and I sat down and wrote the first three chapters of it and really liked it. But then I was just so intent on getting this other book published, so I went back to this other one for another almost a year and sent it off to more agents. [00:05:35.070] - Nick Eames And it ended up intriguing one enough that he said, I'm not going to pick this up, but I'll take a look at whatever you write next. And at the time, I was just about done Kings of the Wyld, so also about that time, I was working at a restaurant in Vancouver and ran into Sebastian de Castell, who I knew, who's an author of his book, The Traitor’s Blade, I had read and loved at the time. I was the first person to recognise him in public, so he was pretty psyched about that and we just kind of talked about it. I was like, oh, I'm a writer too. Obviously I said that and he was super gracious about it. And I saw him at the Writers Festival and then when I finished Kings of the Wyld, I sent it off to that agent who one morning sent me an email and I'll never forget it. He was like, I'm not saying yes, but I'm not saying no. Can we work on this together? And I was like, I'm in. I'm Gold, I got myself an agent. He's not going to say no. And so we workshopped it for months and he made me make a lot of changes. [00:06:28.700] - Nick Eames Some of them were good and stayed in the book and made it way better than it ever was. And some of them we just did not see eye to eye on. And then I will also never forget the morning that I got another email saying, I'm going to unfortunately pass on this. And I was pretty devastated. And by then, I hadn't sent that book out to anyone. I had sent my previous book out to probably, like, maybe 20 agents, which is really not that many compared to what some people do, but they were just the ones I really, really wanted and it didn't happen. And so I started sending it out to agents. And by then, Sebastian, actually the Castell, came back into my restaurant. I told him this story. He knew the agent because the agent is a pretty big agent and was like, he must have thought to himself, it can't be that bad if this guy almost took it. So he's like, I'll pass it on to my agent, Heather Adams. So he passed it on to her and she picked me up. I really lucked out. And so Heather and I've heard you talk about your sub story. [00:07:24.280] - Nick Eames You expect it to be really quick. How long was your book on sub again? [00:07:27.700] - Sunyi Which one of us? [00:07:28.720] - Nick Eames Both of you. [00:07:29.310] - Sunyi So my first book was on sub for 18 months and then died. [00:07:33.950] - Nick Eames Right. [00:07:34.670] - Sunyi Scott's was nine months, I think you said. [00:07:37.180] - Scott It was kind of a weird situation. It was probably three months. Three or four months. I had no idea what to expect, right? So I was bugging my agent all the time. I'm sure he hated me at the time, maybe still, I don't know. [00:07:49.110] - Nick Eames Yeah. [00:07:49.480] - Scott But yeah, it was three or four months and we had only subbed to like nine editors and we had two or three rejections by that three or four month mark. But they were really nice and detailed in what they'd want to see different. And one was, hey, resubmit if you change a few of these things. So we decided to pull I worked on it a little more and then we went back out and then it sold within, I don't know, two months ish after that. [00:08:18.480] - Nick Eames Yeah. And Sonya was the book eaters. Like a weekend or something like that. Yeah, a week. [00:08:25.650] - Sunyi Yeah. I don't know, it was crazy and I was not expecting that because the first one is so slow. I think we started getting rejections at the three month mark the first time around, which is more normal. [00:08:39.730] - Nick Eames Yeah. Well, unlike either of you, I didn't hear anything back. She didn't ask, and I didn't ask either to get to hear any of what was going on. I just kind of got to work with Heather. Sebastian gave me some advice before I even talked to her, which was have a trilogy in place because Kings of the Wyld was originally just kind of written as a standalone and ultimately kind of still is because I was like, I'll have a trilogy in place, but I'm not dragging these guys out on another adventure. That's kind of the point. Even though I kind of dragged them out. But anyway, so, yeah, I had a phone call with Heather. She took me on. We did a little bit of editing in Summertime, which for aspiring authors who may not know, the publishing industry, does not operate in the summertime at all. [00:09:22.950] - Scott Or September or. [00:09:26.710] - Nick Eames Christmas, or any of the plethora of British holidays that can happen any day of the week. [00:09:32.250] - Scott Or Thursday or Fridays. [00:09:39.350] - Nick Eames We worked on over the summer. My book was Kings of the Wyld was originally 120,000 words. When I finished it, we brought it down to like a svelte one hundred k and then we started submitting it and in September, and then it was in February when we got offers on it. [00:09:56.300] - Scott Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So pretty typical. And I think a lot of aspiring authors would be pretty surprised that even a book that has succeeded to the level yours has took five months on sub to find a home. [00:10:12.130] - Nick Eames Yeah. And I mean, even, even after Heather took me on, I did get one email back from an agent because I sent it out to about, probably about ten agents after that, after I got that rejection. And one person did get back to offer representation, but I got tonnes of rejection letters after I already had an agent. So it's just not for everyone. Yeah. Lucky