Publishing SHADOWS IN THE MIST - Part 2

After doing a goal-reaching exercise on being a published author, I began to list out my top ten values for my career. What was most important? At the top of the list were "launching a successful writing career," "seeing my book in print," and "sharing SHADOWS IN THE MIST with the world." While I was submitting manuscripts to agents, achieving these goals was completely out of my control. I had already spent years playing the waiting game with agents and was ready to waste any more time. So I made a key business decision: self publish.

In short, I formed my own publishing company Blue Morpho Publishing. I shifted my focus from seeing my novel as a manuscript to seeing it as a product to design and release to the market. This was an easy transition for me, because I've always been an entrepreneur by heart. I studied business in high school and college. I was already operating my own successful business as a freelance film/video editor. I was so excited to be taking over the destiny of my book, that I jumped right in. I got some financial backing. I hired an editor, Karl Monger, to give my manuscript a professional polish. I was determined to have a cover that I was not only proud of, but it had to compete for attention of millions of other books out on the market. The cover is where I focused most of my budget. I hired Kathy Dunn to design the cover and Les Edwards to illustrate it. Here's the evolution from sketch to finished cover.

There's a whole lot more that I did to prepare my book for the market that's too detailed for a blog post. If you are a writer and interested in learning more about the business side of self-publishing, email me at Brian@BrianMoreland.com for a free copy of my ebook PUBLISHING FROM MANUSCRIPT TO BOOKSHELF.

Most traditional publishers take anywhere from eighteen months to two years to release a book, from the day I decided to self-publishing, nine months later I was holding a bound copy in my hands. I'll never forget the feeling. Finally, after eighteen years, I had a bound novel with cover art and even a bar code on the back. It was ready to go to market. I originally released SHADOWS IN THE MIST in September, 2006. By October, it was on display at Barnes and Noble where I did two book signings. The goal-setting exercise I did paid off.

During its first year of publication, Shadows in the Mist received some great reviews.

"Equal parts horror story and spine-jangling thriller. An adventure not to be missed!"

—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of Map of Bones and Black Order

"Fast paced and tension ratcheting, Brian Moreland's SHADOWS IN THE MIST is a page-turner sure to satisfy even the most fickle thriller junkie! This one definitely won't be collecting dust on your nightstand!"

—Deborah LeBlanc, Author of Morbid Curiosity and A House Divided

“Shadows in the Mist is chilling horrorfest, written by a bright new talent in the horror genre. But more than that, this novel is a terrific page-turner that combines the best aspects of mystery, dark suspense, and the historical thriller. Well written. Well researched. And a gripping, haunting read from the opening pages in a creepy Nazi-occupied castle to the grand guignol of the last pages."

—Gary Braver, Bestselling Author of Flashback and Skin Deep

"Shadows in the Mist is one of the best books that I've read this year."

—Horror Bob, HorrorReview.com

“Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers meets Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code meets F. Paul Wilson's The Keep. With Shadows in the Mist, Brian Moreland weaves together the best elements of military, supernatural and religious conspiracy genres, staking out a new territory all his own.”

—T.L. Hines, author of Waking Lazarus

Self-publishing offered me the chance to do several book signings and a radio show and meet some incredible people along the way.

While I was I having some initial success promoting my book on my own, it was a lot of work, and I didn't get much novel writing done for about six months after I launched the book. I was wearing too many other hats--publisher, marketer, event planner. But I was having an absolute blast and finally experiencing what I had dreamed of doing eighteen years ago in college. I owe a lot of the book's success to my publicist Leann Garms. Here we are at my book release party at Barnes and Noble in Dallas, Texas.

In 2007 I had a key turning point. I entered my book into an international contest called the Independent Publisher Awards. Shadows in the Mist won a gold medal for best horror novel. Here I am in New York posing with author Riley Weston. Her novel Before I Go won a gold medal for the best novel overall. This is several months since my book launch, so my hair's a little longer.

