A couple days ago, when I wrote about my upcoming novel, Ghost Detective, I mentioned that I’m doing a little bit of recalibrating with my writing career.  Well, republishing my Jack Nolte books under my own name is a big part of that process.

Why go to all the trouble, and why did I publish those books under a pseudonym in the first place?  Well, at the tail end of 2010, when I first indie-published The Gray and Guilty Sea, both Big Publishing and my own writing career were in a very different place.  I’d published my first young adult novel with Simon and Schuster and was working on a second, plus had an inkling to write a middle grade fantasy involving the untold story of Pinocchio (which turned out to be the book Wooden Bones.) Although I’ve always been one of those writers who writes like he reads — all over the genre map — I was feeling like I was building toward something of a career as a young adult/children’s writer under my own name.

Now, you have to understand, this isn’t how I saw my writing career.  I follow a simple motto when it comes to my writing, one that I actually have taped to my monitor as a daily reminder:  Write your own favorite book. What I mean is, I try not to pigeonhole myself as a young adult writer or a children’s writer or a mystery writer or a science fiction writer or literary writer, though in my short career, you could already make the case that any one of those labels applies.  I just try to write my own favorite book.  I’m not saying I always succeed, but that’s the goal.  I write stories that I want to read, hopefully ones that will stick with me long after the final page is written/read.

If I don’t try to write books that are my favorite books, how can I ever hope for them to be someone else’s?

But back to 2010.  There are many valid reasons to write under a pseudonym.  You could do it because you don’t want people to know (anonymity) you write “that sort of thing,” whatever “that sort of thing” is.  You could do it because you write across genres and you want to more clearly distinguish those books for readers (branding).  But even if you don’t feel the need to write under a pseudonym for those two reasons, there was an even better one if you hoped to have a long and fruitful traditional publishing career:  protecting your sales numbers.

If you wrote thrillers that were expected to move 100,000 units a book, you may not want to release that latest science fiction novel that’s only expected to sell 5000 under your own name.  Especially in the days of the big box bookstores (days that are thankfully coming to an end), those sales numbers could determine how many copies of your next book the bookstore ordered.  So some bean counter sees you only moved 5000 of your last book, not understanding genre expectations, and dramatically reduces your order for your next thriller.

Don’t think this happened?  Oh, yes, it did, all the time, and it killed careers —  unless the writer was willing to re-launch under a pseudonym.  And of course, the smart writers, understanding this phenomena, wrote under pseudonyms from the get go.  My friend Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of the masters of this, writing award-winning science fiction under her own name, acclaimed mysteries as Kris Nelscott, and quirky paranormal romances as Kristine Grayson — and those are just three of her pen names!  (And if you haven’t read her — any of version of her — you really should.  She’s a fantastic.)

So for some of these reasons (branding, fear of poor sales hurting my career) and because nobody really knew what the future held for indie-published writers in 2010 (though it was looking promising), I decided to release The Gray and Guilty Sea under the pen name Jack Nolte.*

Honestly, I was unsure about the book, too.  A writer’s self-confidence can already be an iffy thing, and this is a book that had failed to sell to traditional publishers.  Granted, it did help land me one of the top literary agents in the business, and it did elicit some very glowing rejection letters, but the editors all passed on the book.  The most common complaint was that they loved Garrison Gage but were hoping for a “bigger” story, with lots of “scope,” something like The Da Vinci Code. But I wasn’t writing that kind of book.  I was writing a character book about a private investigator who “retires” to the Oregon Coast from New York after his wife is brutally killed in a mafia hit, and who, in the book’s opening page, stumbles upon a dead girl on the beach on an evening walk.  It’s a regional mystery, heavy on the character, about guilt and redemption.

So I just stuck it out there with no fanfare, not even a mention on my own blog.  I even put the book at 99 cents originally because I just didn’t care.  I created a JackNolte.com website ( a site which, you’ll notice, now links back here) and treated Jack like he was a separate writer altogether.