we ended up having two offers. And I am so extremely fortunate that we did because someone who I was an aspiring author for as long as I was. I was willing to take anything to be an author. I really wanted to be one so bad. So the first one that came in was, like, a pretty low offer. And they didn't like the book kind of as it was. They didn't like the comedy aspects of it. They didn't like the rock and roll aspect of it. They wanted it called The War Band because it was just called The Band at the time. They were pretty much looking for, like, Joe Abercrombie Light. [00:11:03.300] - Sunyi Did this person actually like your book? [00:11:06.310] - Nick Eames I guess they were like, well, he could write, but the story sucks. (laughing) [00:11:11.350] - Scott (laughing) “I hate everything about this. I just want the core of it.” [00:11:18.200] - Nick Eames Yeah. I mean, they wanted even they wanted Moog, who's, like most people's, favourite character, right out of the book. Like, excised from the book. Thankfully, an offer came in from Orbit at the same time within a week after. And it was a better offer from an editor that loved it just the way it was. And in fact, Orbit was in this really weird phase at the time. They went through for about six months. And for some books it worked and for some books it didn't. But they were padding books at the time. They wanted books bigger. So when they took me on, they were like, can you make it 50,000 words bigger? Which 50,000 never, as far as I know, never happens. They always wanted smaller, so they wanted 50,000 words bigger. There was about 10,000 words worth of flashbacky scenes they wanted gone. So in the end, and I didn't obviously add any of the words that me and Heather took out because if they could be taken out, they deserve to be taken out. But I essentially just was able to world build a bit more because my book was very just kind of like, go, go, so I world build it a lot more. [00:12:17.310] - Nick Eames I added the bad guy who didn't even exist in the first draft when it got sold. And yeah, 50000 words. And that was the only the first and only deadline I ever hit in my life was turning that book in. [00:12:34.100] - Scott I feel that at 135,000 words. Yeah. Wow. [00:12:35.810] - Sunyi Was that Lindsay acquiring it? Because I think she was at Orbit at the time. [00:12:39.890] - Nick Eames Yeah. And I believe Lindsay was an assistant editor at the time. And I could be wrong, but I think it was either her first or second, the book that she had taken on herself. [00:12:48.680] - Sunyi Yeah. I find it really interesting because all the Lindsay authors I know, myself included, I feel like we were sort of project books in a way. Like, there was a lot of editing to be done. There was a lot of changes, which were all good changes, but that's in some ways relatively rare. I think a lot of editors are maybe a little more shy of asking for that in case their vision doesn't align with yours or whatever, but I'm not sure. I've not worked with other editors, really. [00:13:11.760] - Nick Eames Why did Lindsay ask you to add words at all to yours as well? [00:13:15.490] - Sunyi I rewrote a full third of Book Eaters and she wasn't saying to add words, she was saying your worldbuilding basically doesn't make sense. Which is true. I'm a very weak world builder by default, so my whole world building… I've got my original pitch letter for that book online and it mentions it all centres around the Sabbatarians, who are a group of people who aren't even in the novel anymore. The plot and everything changed a tonne. [00:13:41.450] - Nick Eames Wow. Yeah, I know. And it's kind of scary, too, because if you're doing a rewrite on that scale, you're like, well, will they like what I've done? And I know for me, whenever I didn't hear from Lindsay for a few weeks, I was like, oh, she's come to her senses, my career is not going anywhere. [00:14:02.250] - Sunyi She's realised I am four monkeys in a trench coat who's stolen a laptop. [00:14:07.550] - Nick Eames (laughing) And especially adding 50,000 words into bad guy. I was just like, oh, boy, I hope this works, because I worked my ass off to do that. And, yeah, thankfully it did. [00:14:21.350] - Scott So how much of that I'm just curious because editor author relationships are very interesting to me. So I'm curious. How much of that the bad guy and those 50,000 words, how did that work? Right? So what did Lindsay say to you and tell you to do versus what you decided to do? Does that make sense? Was she very prescriptive in asking for certain things? Or was it more along the lines of prompting to hit certain angles and kind of left it up to you? [00:14:59.410] - Nick Eames That's a great question. I think probably when it comes to how Lindsay and I work together, is that I often think ideas are mine when in fact they're hers. So I could be like, I came up with this. But looking back, maybe she did be like, hey, what about this? What about this? She's great at doing that. And then your own kind of maybe imagination can run away with her prompts. So I don't think that she suggested the bad guy, but she was like, well, what else could you do? And I was like, oh, you know, I could add a bad guy. Because right now it was just like a faceless horde that was the enemy. And obviously the bad guy added so much to more to my book and is honestly the crux that moves the whole rest of the series forward. So, again, there's so many times in my past of publication where I just feel extremely fortunate. But the fact that I got the agent that I got, because the first agent made me even take out he was an older British guy that got every single music reference