The award helped my agent land a book deal with a major New York publisher, Berkley/Penguin. In less than one year after my book's release, and within two years of me deciding to self-publish, Berkley bought the rights to release Shadows in the Mist again in small paperback. Landing a book deal with a major publisher was my goal from the beginning. And now it's happening, with the book due to release nationwide in just a couple of weeks, on September 2nd, 2008. Check out the new cover.

That's my story of how I went from a discouraged writer to a self-published author to finally a traditional published author. I have no idea where my career will take me from here. Hopefully people will buy Shadows in the Mist and launch it to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. That, of course, is out of my control. Or is it? I believe we have the power to make our dreams happen. It just takes a lot of persistence, patience, and being believing the old saying "If you can conceive it, you can achieve it."

Publishing SHADOWS IN THE MIST - Part 1

Publishing my first novel has been a long and winding road that spans eighteen years. If you read my previous posts then you know that I began my writing career in college with a little horror novel called THE DEGBA DYNASTY (later renamed SKINNERS) that never sold, and that my second novel, SHADOWS IN THE MIST, began as a short screenplay I wrote for a screenwriting class. Back then I had stars in my eyes about how my career as a novelist would play out. I thought for sure by the time I was thirty, I was destined to be the next Stephen King or Dean Koontz, with half a dozen bestselling novels, my books made into movies, and millions in the bank. It's great to have dreams. They just sometimes take longer to manifest than we wish.

Well, I'm thirty-nine now, approaching forty real soon. And my dreams and persistence are what have gotten me where I'm at today, on the verge of releasing my first novel in small paperback through my publisher Berkley/Penguin. I actually self-published this book as a large trade paperback in 2006 under my own company, Blue Morpho Publishing. Here is the original cover painted by award-winning artist Les Edwards.

I'd love to have more books to share at this stage in my life, but I hit a few road bumps along my path that included a brief marriage, sudden divorce, a few bouts of depression, focusing on my video editing career, starting up several side businesses, and doing a lot of soul searching. With the intention of finding myself, I backpacked for three weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Five times I ventured down to Costa Rica to do yoga and meditate in the rain forest. I also attended a number of retreats in Hawaii, searching for my purpose. A frequent question I continually asked myself was "Am I destined to be a career author or am I just kidding myself? If my passion for writing is my true gift to the planet, how can I be successful at it? How can I get my books published?"

During my eighteen years of writing and dreaming, I never gave up my vision of being a published novelist. The flames of passion have always been burning. They just ranged from cindering coals to volcanic eruptions of creativity at different stages of my adult life. But I never gave up.

I shared in a previous post, that I failed to sell my first novel, SKINNERS. I spent years submitting it to New York literary agents and received dozens of rejections without anyone ever reading my manuscript. Then I spent four and a half years researching and writing SHADOWS IN THE MIST. Again, I invested two years and a lot of promotional materials to get an agent. I sent out half a dozen query letters then played the waiting game for several months. I even went to the Maui Writers conference and pitched my story to an agent. She read a portion of the book then declined, saying she was already representing a WWII horror author. Why she just didn't say this up front instead of making me wait for her response, I don't know. Bottom line is in 2005 I hit my breaking point. I was on the verge of doing something I never thought I would do--quit this silly dream of being a novelist.

I took some time off from writing and publishing to get centered. Get to the core of why I'm here on the planet. And what kept coming up was I'm here to be a writer. A storyteller. A novelist. Writing is my innate talent. It's my gift and I need to share it, even if it takes years until my words reach the world. Even if I never get rich from it or achieve the fame and glory of Stephen King, writing is still my destiny. And I believe if we follow our inner calling, we will live a life that brings us the most joy. So that's what drives me.

Here is a mission statement that I wrote to keep me motivated.

MY MISSION:

I am writing exciting stories that invigorate my soul.
I am publishing novels that entertain millions of readers.
My books are made into blockbuster movies.
I am enjoying a prosperous career as a writer.