And an amazing thing happened. The book started to sell.

Not by the standards of Hugh Howey, Amanda Hocking, or Joe Konrath, you understand, but it was still selling eight to ten copies a day.  I did publish a free short story, “A Plunder by Pilgrims,” a sort of prequel to the book, and I know for a fact that many readers discovered it that way, but otherwise I was doing no promotion at all.  I raised my price to $1.99.  Then $2.99.  Then $3.99.  The book continued to sell at about the same rate.  I eventually raised it to $5.99, trying to position the book at the bottom end of traditionally-published books, and though the sales did slow down after a while, it had a very good two year run and continues to sell at a decent clip.  I released a second book a year ago featuring Gage, A Desperate Place for Dying, and it has also sold well.

Which brings me to today.  I’m just about to publish Ghost Detective, which I think readers of the Jack Nolte books may very well enjoy.  I’m well into the third Garrison Gage novel, which, if the stars align, will be released later this year.  Over the past few months, this whole pseudonym thing has been nagging me a great deal.  It’s hard enough to build one name, and it’s doubly hard if you’re spreading your books among several.  This has always been true, I guess, but it’s even more true now:  The best way to build a career, today, and with indie publishing specficially, is to steadily release new, similar material.  It’s not the only way, and it’s certainly not right for every writer, but it’s probably the most common method I’ve seen writers use to achieve success recently.

The one thing stopping me was this idea of branding.  Though I’m trying to be a little more disciplined in the projects  I select to write (part of the recalibration I mentioned), I can guarantee you that you will see other children’s fantasies, quirky young adult books, and other things that will continue to make me one of those writers who’s hard to pigeonhole.  My muse, I like the guy, but he’s a bit schizophrenic, you see, and I’m afraid I’m stuck with him.

What if a parent who bought A Tale of Two Giants, one of my more gentle children’s fantasies, buys one of my grittier mysteries and is shocked at the profanity?  Will I piss of a reader?  Will I lose them?

Well, maybe.  And you know what?  That’s okay. It’s also possible that a reader who enjoyed my quirky young adult book, The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens, may also be a fan of dark paranormal mysteries.  I mean, I am, right?  And by keeping it all under my own name, I make it easier for that reader, the one like me, to find all of my books.  And there are lots of ways to brand books, from font style to cover image.

I’m also reminded of something a long-time pro said to me a few years ago.  I think it may have been Kate Wilhem, though I can’t be sure, though it certainly seems like something she would say.  When I asked what she thought about pseudonyms, she said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, I think readers are pretty smart.  In fact, I think they’re smart enough to decide for themselves what they want to read.”

I thought that was pretty wise, even though I decided to ignore it.  (For better or worse, I’m often ignoring advice people give me.)  But now, I’ve pretty much come around to her point of view.  Unless there’s a very good reason to write under a pseudonym — and there still are many — I’m going to be writing almost everything under my own name.

Thankfully, with indie publishing I was able to do this relatively easily.  Here’s what I did over the last week:

1. Add my own name to the online listings of the Jack Nolte books as a co-author
2. Repackage the covers, dropping the Jack Nolte to a “writing as” subhead
3. Direct all traffic from JackNolte.com to my own site.
4. Publish updated versions of the paperbacks with new covers and interiors.
5. Write this blog post, so Jack Nolte fans will know why I’m making this change.

This way I don’t lose any momentum from the Jack Nolte name, but I position myself so that when the third Gage book is released, I can just release it completely under my own name.

It was a bit of work, but it was worth it to me.  I can’t deny that maybe a little bit of ego was involved, too.  So sue me.  My name is my brand.  I don’t know what that brand is, exactly, except I can tell you this:  You may not like everything I write, but you’ll always get my best effort.  I hope that’s enough.

*In case you were wondering, Nolte is my mother’s maiden name, and “Jack” is a handle I used in the early days of the Internet with Usenet and public Bulletin Boards, when as a teenager I wanted to engage in online discussions but also wanted to protect my anonymity.  Mostly, I think, because I was afraid the older kids would come to my house and beat me up.