and kind of made me take them all out because he thought everyone would get them. [00:15:53.650] - Nick Eames Like, I took out Slow Hands nickname because he's like, everyone he knows that's Eric Clapton's nickname. And I was like, nobody in the United States of America knows, really under the age of 40 that knows that. And so, luckily, I feel lucky that Heather got let me put a lot of stuff back in and then that Lindsay just, like, saw the book for what it was, which was kind of a risky thing, kind of something that didn't exist in the genre at the time. Didn't ask for it to be more grim. There was a couple of scenes that Orbit wanted toned down a bit that maybe were a little too outrageous. So one of them went and the rest of them stayed in. Yeah. And it was a great process. And I've heard of people who can be kind of like, adversarial with their editors and not out of any spite or not because they've been slighted in any sort of way. It's just the way they work. They're very protective of their own work. I just happen to not be like that at all. I will take pretty much anyone's advice. If a guy on the street is like, oh, I read your book, you should do this instead, I'd be like, Noted. [00:16:50.060] - Scott (laughing) “Oh yeah, that's a good idea.” [00:16:52.930] - Nick Eames Yeah. I like to think I'm pretty easy to edit. Obviously, I'll stick to my guns about some stuff, but otherwise I'd like to think I'm pretty open to people's suggestions, especially people that obviously are in the industry and know what's a bit more than I do. [00:17:07.690] - Scott That's interesting, though, because you had an editor who wanted your book but wanted all of the personality cut out of it. [00:17:16.990] - Nick Eames Right. [00:17:17.340] - Scott They wanted all the fun bits that ended up being what made it work, at least for me. Right. And I think for most reviewers I've seen, that's really what people cling to in your book. Not that it wouldn't have been good as Abercrombie Light, but I mean, what really put it over the top and got noticed in a very crowded field of science fiction and fantasy books is that element. Sunny and I talked about this yesterday when we talked through our launch experience and how things went and trying to figure out why we think things went a certain way. That match between editor and author is extremely important. Not just because they're at a certain imprint or have a certain name behind them, but that connection with the work and whether they want you and your story or whether they want to fit you into some mould that they already have in mind. Right. [00:18:16.700] - Nick Eames Yeah. It's very true. Very true. Lindsay is a pretty great editor, and honestly, everyone at Orbit has been great about it. And I do feel very lucky because yeah, maybe who's to say how it would have done if it was just an Abercrombie Light? I don't know, there could have been some neat things about it, but I think it's like differences were what helped do as well as it did in the interest of transparency, because you two have both been so forthcoming with your deals and all that kind of stuff. My deal was it was a three book deal for $50,000. However, 17 grand a book per se, which is not small, but it's not blockbuster either. And, yeah, at the time, it was more money than I'd ever seen. I just finished paying off my student loan, so I was pretty psyched about it. Obviously, as people may or may not know, you only get a chunk of that. So I got, like, about 20 grand up front and I still haven't got the end of it, just because I haven't turned in the third book yet. And so, yeah, that money is kind of parcelled out. [00:19:15.330] - Nick Eames You've talked before a little bit about, like there's obviously a lot of benefits and negatives to getting your advance size and I can only look at mine in hindsight, thinking that a small advance was good because obviously it did get some traction and I was able to pay it off. But, yeah, I'd probably like a bigger one. [00:19:36.470] - Sunyi That's the spirit. [00:19:38.950] - Nick Eames Something to note as well. I was thinking about the other day and it's kind of a tricky thing and I don't like harbour harbour any ill will towards my original agent, Heather, because she's actually retired now and I have a new agent is that the Orbit bought the world rights to it, which once again is sort of like a can go good, can go bad. If the book's doing well, then they're going to work their ass off to sell it. But if it's not, then you got to hope your agent focuses on you enough to also want to sell it to as many people as possible. But because my agent is in the UK, my deal is like, they get 15% for whatever it's called, home deals in your own country, and then 20% overseas for foreign things. And because Orbit US bought it, it's technically 20% that they get. So I'm kind of locked in that for my whole career now, or for not for my career, but for this whole series. 