So now I had my life purpose and mission, I needed some direction. I needed someone to bounce off ideas and talk about where I was stuck. I started working with Life Coaches. I believe that hiring a personal coach is key to success. All successful athletes have a coach to keep them focused and motivated. There's so much that can distract us or weigh us down. It's easy to lose focus on what's most important. A life coach helps you prioritize the activities in your life that really matter and keep you focused on achieving your goals. I so believe in this that I trained to become a life coach myself, as well as a career coach for writers. If anyone is interested in personal coaching, email me at Brian@BrianMoreland.com.

So, here it was September 2005 and I'm down on my luck. I've got my life purpose--write novels for pleasure and profit and share my stories with the world--but no direction and very little gas left in the tank. During my coaching training, where I learned Nuero-Linguistic Programming (NLP), I used to practice techniques with my friend Mary-Helen. We did a goal reaching exercise where you write down in the present tense exactly what you want to achieve as if it's already happening, exactly the way you want it to happen, and then read it out loud to a partner with as much positive emotion as you can muster. I did this for my goal of seeing my novel SHADOWS IN THE MIST in print and selling in book stores.

To be continued on the next post . . .

A Brief History of Fiction Writing - Part 2

Spring semester of my sophomore year at U.T. I changed majors from finance to Radio/TV/Film. I knew I wanted to be a novelist first and foremost, but at that time (1989) there was no major for it, other than an English major.

I've always been a huge movie buff, so I studied film and screenwriting. I believe this helped my fiction writing, because I learned to write in scenes, and like movies, my novels are very scene-driven. I don't spend a lot of time with description or author monologues about philosophy. My characters play out scenes like actors; they do something to move the story forward, then I cut to the next scene. I like to keep the scene moving with dialogue. Being a film/video editor for the past fifteen years has helped me develop this concept of telling a story with dramatic scenes and intercutting them so they have a more powerful effect. I love cliffhangers and end my scenes with cliffhangers as much as I can to build suspense.

I also studied Creative Writing: Fiction, and learned how to structure and write short stories. My professor gave me some great feedback and I learned more that writing fiction is about crafting a story. It doesn't all get written perfectly in the first draft. I write many drafts, often thirty or more before I feel like a story or chapter is complete. I equate it to painting a picture. I'll write an initial scene from a place of inspiration. Write from the heart first and then let my logical mind work with it. I write it as I feel it in the moment, and that's my rough sketch of the scene. Then like adding details to a painting, I go back over the scene several times and add visual details, sound effects, tighten the action, and refine the dialogue to so it's efficient and powerful. Even though I write supernatural and horror, realism is very important to me. I don't like campy horror movies or books. I like horror that explores beyond the boundaries of what's seemingly possible and makes it feel real. I keep asking myself, "Does this ring true? Would the character really do this or say that? Can I make this scene even more riveting, more scary? Can I up the stakes? When writing suspense I often ask what's the very worst thing that could happen to this person? Then I put that into the scene.

Next, I'll talk about how my first novel, SHADOWS IN THE MIST, came about. Stay tuned.

A Brief History of Fiction Writing - Part 1

I discovered writing in college. At age 19, I decided to write a novel just for the fun of it. I also thought it would make me a millionaire quickly. Little did I know that becoming wealthy through writing novels was going to be a long and winding road.

So here I was attending the University of Texas at Austin Fall Semester, 1987. A Business Finance Major destined to be a banker or President of my own company. I didn't even know I had a creative side. Well, Christmas break of my Freshman year I had three weeks off and was staying with my parents, who then lived in Dallas. (That's where I grew up, by the way, in a little suburb called DeSoto).

While the Christmas season was in full swing, I brainstormed on becoming a novelist. Not to put out great literature, but because I thought it would be a profitable business venture. Back then I was a reader of mostly spine-tingling horror: Stephen King, John Saul, Robert R. McCammon and Dean Koontz. Stephen King was constantly on the bestseller list and every book he wrote became a movie. I wanted his success. I also read Dean Koontz's Watchers and Phantoms and I was a hooked Koontz fan for years. John Saul and Robert R. McCammon were also major influences. I loved reading mystery combined with fast-paced action and edge-of-your-seat suspense. I also loved stories that included monsters or ghosts. I enjoy the adrenaline of being scared or wondering what's making that strange noise in the basement. Just love it!