Well, I promise not to make it a routine.  Whenever I spend too much time on the website, it doesn’t take long for me to feel like the effort I put here would be better off spent writing fiction, especially since with a busy day job at a university and all the challenges that come from raising two kids, time is hard enough to come by as it is.  But as I menioned earlier, I’m making a little extra marketing push with the book being published this summer, Ghost Detective. Part of that effort is a short story called “The Haunted Breadbox,” which is not only a prequel to Ghost Detective but was also the inspiration for it.  Here’s a little more information:

Myron Vale sees ghosts. One hundred billion of them, to be precise.

In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. In fact, he may just be the only one. His strange ability the result of a gunshot to the head while serving as a Portland police officer, a few years later he recovers to forge a new life as private investigator catering to both the living and the dead.

His biggest problem? He can’t tell them apart.

In this short story prequel to Ghost Detective, the first novel featuring Myron Vale, a house call to an old farmhouse finds Vale investigating the most unlikely of haunted places — a breadbox. What lies inside? It’s not at all what Vale expects.

You can read this story for free right now on this website, or download a free copy in any number of formats over at Smashwords.com —  .mobi for the Kindle,.epub for the Nook, even PDF for your computer.  It’s also available for 99 cents on Amazon.com if you want to make it easy to download it to your Kindle.  At the end of the story is an afterword explaining the origin of the story, which then lead to the novel.

This is another great advantage of indie-publishing.  I’ve sold many short stories  to magazines and anthologies, but if I tried to do the same with this one, it could take six months to a year just sending it around (with no gaurantee anyone would buy it), and another six months to a year before it was published.  Then I’d have to wait another three to six months (an exclusivity period) before I could republish it on my site for free.

By releasing this one now myself, I can get it out before Ghost Detective is published, which hopefully will entice readers to pick up the book.  I did this once before, with a short story called “A Plunder By Pilgrims,” which was something of a prequel to The Gray and Guilt Sea, and I know for a fact that many, many readers discovered the novel via that short story.

A novel, by the way, which was published under the name Jack Nolte, and is now being re-released under my own name.  More about that soon.

If early reader reviews are any indication, it could very well be one of the best things I’ve written, which has prompted me to make a little extra marketing push.  When I finished this book, I really wanted to write more books about Myron Vale, and I’ve purposely set it up to be an ongoing mystery series.

When will it be published?  Target date for a simultaneous paperback/ebook release is July 1 (just in time for the holiday weekend), but it could be published a few weeks before that.  If you sign up for my newsletter there on the right, you’ll not only get a free copy The Man Who Made No Mistakes, you’ll also be the first to know when the book is available.  I don’t send many emails, a couple a year at most, but I do try to take care of my most dedicated readers.  You’ll also get first crack at limited editions and other things. I won’t spam you or give your email to someone else.  Promise.

A couple other things.  I’m releasing this book under my own publishing company, Flying Raven Press. When I first dipped my toes into the waters of indie-publishing a couple years ago, I thought it might be good — how can I put this tactfully? — to not be too obvious about that fact.  Even though self-publishing was the norm until maybe a hundred years ago (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Rice Burroughs and many other notable authors self-published their own work),  it took on a certain stink of desperation in recent decades.  But folks, the game has changed.  Self-publishing, if done right, is not only a viable alternative to traditional publishing, in most cases these days it is the preferred option.  There are so many writers covering this now that I hardly need to do so, but if you’re interested in learning more, read the blogs of Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathtryn Rusch, The Passive Voice, and J.A. Konrath.  That’s a good starting point, and from there, you’ll be led to many others.  I’m thankful to all of them for the help they’ve given writers.

I can honestly tell you I only considered submitting Ghost Detective to traditional publishers for about five seconds before dismissing the idea.