5% more than the average. [00:20:29.890] - Sunyi That explains to me why some of the UK agencies use American co agents, then. That's kind of a way to get around it. You almost have, like, a separate American agent. [00:20:40.170] - Scott I mean, they could write 15% in the contract if they want us. Let's not pretend they couldn't. (Laughing) [00:20:47.990] - Nick Eames Yeah, looking back, it should be like 15% for UK US and then 20% for other places. [00:20:57.330] - Sunyi You were obviously working and living like a non author life when all of that happened. So how did that change your schedule? Because I think something that I've seen you talk about a little bit before and something I know a lot of authors are kind of labouring. Under is the reality that most people need day jobs and they can't be layabouts. Like me and Scott. Planting 50 trees doesn't count, Scott. [00:21:25.310] - Scott that is a lot of trees, Sunyi!! I am so sore. [00:21:28.850] - Nick Eames It definitely didn't happen right away because 20 grand isn't an insane amount of money. And I actually went through that relatively quick because I had lived away from my family for about 15 years at the time and thought and they lived in Ontario and thought, okay, this is a good chance to my brother had started a family in Ontario. My parents lived there and I really missed them. So I'm like, I'll move back there and write my next book there. And so once you factor in moving across the country and all that kind of stuff, and getting a new apartment, maybe for spring and a summer, I didn't work. And then I was like, I need to get a job again. And I worked in restaurants my whole life, so I did end up picking up another job at a restaurant in Kingston, one restaurant that I just it was like a chain restaurant. I hated working there so much. People think when you're an aspiring author that once you got your book on your shelf, you're just going to be in the stratosphere. But I read good reviews and then go to work and get written up for not putting an allergy on a dessert correctly or something like that, or haul a garbage bag and the whole thing would burst on me the day I turned in Bloody Rose. [00:22:33.780] - Nick Eames So it definitely wasn't life changing right away. Obviously, if you get a bigger advance, that gives you a bit more time to get that second book out the door. But for me, obviously, it wasn't. And honestly, I kind of liked working in restaurants, so I still did it. And I did it for another probably a year after Bloody Rose came out, until Kings of the Wyld. It earned out in about ten months, I think, or so. But on the other hand, I only get paid once or twice a year and I have no idea before that paycheck arrives how much of that's going to be. Yeah, once Bloody Rose came out, I got a royalty cheque. That was enough that I was like, okay, I can stop working in the restaurant for a while. And to this day, I have not gone back. But I'm days away from getting that next royalty statement. And about a month before they come in, I stop spending money and start living unbelievably frugally just in case people stop buying my book. [00:23:24.510] - Sunyi It's funny, because yesterday we recorded this episode, me and Scott, we were talking about how our sales had worked out in the first few months because that was all the information I had. And then literally that night, like the middle of the night, I woke up because I had a notification on my phone. The Harper Voyager just, like, deposited money in my account. And I was like, okay, so I guess a royalty payment came in and I had no warning. I had no sense before I got paid that I would get paid or how much I would be paid. [00:23:52.090] - Scott Based on your messages in discord, you thought it was an accident. [00:23:57.530] - Sunyi I did. I was like, why did you leave money in my account? That can't be right. Nobody does that. [00:24:04.410] - Nick Eames Yeah, I know. It's a weird thing to try to budget your life around. Like I said, I know a lot of authors and some authors that have really had their shit together, they kind of rely on, like miles Cameron is an author who I've met. He's been kind of a mentor to me, and Christian Cameron is his real name. And he just is the ultimate working writer. He's got no angst about it. He's got no depression about it. He's got no nothing about it. He just does it, and he's good at it. And he pumps out books and he has a family and so many hobbies and travels and just has all the shit together. [00:24:36.520] - Sunyi And he's a great DM. [00:24:37.790] - Nick Eames I bet he's a great DM, actually. He has DM me. He almost killed me, actually, only because of my recklessness. But anyways, yeah, he kind of relies on his advances, which aren't really that huge, but they work for his income. And then his royalties, if he gets them, are kind of like on top of that, where I do not have that luxury. So I currently rely on my royalties. And yeah, every once in a while I'll just get panicky and think because you just never know. You never know what it's going to be. I did have an issue where my Spanish royalties hadn't been paid for a couple of years. So I'm hoping that that pumps this one up a little bit. And it's always technically going to go down a little bit every single paycheck. So you just don't know how much it's going to go down unless, like, Daniel Green posts about your book or something like that. Then it goes up. Yeah, it's a real crapshoot. And as far as getting paid and still working, I had some friends that were aspiring authors who I think were like one in particular was, like, avoiding getting promotions at his job because he was like, I'm going to be an author. [00:25:36.080] - Nick Eames And then as soon as he saw me and what my situation was, like, two books out working at a restaurant, he was like, I'm taking some promotions. wisely. And so that's one of my advice. Whenever people ask me for authorly advice or aspiring author advice, obviously it's hard to give, but not to neglect your day job or put all your eggs in the writing basket, because even in some of the. Best case scenarios, it cannot be life changing. [00:26:03.020] - Sunyi No, I would echo that completely if you have the option to keep it. In my case, there wasn't an option because I just wasn't unemployed anyway, since being a carer doesn't count as employment. But if I'd had a backup, I would have kept it. Absolutely. Because