Anyway, I used to visit book stores and stare at all the cool book covers. Especially the small paperbacks. The artwork always captured my imagination and told me their own stories before even opening the book. I loved opening a paperback and smelling the pages. It was some kind of strange fetish I had, I guess, but it seemed like every time I was at a bookstore, I would flip the pages near my nose and inhale the words written there. Maybe that's how I became an author. I just inhaled the wisdom and creativity of those who came before me. Reading Marvel comic books also influenced my imagination.

So, back to my first horror novel at Christmas break. I started writing it in a spiral notebook. I came up with seven characters--all of them college students like me. The girls were hot and the guys were cool. I gave the book a really bad title called The Degba Dynasty. It was about seven college kids who spend Spring Break at a remote cabin in the Colorado wilderness. While hiking, they come across, of all things, an ancient pyramid in the Rockies that somehow no one has ever discovered. It was hidden in a thick forest where "man was never meant to go." At that time, I thought the concept could work. Now, after hiking near Boulder, and visiting towns like Aspen and Vale, I know there's no place in Colorado that man has never set foot. There are hikers and mountain bikers everywhere. Reality didn't matter back then. I was writing a horror novel for the sheer fun of it. I didn't need to get bogged down with whether or not the story was plausible.

Between Christmas and January of 1987, I defined my characters and outlined the plot. I returned to school for the Spring Semester and was pumped to write out the novel. We didn't have personal computers back then. But the university had a computer lab. I was there when it opened at 8:00 a.m. and they had to kick me out every night at 10:00 p.m. I discovered something about myself. I had a passion for writing fiction, and especially writing novels. I had never even written a short story. I just delved into my first novel and never looked back. I often describe writing a novel as visiting another dimension or a dream world. The fictional people around me seem so so real, so alive. I can see, touch, and hear everything around me. That's why I can stay in writing mode for six to twelve hours, only taking breaks to use the bathroom and maybe eat a little something.

Okay, I digress. The Degba Dynasty turned out to be a fun little story I wrote in about three months. It was violent, scary, and had some great sex scenes. I was a hormonal nineteen-year-old and didn't have a girlfriend, so I was living vicariously through my characters. I was also influenced by movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween. The basic premise was the seven college kids are out hiking and come across this undiscovered pyramid. It's buried underground except for the apex which juts out of the earth a couple stories high. They explore the pyramid's tunnels and discover some strange things in there (I'd rather not tell in case I decide to revisit this story and publish it later). Turns out there's a small town nearby with a bunch of hicks whose main role is to make sure no one ever finds the pyramid and leaks out that it exists. The backwoods hicks turn out to be alien half-breeds who can shape shift into seven-foot-tall creatures, something like werewolves, but with some alien features. I wrote this shortly after the movie Aliens came out. Both Alien movies blew me away and changed the way I looked at the horror genre forever. I was also blown away by one of my all-time favorites The Howling. So, I guess movies, even more than books, influenced my story telling. In fact, I'm often told that as people are reading my novels, they feel like their watching a movie in their heads.

Back to The Degba Dynasty. Once the college kids get caught exploring the pyramid and learn its true reason for being here, their lives become in jeopardy as the town of alien half-breed monstrosities wreak havoc on them. Then the book just becomes an act of survival.

My first version was a slight 120 pages, but I was proud of finishing a first draft of The Degba Dynasty. So proud that I paid thirty bucks to have it bound together with a solid black hardcover. I wanted to hold it in my hands and feel it as a book. Smell the pages. My mom and dad still have it sitting on their book shelf. Within four months I wasn't just a writer playing around with starting a novel. I had completed a whole manuscript. My story had a beginning, middle, and cataclysmic ending. It had romance, humor, scary scenes, tragedy, and incredible acts of heroism. It was horror, adventure, Sci-Fi, and mystery all rolled into to one book. Like I said, I was reading a lot of King and Koontz during that time.

