Draft2digital Blog Building an Author Career with Christian A. Brown // Self Publishing Insiders // EP040

Episode SummaryThere are a lot of paths for starting a writing career, and no single path is the "right one" or the "wrong one." When fantasy author Christian A. Brown started his own writing journey, he learned how to navigate the waters of writing, editing, and marketing.Episode NotesQuadragenarian fitness model, lifestyle coach and bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates, Christian A. Brown received a Kirkus star in 2014 for the first novel in his genre-changing Four Feasts till Darkness series. He has appeared on Newstalk 1010, AM640, Daytime Rogers, and Get Bold Today with LeGrande Green. He actively writes and speaks about his mother's journey with cancer and on gender issues in the media. In this live-chat with Draft2Digital he discusses his career, and his best advice for authors who are just getting started.Find Christian A. Brown online at www.christianadrianbrown.com //Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career// Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor. We'll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way, and we won't charge you a dime. We take a cut of royalties on each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money! • Get started: https://Draft2Digital.com Get insider info on indie author success from our blog. • Visit: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog Tune in to our monthly livestreams and ask us anything! • D2D Live: https://D2DLive.com Promote your books with our Universal Book Links! • Books2Read: https://books2read.com //Get ahead of the Self-Publishing game with our Amazing Partners// Findaway Voices || Find a narrator, produce your audiobook, and distribute it to retailers worldwide, including Audible.com and Apple Books. • http://findawayvoices.com/d2d Reedsy || Assemble your team of publishing professionals! Find editors, cover designers, marketing experts, ghostwriters and more. • https://reedsy.com BookBrush || Build graphics and video that help you market and promote your books. • https://bookbrush.com/d2d-mockups/ //Join the D2D Community Online// Facebook || https://facebook.com/draft2digital Twitter || https://twitter.com/draft2digitalTranscriptSUMMARY KEYWORDSbook, people, author, writing, manuscript, important, life, invest, net galley, read, goodreads, find, bit, publicist, work, couple, wrapping, good, family, generalKevin Tumlinson00:02Well, we are live. Thank you everyone for tuning into another Self-Publishing Insiders. Now, I'm talking to somebody I have talked to a number of times in the past now, we're old friends now, going way back to his first appearance on the Wordslinger podcast. I'm talking to Christian A. Brown. I'm gonna read part of his bio here because I have to use this word publicly for the first time: quadragenarian, fitness model, lifestyle coach and bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates. Now, of all those words, you would have thought that I'd get "author" right, but apparently that's the one I stumbled on. So, Christian. Hey, thank you for joining us on Self-Publishing Insiders, man. Christian A Brown00:47Thank you for having me. Kevin Tumlinson00:49So, um, you and I go way back now. We're old buddies. We're old podcast buddies at this point.Christian A Brown00:552014.Kevin Tumlinson00:56You went and looked it up, look at you.Christian A Brown00:58No, that's when the book came out. And that's when a lot of the blitz was going on.Kevin Tumlinson01:02That's when you did the whole promotion and everything. And so that's one of the things I was really interested in talking to you about, by the way, is that you kind of went a more traditional route than most of the authors that we have on the show. You're still indie though, right? Christian A Brown01:17I'm 100% indie, I own everything. I did it, but my goal from the outset, like I had a bit of savings saved up, I was pretty successful in the health fitness industry. And so I had some money saved up, and I did that thing you're not supposed to do, which is like, ever spend that money. But to me, it was like, I haven't needed this money, you know, who knows if I'm going to live to be 60, and now there's COVID and killer bees and whatever else so, I don't know what's gonna happen. But it was like, ok, I'm gonna invest in myself and I'm gonna believe in myself. And so I took, I didn't take much, because like I wasn't, my mother raised a very frugal son. But I just researched what I had to do. I researched, you know, obviously getting an editor. And with a project this large, I needed someone really adept at especially fantasy and large sort of sweeping epics to tackle this thing. So I ended working with Barbara Burson, who used to work with Guy Gavriel Kay. I think I just butchered his name, but she used to work with like some really really big fantasy authors, and she was since retired-not retired, but she'd gone