Why? Although I’ve had a great experience with Simon and Schuster with several of my novels, and would certainly consider a traditional publisher again for the right project, the advances, royalties, and contract terms have gotten pretty piss poor unless you have the leverage to dictate better terms. And how do you get that leverage?  By coming to them after you already have a top-selling book.

But even then, it’s not a sure thing whether an author should sign up with a traditional publisher.  Numbers are hard to come by, of course, but the expert analysis I’ve seen pegs non-online sales of most fiction around 40%.  This means that 60% of a novel’s sales (a little higher or lower depending on the genre) come from either ebooks or print sales via online channels like Amazon.com.  And once you know how, you as a writer can reach those markets just as well (or in many cases, better) than traditional publishers.

Yes, this means I have to wear the publisher’s hat in addition to the writer’s, but I don’t mind.  In my early creative days, I started as a visual artist (both cartooning and fine art), and have worked a number of jobs that required me to learn desktop design, so I enjoy putting the books together.  Whether my covers rival those coming out of New York, I’ll leave for you to judge, but I definitely feel I’m getting better.  The final draft of this book is currently being proofread by an experienced New York copy editor.  I can’t promise you there won’t be any errors in the book, because even the big publishing houses miss some, but when it’s all said and done, whether you buy the paperback or the ebook, I want you to feel you’re holding a book in your hands that’s just as good, at least in terms of presentation, as anything coming out of New York.

It’s been an up and down year on the writing side, which I may talk more about soon (or I may not, I’m a pretty erratic blogger, as you can see), but I feel really good about the future.  I’ve made some decisions lately to recalibrate my writing career a bit, and Ghost Detective is a big step in this process.  I hope you check it out.

Ghost Detective
by Scott William Carter

Ebook Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Paperback Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Genre: Fiction | Mystery

After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse:  He sees ghosts.  Lots of them.

By some estimates, a hundred billion people have lived and died before anyone alive today was even born.  For Myron, they’re all still here.  That’s not even his biggest problem.  No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell the living from the dead.

Despite this, Myron manages to piece together something of a life as a private investigator specializing in helping people on both sides of the great divide — until a stunning blonde beauty walks into his office needing help finding her husband.  Myron wants no part of the case until he sees the man’s picture . . . and instantly his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel.

Read the first chapter here.

Out at the Oregon coast with family, doing a little writing, relaxing, and having a good time.

Made a quick weekend jaunt down to Crescent City, California, where I did 17 miles of hiking in the Redwoods. Even in February, the temperature was in the low fifties.

Me

Poe: Yikes!

Me: You’re Edgar Alan Poe, and the best you can do is ‘yikes’?

Poe: I have been attempting of late to modernize my speech a bit.

Me: That sounds more like you. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad thing. The project wasn’t working and I needed some distance from it. I’m already fifty pages into a new book and it’s going well. What’s interesting to me is how my attitude about this might have been totally different ten years ago, maybe even two years. I probably would have been very depressed. But now, I think, well, that’s just part of the process, and you get on with it. That’s when I realized something.

Poe: And what would that be?

Me: I crossed some kind of Rubicon. I stopped trying to become a writer and simply became one. Now, I’m not saying I didn’t think of myself as a writer before, but I no longer feel I have to prove to myself that I am. Or to anyone.  I’m the writer I want to be.

Poe: So you’ve achieved all of your goals and dreams?

Me: Oh no. I’m more driven than ever. But it’s different. I’ve relaxed, I guess. I’ve released myself form the outcome to some degree and just focused on the doing of it. Maybe it sells, maybe it doesn’t, but once I’ve done what I need to do, that’s out of my hands. Maybe it’s partly because I’m hitting one of those big birthdays in a couple months, too, but I suddenly realized that I was living the life I wanted to live. I’d spent so many years preparing to live it that it kind of snuck up on me, and when I finally took a hard look at the whole balance of my life, I realized that it was all right there. I just needed to relax into it. And when that happened, a lot of stuff I used to worry about didn’t matter any more.

Poe: Such as?