After my real Spring Break was over and I got back to school, I wrote the second draft. By this point I was skipping all my classes and just writing all day long and into the night. My grades suffered that semester. All my finance and accounting professors wondered why my seat was always empty. Who had time to study? I was off in Colorado fighting aliens and saving the planet. I was also having the best time of my life. What more could a lonely, introverted guy ask for? My characters became my closest friends. A bit sad maybe, but I was a small-town kid trying to find myself at a university of thousands of students. I had grown up thinking that money and power were the pathways to happiness, but through my renaissance period my Freshman year, I was discovering that creative self-expression was the pathway. At least for me.

Well, I revised and edited my manuscript all the way until May. I was also reading a great writing book, How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey. I started learning the structure of a novel, as well as improving plot, characterization, and dialogue. I remember that May, the last day of school was approaching. I finished my second draft and the book was even better than before. I had added new characters and scenes and gave more history to the town and why they were hiding among us and protecting this pyramid.

I saved my entire manuscript on one floppy drive that I treated like it was plated with gold. Then tragedy struck. One day I go into the computer lab, slip the floppy into the computer for another writing session, and the computer blips and the screen reads: "Do you want to format this disk?" I didn't know what format meant, so I hit "yes." It deleted my entire manuscript. My only digital copy. Six months of typing--gone. I was crushed. A night of heavy eating of pizza followed. I couldn't believe I had lost my entire novel. Back then I was very new to computers. It was the late eighties and computers were mostly IBM, green letters on black screens, with a single floppy drive. I didn't know about backing up files. I just knew how to boot up and start typing then save to my floppy. So it was a hard lesson about computers and formatting disks, but it turned out to be a godsend. Did I give up? No. A true writer keeps writing, no matter what. Persistence, persistence, persistence.

I had the whole story in my head. I knew the characters by heart, how they talked, their attitudes, beliefs, likes and dislikes. So I went back to page one and started typing. What happened after that amazed me. The story began to flow out easily and differently than before. I was coming up with new scenes that were richer. The plot went off into new, exciting directions. And new characters began to emerge. New villains that were even more sinister. And the title changed from The Degba Dynasty to Skinners. After writing two drafts, the third came out even faster. Just a few months after deleting my manuscript, I had rewritten the entire book and had it saved on multiple floppies. A savvy novelist was born.

Through the process of writing my first novel in college, I developed a belief in myself that I was not only a committed novelist, but destined to one day hold a paperback of my book in my hands, hold the book to my nose, and smell the pages.

The Adventure Begins!

Hi, and welcome to my blog. In the past couple of years, I've begun to see some successes from self-publishing my first novel, SHADOWS IN THE MIST, to landing two book deals, one here in the U.S. with Berkley/Penguin and one in Germany. SHADOWS IN THE MIST is being translated into German. It is also finding readership in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. Three years ago I was losing all hope in ever seeing my manuscripts in bookstores. I now have a literary agent, an editor, and publicist. I've seen both sides of publishing, as a self-publisher and working with a traditional publisher. My second novel DEAD OF WINTER is coming along great, and I'm finally realizing my dream to be a working published author.

The dream began back in college twenty years ago. (I turn 40 November 28th.) Amazing how time flies. Hitting my midlife crisis at age 35 really pushed me to finally get myself to complete my first book and just get it out there, even if I had to do it myself. And I did. I believe that any writer can complete a manuscript and get their work published. You just have to push past all the internal and external obstacles and keep going for it. Keep believing in yourself. As a published author and success coach to writers, my mission with my blog is to inspire others to keep following your dream.

My intent is to reach readers and writers alike. And to inspire people to read, write, and go after their own dreams. I'll do my best to keep you entertained as I share advice based on my experiences in the exciting world of book publishing. Thanks so much for visiting. More entries to come very soon.