it's so much safer. It's a little bit easier in the UK because we have free point of use health care, so I don't have to worry about that. And that makes a massive difference to my life. But I think if you're in the States, that's really scary to be unemployed or self employed, unless those Advanced Cheques are very regular. [00:26:35.450] - Scott I definitely put way too much hope over the years, especially once I got an agent. I remember when I signed with my agent, I checked out for at least an entire day or two of work, because I was like, I'm done, I made it, it's just a matter of time. [00:26:53.770] - Nick Eames (laughing) Fuck you guys! [00:26:56.630] - Scott (laughing!) Build your own goddamn software! [00:26:58.780] - Nick Eames (laughing) You have a bad haircut, Brad! [00:27:03.910] - Scott Yeah, fast forward five years and I finally launched and obviously didn't go quite as I was imagining back in 2017. But, I mean, that all goes back to one of the classic arguments that you see among some readers of, oh, I'm not going to pick up this person's work until they've finished the series, or they've finished their trilogy or whatever. That just drives me fucking insane. Because they don't understand that what people who are writing are going through. They assume that I think somebody would look you in particular up, Nick, on Goodreads or wherever, see the number of people that have reviewed your book, see the number of people that absolutely love your work and talk about it all the fucking time on Reddit and everywhere, as they should, because your work is awesome, right? And they'd think, oh, man, that guy's got it made and I can trash him wherever I want. And this isn't particularly about you, but just authors of that certain level when they don't realise what the income really looks like in quantity and timing. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that, because I don't think many people, even people who know more than most about this industry, understand that, no-- [00:28:25.730] - Nick Eames This guy still only buys toothpaste if it's on sale because expensive. Otherwise, come on, now. But, yeah, no, it's something you just yeah, you have no idea about. I remember even when, but right before my book came out, there was an author who's self published, and he's actually found a lot of success self publishing. And he wrote a book. And I was looking for the sequel to it, and there was never going to be a sequel to it, apparently, because and it was published by… forget who. Maybe harper collins or something like that. And it had only sold something like 500 books or 800 books over the course of a few months, and I had no clue that that was a possibility. When I was an aspiring author. I thought, you're on bookshelves everywhere. You only hear about the millions, hundreds of thousands of sales and stuff like that. You just don't hear about the smaller and what actually constitutes success, obviously, as you guys have kind of delved on your show. Awesome. If you sell 5000 copies... I know Miles Christian Cameron, if he sells 5000 copies of a book, he's like, great, perfect. Did it. onto the next one. Success. Yeah, you just have no idea. So I suddenly, about two months before my book came out, was like, oh, I might fail. I might only sell 500 books ever or something like that. [00:29:31.930] - Sunyi That's maybe a good point. I was going to ask you what were your launch months like? Because I think based on how the book was received, it probably outperformed its midlist expectations. That's my guess. Or what it looked like to me. [00:29:44.480] - Nick Eames Yeah, no, I think it did, except my mom obviously knew it was going to be a huge success right from day one. Obviously everyone has high hopes for every book, but it wasn't definitely like no one super pumped its tires. There was tonnes of other books that came out that month that got so much more press and more hype. And you've talked a bit before too about just having to be your own publicist and so I was involved on a lot of Facebook groups. I think I was on reddit, obviously. I started my own website. I was on Twitter, obviously, and tried to do as much as I could and just interact with other authors, obviously the same as I think everyone every debut does. I super close to my debut class, especially the Orbit people that came out with me, but also the other the tour folks and the glance folks that year. There's like a bond that you'll never family forever. And so luckily everyone just kind of like helped pump the tires and the book came out and I think it maybe did a little bit better than they expected to right off the bat. [00:30:46.350] - Nick Eames And I don't know whether it was these Facebook groups that did it. I know a lot of people come in there like, I only sold nine copies of my book or something like that in the first few weeks. I'm like, don't you have nine friends? Are your friends assholes? Make them buy. Granted, maybe help that. I worked in restaurants and had friends all over the place and and and I'd been telling everyone that I was going to be an author for 15 years. So you're damn right they bought my book when it finally came out. So I think I probably got 1000 sales just from friends and family. And my mom, she bought copies for everybody, so did my dad. Like they just went nuts. I can't point to anything really that really helped get the ball rolling. But obviously it did a lot better than I think everyone expected. [00:31:36.270] - Scott What kind of activity did you get from your publisher before launch and when it launched? Sunny and I can talk about this as well, relative to our books. Again, we just recorded an episode, her and I, yesterday, where we talked about this, but for context, we talked about how she got somewhere in the ballpark of what did you estimate? 