Me: A lot of things. Going to writing workshops or conferences, for one. If I want to go, I’ll go, but I’m a lot pickier about them now — which is saying something, because I was picky before. The labels other people apply to me. Who cares if I’m a full time writer or not? Really, does that label matter? Nope. It doesn’t matter to the reader, that’s for sure. Sales, rejections, awards, reviews  . . . I’m not saying these things don’t mean anything, because that would be lying, but I don’t sweat them as much now, for good or bad. It’s like I’m more driven than ever by putting one word in front of the other, of my own internal compass of what I should be doing as a writer. I trust that instinct now.

Poe: And you didn’t before?

Me: Not as much as I should have.

Poe: Sounds as if you’re saying — and I’m attempting to use a modern colloquialism here — that you just don’t give a shit what other people think.

Me. Wow. That’s definitely modernizing your speech.

Poe: Thank you. I’ve been reading your Elmore Leonard collection.

Me: Nice. Can’t go wrong studying dialog from that guy. But yeah, I think you’ve got the right spirit. I guess another way of saying it is that I know what kind of writer I want to be, and the life I want to live, and I’m no longer seeking anyone’s permission or approval to be it. I’m just living it.

Made a quick jaunt out to Fogarty Creek State Park just outside of Depoe Bay on the Oregon Coast. Family had a great time. The temp, while not quite 50 degrees, was still 20 degrees warmer than in the valley.

Just got word that Wooden Bones, my fantasy chronicling what happened to Pinocchio after he became a real boy, will be published in paperback next summer, which is welcome news.   My young adult novel, President Jock, Vice President Geek, was just released in audio, available for digital download from Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Plus my second mystery under my Jack Nolte pen name, A Desperate Place for Dying, featuring the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, was also published in audio.

As for me, I carry on like usual, writing my four or five pages a day, reading good books, helping the kids with homework and piano, raking far too many leaves, and eagerly awaiting for each installment of The Walking Dead. I’ve also been extracting myself more and more from the Internet.  Went a little overboard during the election, which is usual for me, but I came out of it really questioning how engaged I want to be in general when it comes to the Internet.  I’ve already come to the conclusion that I want to be a minimalist promoting my work (believing, as I do, that the best way to increase your “discoverablity” as a writer, which is the latest buzzword in publishing, is to focus your energy on just writing more rather than trying to hype what you’ve already written, because more work means more gateways for people to find out about you as well as more for them to buy when they do — win, win), but I’ve also been feeling like I want to be a minimalst when it comes to how much time I spend reading online, too.

I already cut out all social media (Facebook, Twitter, and the like), and now I’ve been dramatically curtailing how much time I spend on listservs, blogs, and other things.  It’s a fine balancing act, because I like being informed, about publishing and the world at large, but I really, really like how I feel when I’m mostly disconnected from The Great and Powerful Digital Hive Mind.  The peace of mind is amazing.

This isn’t to say I want to give up the Internet completely.  It’s still the greatest tool for communication since the Gutenberg printing press.  But it is to say that I’m finding how to use it only when I need it (which isn’t nearly as often as I used to think) and not using it because I have this paranoid fear that Something Out There Is Happening And I Don’t Know About It.

I have a new friend in the house.  I picked up this handsome little puppet of Pinocchio in Venice during our summer trip to the Mediterranean.  He now sits on my “brag shelf,” standing guard over all the books and magazines where my work has appeared.   It was a pretty big memento to stuff into my suitcase, but I couldn’t pass it up, seeing how my book, Wooden Bones, was coming out at almost the same time I was visiting Italy.  You see Pinocchio puppets all over Italy, of course, but most of them have the traditional red outfit, and this one better matched the spirit of my book.  The company who produced it is based in Italy, and there was only one store in all of Venice where they were sold.

Picture taken on a fun day hike up to Mt. Rainier on Saturday with friend and fellow writer Mike Totten. A flat tire set us back a couple hours, but we still had a great day.