into, she'd been shunted off of the Penguin Random House, off of her position there. And so she was doing some freelance stuff. So I connected with her through just this very random series of events. I was kind of blessed, I guess, in a lot of the choices I made originally, or the things that happened. And connected with her, paid her for her services. So she was someone I invested in. And then after that, I went through the traditional route of three rounds of copy or stylistic editing, just to get this beast under control. I think I ended up writing about nine versions, nine drafts, like nine versions of the manuscript before you got to what you saw. And I wanted it, when it launched, to be indistinguishable from a traditionally published book. That was my goal. Because there is no reason why you can't do this yourself, you know. There's absolutely no reason, with enough time and smartly-placed resources, you know. So I wanted it to launch and I got it in Chapters/Indigo and I got it in all the brick and mortar stores, mostly because people just didn't know. They just assumed, they didn't know it was self-published, so I just sort of snuck it in there. Kevin Tumlinson03:27Well, let's talk about that process, because that's something that a lot of authors really want, is to get their books into places like Indigo and Barnes and Noble, you know, the traditional bricks and sticks. I think right now, it's probably less of a ...Christian A Brown03:39It's not worth it anymore.Kevin Tumlinson03:41Yeah, it's not such a big deal. Christian A Brown03:43Nobody really cares now, but ...Kevin Tumlinson03:44We're just gonna assume that all that will bounce back though. So what was your process for getting it into those stores? Christian A Brown03:50So, just working with all the connections I have. I think, one smart thing, as soon as you get ... I did, okay, so I spent a tiny bit of money. And when I say a tiny bit, I didn't spend like tens of thousands, I spent like a couple grand just on the initial setup of this book. And it was massive. And I spent it over a period of about ... well, the book, the first manuscript took me about three years to write. Subsequent ones have been much, much faster. And I think we've talked about that before. But anyway, so I took that small investment, and then I did nothing until I started making money back. And then as soon as I started making money back off the books and off the promos and off just the shamelessly, you know, W-H-O-R-I-N-G yourself on Goodreads ...Kevin Tumlinson04:30Thank you for helping us keep this family-friendly, by the way.Christian A Brown04:34You gotta beat that drum and just get out there. So after a couple years of actually, and a second book, I think I'd done by that point, and a second manuscript, I just started investing the money I made back into my business. And I treated it very much like a business too. And I still do, I think that's important too, is like, we do think of ourselves as artists, which we fundamentally are, but you do need a certain sense of business savvy or you won't be able to balance your own craft with, you know, where you want it to go. So I was treating it like a business, money in, money out. So the next thing I invested in, after I had done the edits and stuff for Book Two, I kind of took a little break because I knew it was going to take me a while to write that third manuscript, because they were kind of ballooning at that point, as fantasy novels tend to do. And so I invested in just a local Canadian, not some big New York one, but just like sort of a grassroots publicist. And she was fantastic. And she didn't cost me a tremendous amount of money. Like I paid like, maybe a couple hundred bucks to her here and there, and it was very sporadic, but she got me on TV. She got me on radio, like I think one of the first things, back when ... What was that horrible movie, based on that horrible book? The sex book.Kevin Tumlinson05:47Fifty Shades of Grey. Christian A Brown05:49Thank you. Yes. Kevin Tumlinson05:50Ah, nailed it on the first try.Christian A Brown05:52That's all you need, right? That's all the descriptors you need. So yeah, back then, so that was kind of when the blitz started, and that was one of the first things she got me. She got me on AM 640, which is a huge Canadian local radio show, one of one of the big ones still, and got me an interview there to talk about, you know, because there's a bit of romance in my book. Not particularly, it's just sort of there as part of the agency for the characters. But yeah, so we were talking about romance and that book, and so yeah, she got me these really, really good opportunities. She was also the one that turned me on to Ingram Spark and helped me understand sort of how to get my book, to answer the question you asked before, into traditional channels. So Ingram Spark will actually manufacture and distribute, unlike Amazon, which doesn't distribute to brick and mortar-unless, I think there's a co