I’m one of the many “mid-list” authors who were dumped by mainstream publishing—in my case, after my first novel (My Life with Darwin, Houghton Mifflin), a work of literary fiction, didn’t turn out to be a blockbuster. A collection of my stories,Throwing Knives, won the Sandstone Prize and was published by Ohio State University Press. When I cut loose and wrote a spy thriller— Satan’s Chamber—for fun, traditional publishing was floundering (as it is today), and our queries to agents and one publishing house didn’t go anywhere. That’s when Karetta [Hubbard] and I decided to launch our independent press, Fuze Publishing, to bring out the book. (We’ve since published nine other titles.) It’s been a steep learning curve—book production, bookkeeping (!), publicity, etc.—but it’s been really liberating, and creativity-affirming, to take charge of our own fate.
Read the entire interview on “Two Ends of the Pen.”