700 to 1000 physical Arcs. [00:32:03.310] - Sunyi 700 to 1000 physical Arcs for UK and us. [00:32:07.690] - Scott And she was included in a few things, like shelf awareness is the name, right? Senior. It's like this huge industry newsletter. [00:32:22.270] - Sunyi And white box mailings, which I didn't explain at the time, but I will another time. [00:32:27.070] - Scott Yeah, long story short, Tor did a lot of really awesome things. Tor did a few things for me, but not nearly as many. So I'm just curious where you fell in that spectrum, if you even know. [00:32:41.480] - Nick Eames I definitely don't know a lot of numbers and things like that. I have no idea how many Arcs they sent out, but they did seem to send out a fair number. And they asked me who I would like to send Arcs to. It maybe because I was also involved in a lot more. Like, I knew who, like, who is, like, doing reviews and running sites. So I asked him to send them to certain people. And honestly, I think that those people can matter so much out there. There's definitely a few people in the industry that if they like your book and can pump its tires, it just can go flying. Like Petrick, who has his own YouTube channel at the time, he was just a goodreads reviewer, but his opinion counts for a lot among a lot of people. And yeah, so I think with my first book, they just kind of did the every step. But I haven't seen Orbit, like, go berserk with promotional stuff for anyone, really. They seem to do a good amount for everybody. Obviously, I can't speak for everyone, but I mean, for that year, they definitely did set up a lot of events with me and my fellow debuts. [00:33:44.650] - Nick Eames And, yeah, I felt that everything was pretty great. They set up a lot of interviews, me, and a lot of blogs. And so, yeah, I felt that I was pretty well taken care of on that front. They definitely, by the time Bloody Rose rolled around because Kings of Wild had done so good, they went nuts on it and did a lot of great promo. Like, they did, like, the audiobooks, like, codes were sent out in cassette tapes. It was all 80s themed. They made T shirts with the bands or the cities on the back where Bloody Rose's band would go through BOOKMARKS shaped like concert tickets. That were awesome. Yeah. And obviously there was just a lot more demand for that kind of stuff. I don't think it was necessarily that, because the book was going to probably sell anyway by that point, but there was just a lot of demand for it, and you might as well capitalise on it while an author is taught, I think. [00:34:33.370] - Sunyi And that's creating stuff for kind of instagram as well, when you're kind of doing that stuff, because people will take pictures of their band shirt and their concert tickets. But I think there's a level there that you're accessing, I guess that's very true. [00:34:46.170] - Nick Eames And also I thought of something else that maybe kind of helped that groundswell was… Another piece of sage advice would be, if you're going to write a book, write one that inspires fan art. How to do that, I don't know. But I also got extremely lucky. There one guy, Felix Ortiz, kind of got the ball rolling. I remember the first time I saw this picture of scrolling down Facebook, and I was like, kind of looks like something from my book. And sure enough, it was, and I was just blown away. And he did a lot of pieces of fan art, and then eventually, funny enough, lindsay got him to do covers for Tor, and now he does covers all the time and so just got the ball rolling. And people just once they see other fan art, they do it. And I think fan art can play a huge role in getting people to read your book, because obviously, if it meant that much to someone, an artist, that they're willing to spend their time and energy and creativity on it, then it must be worth reading. I think that helped a lot. [00:35:43.810] - Sunyi Yeah. I know you had a really good first experience with kind of Lindsay and Orbit, and I think Orbit generally has a good reputation for basically having a functioning mid list. But obviously Lindsay doesn't work at Orbit anymore, and she now works at Tor. So what was that like to basically have your editor leave? Because that is very common in the industry, for people to be orphaned as editors, chomp and jump. [00:36:09.440] - Nick Eames Yeah. [00:36:10.120] - Scott And it sounds like you were orphaned by your agent a little bit as well, too, right? [00:36:13.940] - Nick Eames Yeah. [00:36:14.680] - Scott Not necessarily orphaned, but you changed. [00:36:16.250] - Nick Eames She put me into good hands, actually, with my agent. She said, I'm retiring. She was going to Oxford, she got accepted to Oxford. And so she was like, I'm going to pursue this dream. But she basically was passing all her authors on to a new agent that if we didn't want to go with them, we didn't have to. But the agent ended up being a guy named John Wood who used to run Glance and now works for an agency. And I got to get along great, and he's super cool, and we have a lot of things in common. So I love him. But with editors yeah, with Lindsay. Like, Lindsay obviously was a huge sounding board while I was writing bloody rose and a therapist. As you may know, she's great at that. So, too, thankfully, Art is my new editor. And yeah, so it was kind of a shame because about two months before I was supposed to hand it in, which I should say it's about five months before I was supposed to hand it in, but two months before my next deadline, she got headhunted and went