I've decided to publish The Band with lulu.com. The whole experience has been a crash course in basic publishing skills in terms of how to: 1) make a book available to online bookstores like Amazon, Powells, Barnes & Noble, 2) format a text so that it looks like the kind of book you'd buy in a bookstore, 3) establishing an ISBN number so that your book is available to retail outlets. Throughout the whole process, I've been reminded of the three years of editorial work I did on The Concord Saunterer. But the truth is, it really is not that difficult to publish a novel.

I guess I've been waiting for an editor or agent to read my work too long. For example, I sent The Band to a publisher in North Carolina on February 1, 2003. 15 months later, I received the title page in the SASE I sent them with "Does not meet our current needs" handwritten in the upper-right-hand corner. No explanation, no apology for taking nearly a year and half to read 5 sample pages. Nothing. This reasonably characterizes the experience of trying to find a publisher when you're an unknown writer.

I'm wary of publishing all of my novels on my own; particularly the most recent ones like The Colorado Sequence, The Miracle, Culpepper, and Claws. I've got to believe that there's an editor out there who will actually read my work, but so far (in eight years), it hasn't happened. Culpepper, for example, has been form-letter rejected by more than a half dozen small press publishers, the most recent of which took nine months to respond to sample chapters and offered no explanation as to why they weren't interested in it. It's like a brick wall.

As disheartening as this sounds, it is actually kind of liberating. I've just come to realize that it is wholly possible to spend 3-6 years working on a novel only to find it impossible to place with an editor. The key is just to keep writing. One novel at a time. And continue to enjoy and do good work. Eventually I'll have a dozen novels published, even if I have to publish them all on my own.

I think you send out a novel when it's done to editors and agents, but if you haven't found one within three years of a novel's completion, you ought to just publish it yourself. Make it available to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc., and move on.

From everything that I've read, The Band should be available within 6-8 weeks via most retail book outlets. I've got to proof a copy and give my final "ok," and then within a few weeks, it will be a published novel available to the public! Pretty cool, eh?

In the meantime, I've got short stories coming out this summer at Plots With Guns and Shred of Evidence, as well as a few other stories under consideration elsewhere.