For the last couple of months, I’ve spent a surprising amount of time working on books that have already been published.
Not rewriting them. Not editing them.
Rebuilding everything around them.
That’s one of the peculiar things about being an indie author—or, in our case, an indie author who also happens to be part of the family that runs a small publishing company. You finish a book, publish it, send it out into the world, and move on to the next one.
Except the world doesn’t stop moving just because the book is finished.
The way readers discover books changes. Retailers change. Websites change. Search engines change. Social media changes. The things that worked brilliantly five years ago become less useful. Things nobody had heard of five years ago suddenly become important.
And somewhere in the middle of all that are the books themselves, sitting patiently on the virtual shelf wearing the blurb, categories, keywords, pricing, and assorted other bits and pieces you gave them years ago.
So this summer, we decided it was time to take a very hard look at Stories Rule Press.
We’ve been calling the result SRP 2.0.
That sounds much more impressive and technologically sophisticated than it really is.
Mostly it has involved Tracy and me looking at things and saying, “Why the hell are we still doing it that way?”
Sometimes there was a good answer.
Frequently, there wasn’t.
So we’ve been changing things.
We’ve been going through our existing books and looking at everything around them: descriptions, categories, keywords, pricing, websites, retailer listings, the way the books connect to one another, and the way readers discover our authors in the first place.
We’re also changing the way we introduce new readers to our books.
For years, like a lot of indie publishers, we used free books on the retailers as an introduction to an author or series. It worked. Sometimes extremely well.
But we’ve decided to do something different.
We’re building Starter Libraries.
Each Starter Library contains three complete stories from one of the Stories Rule Press authors. You sign up, the first book arrives immediately, and the other two follow over the next few days.
No excerpts. No sample chapters. Three actual stories.
And yesterday, our first one went live.
Cameron Cooper’s Starter Library is officially out in the world.
Cameron writes character-driven science fiction—big futures, strange worlds, political intrigue, crime, technology, spaceships, and, most importantly, people trying to make their way through all of it.
The three books we picked are Hammer and Crucible, The Body in the Zero-Gee Brothel, and Winds of Change.
They’re three very different stories, which is exactly the point. If you’ve never read Cameron before, those three will give you a pretty good idea of the range of stories waiting for you. If you’d like to try Cameron’s Starter Library, you can get all three stories free here.
Cameron also gets the dubious honour of being our guinea pig.
Because Cameron is only the beginning.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out Starter Libraries for Tracy Cooper-Posey, Taylen Carver…
…and me.
Which means I’ve now reached the interesting stage of this whole SRP 2.0 experiment where all the clever ideas we’ve been inflicting on everybody else are about to be inflicted on my books.
My Starter Library will include Assassinating Yesterday, Crime and Gummibears, and Feet of Clay.
Three complete thrillers. Free.
And that’s only part of what’s coming.
We’ve also completely rebuilt our publishing schedule. Beginning this fall, there will be a new Stories Rule Press release every four weeks, rotating among our authors.
For me, that includes something rather different from the thrillers I usually write.
The Summer Garden.
It’s a warm, funny story about grief, friendship, community, second chances, and a bunch of people growing vegetables in a community garden while becoming tangled up in one another’s lives.
There are tomatoes.
There are enormous zucchini.
There are arguments about hoses.
There is coffee.
Lots of coffee.
So yes, it’s possible I haven’t strayed quite as far from my usual subject matter as I thought.
There’s considerably more happening behind the scenes, but you’ll hear about all of it soon enough.
For now, Cameron gets to go first.
We’ll watch what happens, learn what works, discover what we screwed up, fix it, and then send the next author through the machine.
Eventually it’ll be my turn.
And that’s probably when we’ll discover where all the loose bolts are.