to Tor. And so for a while I was editor-less. [00:37:15.920] - Nick Eames And actually that worked phenomenal for me because I was still furiously working on this book and didn't want to rush it. And I was like, oh, the longer it takes for me to get an editor, the longer I have to work on it. This is great. And when I did get a new editor, whose name is Bradley Englert at Orbit, who is also fantastic, and we have a tonne in common, and he's been a wonderful therapist and a great friend, he was just like, especially when you get a new author. And the author my books have done really well. So he was like, hey, I'm here whenever you're done it. So I was like, Great, I'll send it to you when I'm done. So I had about two more months after that of Leeway to finish it and hand it in. But that time I had a UK editor as well named Emily Byron, who I think for the first book, she kind of didn't do. We definitely had no contact with her besides saying hello, and I don't think she made any changes to it. We didn't really interact very much. But when it came time to turn in Bloody Rose, at that point I had both editors and turned it into them both at the same time. [00:38:18.030] - Nick Eames They both read it, they both came, which was an awesome experience, and I got along well with both of them. And hopefully when I turn in Outlaw Empire, it'll be exactly the same and they'll both still be there. Fingers crossed, they still are. I think Emily's had two kids in the time. She's like, sorry I won't be your editor anymore. And I'm like, you might still be nine months from now. You hang in there. [00:38:39.270] - Scott I'll wait for you. (laughing) [00:38:43.670] - Nick Eames And so, yeah, they're both still my editors, and thankfully and I'm really excited, I hope they're still there when I turn this book in. I hope they're still alive, actually, by the time the rate I'm going. [00:38:55.770] - Scott Well, I, for one, Nick, really appreciate hearing about an author who isn't turning out books every few months and is still found the same. Yeah, and has still found a solid level of success in the industry because that seems to be what you hear about more often than not. The old adage is just if you're worried about how your current book is doing, just write another one. And there's nothing else you can do besides turn out a tonne of work. But it's nice to know that's not the only model. [00:39:31.580] - Nick Eames Yeah. Once again, I'm fortunate because I am incapable of doing that. This time next month, if that paycheck shows up and it's not what I hope it is, then it's back to the keg or working at restaurants. [00:39:46.500] - Sunyi For me, we're kind of coming up on an hour. I mean, we can take as much time as you need, but we have a couple of questions from our discord and one of them is from Michael Mammay. He wants to know, when is book three is coming out, since you're talking about writing. [00:39:59.090] - Nick Eames Well, no time soon, unfortunately. I wish it was. I've definitely, obviously very struggled with writing it since it's been a few years, and I basically just kept writing the beginning over and over and over and over again. And a lot of the time, if I'm having trouble with a chapter or I can't move forward in the past, I've kind of had to go back a few chapters and realise that I've gone down the wrong path and start over. And so that's kind of what I kept doing until finally, recently. And actually, I haven't even told my editors this yet, and I'm sure they'll be both happy and distressed to learn that I restarted over with a new main character instead of the person that has been the main character for the last four or five years. And, I mean, it's early days yet, but it's going pretty good and I feel pretty great about it and I'm pretty psyched about it, so hopefully that was the problem. And here we go. So it'll be out in a month or so. [00:40:53.680] - Sunyi Where do you go from here? What's? After the Kings of the Wyld and all the other band, their adventures are done. [00:41:00.930] - Nick Eames After the third book is out, I definitely have another idea for a series, probably a trilogy that is very similar, but different, which is what a lot of people, and probably editors would love to hear because you obviously don't want to read the same thing forever. But you don't want it to go stray too far from what made you success in the first place. So, yeah, I've got what I think is a really, really good idea that's a lot of fun and funny and a little bit different, but just enough. But I would also love to write. Like, I just wrote my first comic book recently. Loved it. It's something I put off for a long time because I was just like, I don't have time. I was so stressed out about hitting deadlines and stuff like that, and then eventually the stress just kind of, like, boiled over and I reached a state of Zen that just, like, prioritising happiness over stress. And so now I kind of do try to make time for do other creative pursuits. And I think it can help a lot because when I wrote that comic book, it was so fun. [00:41:53.920] - Nick Eames It was so easy. And when you're writing for so many years and not producing anything, you can kind of feel stunted. So, for me, it was a great way to feel refreshed again. So I don't feel that it's something that gets in the way of my writing. Hopefully it'll be therapeutic for it and helpful. [00:42:09.670] - Sunyi Awesome. Scott, would you like the honour of reading Ryan's question? [00:42:13.770] - Scott Okay, so Ryan Rose, who hopefully will have a book deal here pretty soon, and more people will know who he is. He wants to know what your favourite class is. [00:42:29.660] - Nick