Being Indie Authors

We started our journey as indie authors in 2021 when we gave up on trying to find an agent and uploaded Lesson One: Vampires Parts 1 & 2 to Rakuten Kobo's online store. That's Book 1 of our SFF digital comic book series An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying. The file was too big so we had to split it in two. This was definitely not like we had envisioned things. We had wanted not only a physical book, but also a single volume. And this wasn't the only time our carefully laid plans were crushed.

Before we settled on AIFAMS, we had already had to abandon another graphic novel series. This one was more serious, focused on witches and sorcerers, and was more standard Urban Fantasy. We had been reading The Sandman, Hellblazer, and House of Mystery, and wanted it to look like that. It was going to have ten volumes, which we had more or less already plotted. Unfortunately, reality got in the way, and we had to accept that the series would require a very different artistic style. AIFAMS, which follows the adventures of Tim, a monster slayer with a secret, and geeky fanfic writer Penny, was the wiser choice and we took it. Lesson One: Vampires was born after we wondered what Fright Night (1985) would be like in a post-Twilight world. We also threw in some gory humour à la Tucker and Dale VS Evil, and lots of 'goo' mentions thanks to Wharehouse 13. It was going to be a standalone novel, but we liked the characters and their world, and decided to turn it into a series. Tim was initially going to be a jaded vampire hunter, but then we thought it would be funnier if he was genuinely nice and well-intentioned. Penny didn't do much in the first draft, and wasn't going to do much in the first plans for the series, but things changed, as things are wont to do, and she became the co-lead. The first draft of Lesson One was finished in 2013; it had only around 82 pages and the art was painful. Clip Studio Paint is very useful, but it took some time to find its possibilities. The story had pretty much the same big moments, but it was more focused on Tim. By 2016 we had expanded it to 154 pages and had a better idea of where we wanted the series to go. But first, we needed to find an agent who would then find a publisher so we could put it out there. Needless to say, things didn't go as we'd expected. We presented ourselves differently back then, but the book was the same. With the rejections piling up, we gave up. We kept writing/drawing, but we stopped querying and didn't really know where to go from there. Honestly, we have no idea what would've happened if the book hadn't been rejected. Our ideas for the series were different, more conventional, and the Lovecraftian influences not as pronounced. Would we have been asked to avoid making it too obvious because of Lovecraft’s personal views? Or perhaps to tone down the violence? Maybe there would never have been any Penny and the Silver Key or Tim's Winter Adventure. We'll never know.

The biggest obstacle to self-publishing was that we couldn't see a way to convert our book to an e-book format. Lesson One's final draft was made with Clip Studio Paint Pro, which doesn't have the multi-page function needed to convert all the pages as a whole. Instead, all that could be done was convert each to JPEG and then put them all together in a PDF with doPDF. The results were far from perfect, and the file too big. We couldn't get rid of that last bit with Clip Studio Paint EX until very recently, but there's a world of difference between taking all those extra steps and simply export a comic as an EPUB. Unfortunately, unlike with KDP, you can't make a table of contents. Amazon really makes everything super easy, but it asks for too much personal data. Kobo was easier and we uploaded Lesson One: Vampires Part 1 in October of 2021. In addition to that, we launched a self-hosted blog, Inaccessible Leng, in the hopes that by reading our posts, people might want to check out our books. However, that was an abject failure. The blog was ignored by everyone except us and the hackers, and Lesson One remained un-downloaded. Desperate, we did that which we had sworn we'd never do - joined social media. We needn't have to worry, though, as most people just ignored us. Instagram got us nowhere, but we managed to grow more on Twitter. Unfortunately, that didn't solve our main problems - the lack of success of the blog and what was meant as the first volume of a series. We decided that a radical change was needed and ditched the blog, even though we had paid for a whole year, and split Lesson One into smaller issues. Letting go of the blog wasn't just because no one went there, though - we just couldn't handle the stress of WordFence's security notifications. It was on the now defunct Inaccessible Leng that we made our first attempt to turn Lesson One into a webtoon to be published on the blog. We gave up halfway through because, again, no one else was going there. Later, we would go back to that and publish it on Webtoon Canvas.

After putting our blog out of its misery, we decided that we still wanted to keep writing longer posts and created our first Blogger blog - The Snarky Cats of Ulthar. That was more successful than the other one. Lesson One went through several iterations until we settled on 4 issues, and we finally got some downloads, though that was likely due to it being free. The webtoon version got some views, but we have the feeling that only one person read the whole thing, and judging by our sales numbers, didn't think it was good enough to get the other books. Because, yes, despite everything, we kept publishing the next adventures. This also meant yet another change of plans. This was supposed to be a graphic novel series, each volume a different lesson, hence 'Lesson One', but as we mentioned before, the files were too big, so we had to split what would've been Lesson Two into smaller issues. Only, since unlike its predecessor, it was itself split into chapters, we had to give up on the Lessons format. These ones weren't all free, so you can guess which ones got downloaded... Still, we persevered and kept writing/drawing. With the blogging, too, jumping between Blogger and WordPress.com. Things were far from ideal and we saw social media and the blogs take up too much of our time; time that should've been used for working on our WIP. We managed to strike a balance between everything for a while, but eventually things started unravelling again. We seem to have a knack for wasting time with useless tasks (like writing this post). We published a whole book on one of our WordPress.com blogs and no one read it despite having publicized it on 3 social media platforms. Speaking of which, social media stats aren't very encouraging, but there's nothing else we can do. The WordPress.com adventure was a failure, and we're starting to suspect the accuracy of Blogger stats. However, we're first and foremost indie comic book creators, and the last 2 books of the series (well, 1 and ¾ as Book 5, Penny and the Silver Key isn't finished yet) were a breakthrough in terms of what we had wanted it to be. Making the AIFAMS Wiki, a Google Sites website with information about the series, gave us a full view of this world we made. Ironically, at the same time, we're seriously questioning the future of AIFAMS. It's one thing for people not to want to spend money, but ignoring free books? That means something. We still want to finish Penny and the Silver Key - after all, we already started publishing it - but after that, we just don't know.

More recently, while playing around on The Bog Witch, our private bog filled with raw WIP ideas and snarky replies that we shouldn't post on social media so we don't end up arguing with some idiot, we brought back a character from that abandoned first series. It made sense, because she's not happy about where she is either. It was just one post, but then we wrote another, and that got us thinking. She wasn't the lead character and only showed up in a prequel (yes, we made a prequel, plus 2 full graphic novel scripts), but when, at one point, we tried turning the series into a literary novel, we developed the character more. We're not really interested in going back to that world, as our ideas for it changed and the full story would require much more work and we're so not in the mood for writing a complex 10-volume series, or even a 5-volume one; not to mention that we still have Penny and the Silver Key. We also didn't see how the original story could work with just this character as it was the lead, who's a witch, who solved things... until we did. It's funny, because while 99% of the stories we review on social media are short stories, we still tend to think of full-length novels when we're developing ideas for a new book. We could see this as a short story, more than one, even, with the character as an occult detective. Of course, we've envisioned many things, and very few have come to pass, so it could very well end up being another dead end.

And this is our journey as indie authors so far. No, it's not going well. The only good thing we can say at this point is that at least, we didn't have to pay for book covers or editors like others did. The most common advice heard in the writing community across social media platforms is to wait, that these things take time. We get it, but creating a digital comic isn't easy. Do we stop until people start showing interest in the already published books? And if we do, will people avoid AIFAMS because the publication date makes them worry that the series will never be finished? We just don't know.