Eames I take it like a DND character wise. [00:42:31.660] - Scott Yeah, I would guess so. Full disclosure I've never played D and D ever. [00:42:36.930] - Nick Eames The upper class! [00:42:38.200] - Scott Upper class (laughing) The one percent! [00:42:42.050] - Nick Eames You know, the folks in succession, those people. [00:42:46.610] - Scott Yeah. [00:42:47.090] - Nick Eames You've never played DND ever? [00:42:48.810] - Scott Not one time in my life. [00:42:50.180] - Sunyi Scott, we have to fix that. You're going to play DND with me at an online con. You're committed now. [00:42:55.210] - Scott Okay, but it's your fault if I embarrass you. [00:43:02.330] - Sunyi Yeah, it'll be fine. We'll get Christian Cameron to DM. [00:43:07.330] - Nick Eames Don'T run into any houses filled with gunmen because he's going to shoot you. That's what happened to me. My favourite class. I mean, I kind of like all of them, as long as you kind of put a spin on them. But obviously I'm partial to Bards. I'm a huge fan of those. They're a lot of fun. Jack of all trades. The classic fighter is great. [00:43:28.530] - Scott So are we just going to go through and name them all? I don't know how many there are. It sounds like you're naming them all. God, I'm already embarrassing you. [00:43:42.630] - Nick Eames See? [00:43:44.150] - Sunyi Fucking jock. (laughing) [00:43:49.270] - Scott I mean, I I grew up reading a lot of fantasy, a lot of science fiction. I am a bona fide nerd. [00:43:57.060] - Sunyi That makes it worse. [00:43:58.590] - Nick Eames You obviously know mages exist. [00:44:02.110] - Scott Yeah. There you go. Thanks, Nick. [00:44:08.430] - Scott Yes, I do know that mages exist, but they also exist outside of that world. Right. Just however it worked. Yeah. I also grew up playing sports and whatever else, and I just didn't have friends that played it. I guess I'm at the point the whole, like, I don't know what that is. And at this point, I'm afraid to ask. That's kind of where I'm at. I'm like I don't really want to dig into it because it sucks to be the new guy who doesn't know what's going on, but, yeah, I'll try anything. [00:44:39.900] - Nick Eames Yeah. No, it's true. I owe my entire DND playing career to one friend that I met in high school. And if I hadn't met him, I probably wouldn't have played it. Yeah, who knows how different my life could have gone if I hadn't. [00:44:56.750] - Scott Yeah. Might have written Abercrombie Light or yeah, who knows? You could have gone and done an engineering degree like me and realised halfway through that it was not what you wanted to do with your life. That was brutal. I hated that. So much engineering. [00:45:17.260] - Nick Eames But I believe there was also a second part to Ryan's question you mentioned before we started. [00:45:22.070] - Sunyi You got to read the full question! [00:45:22.070] Scott Well, I mean, if you wanted that, yeah. Okay. “Ask him what his favourite class is, tell him I love him and then ask him if Ren is the MC of book three or simply in the party.” [00:45:41.150] - Nick Eames Well, let's try to keep some things under wraps. [00:45:46.370] - Scott Well, that's why I wasn't going to ask that question. Hah [00:45:51.440] - Nick Eames Ask me five months from now, I'll be like, oh, it's so and so. I'm going to answer this in a way that I hope is intriguing, is that over the course of the previous two books, two couples have children, have a child. One of those kids was the main character for the last five years. The other one is now the main character. Which one it is, who knows? But Ran is in the party. Actually, the cover of the book has been done for about four years, unfortunately, and it looks incredible. They did it before I pretty much even started writing. I just gave them character descriptions and so now I'm locked into those characters, obviously, but it looks amazing. Thank God the main character is on the cover. [00:46:35.390] - Scott I do think your strategy of the generation shift between books is really interesting, and I've seen something like it a few times, but it's not common at all. [00:46:45.360] - Nick Eames No, I think it's a little bit of a risk, too, because especially when you write the first book and it's just like five old dudes, a lot of your readers that you attract are old dudes. And so when the second book comes out and it's about a 17 year old lesbian, some of them aren't as receptive as others, but at the same time, you've got an opportunity to get a lot more fans if they haven't been turned off by the fact that you wrote about five old dudes in your first book. That was something me and Lindsay talked about beforehand. You just got to write the book that you want and the characters that you love and hope that people love them, too. And honestly, the fan mail I get about bloody Rose is as touching her more than the fan mail I get about Kings of the Wyld. They're both a particular brand of poignant. [00:47:37.090] - Sunyi Yeah, well, thank you so much for writing it, because when I read Kings of the Wyld, I realised how much I'd missed writing humour, because Book Eaters is just so depressing and serious. So it was such a breath of fresh air, really, kind of, I guess, inspires me to try and write a little bit lighter in future and yeah, thank you for talking to us as well. [00:48:00.460] - Nick Eames Well, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I hope I haven't rambled on for too long. [00:48:05.280] - Sunyi No, not at all. No, I mean, that's Scott's job. [00:48:06.700] - Scott Hey!! [00:48:11.450] - Sunyi You'Ve been listening to the publishing Radio podcast with Sunny Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.