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Indie Author - Edward W. Robertson
IndieReads: What name do you write under?
Edward W. Robertson: My name’s Ed Robertson. There are a lot of us out there, however, including one particularly famous Canadian pop star, so I write under a longer version of my name.
IR: When did you start writing?
EWR: I started writing when I was 12. In English class, we were assigned to write a short story–5-6 pages, if I remember right. I wrote about a boy and his dragon (pretty original, eh?); my story ended up about twenty pages long. It flipped a switch in me. A switch that said “Write a ridiculous novel about a bunch of 12-year-olds with lasers who save the world from an invasion of alien frog-monsters.” I spent my next few months tucked into my computer chair telling a story full of puns, bad jokes, and tween-on-alien violence.
IR: What genre do you write in the most?
EWR: Science fiction. I write a lot of fantasy, too, and occasionally I’ll write a story that ends up horror.
IR: What is it about that genre that attracts you?
EWR: After that initial burst of SF/F writing, I got more and more into literary fiction. That’s all I pursued through high school and most of college. I like literary fiction. I still read a lot of it and I enjoyed writing it. But a few years back, I realized there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t write literary fiction that was also packed with wizards and robots. With SF/F, you can write about absolutely anything and still hit on (or try to) the same themes and emotional depth of literary fiction. I haven’t looked back.
IR: How many books have you published?
EWR: Two novels and two short story collections. Most of the stories were previously published in various magazines, but there’s some new material mixed in too.
IR: You also currently have a free novella up at Smashwords called The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story. I just downloaded it and am looking forward to reading it.
EWR: Hah, that’s great. A lot of fun to write, but I’m glad I waited to try a novella until I’d already worked on novels and short stories. It’s a deceptively tight format.
IR: Which one should people start with?
EWR: Depends. If you like epic fantasy, well, The White Tree
IR: What was the prime motivation in publishing your work through independent channels?
EWR: First, there’s no reason I can’t continue to pursue the traditional path at the same time; I intend to, actually, and would love to wind up with a career that’s part indie, part big guys. Second, I feel like my career’s ready. I’ve been going after agents and all that for ten years now. These books aren’t the first I ever wrote–my first two proper novels, written in college and after, those are locked away in a dank file-dungeon deep beneath my hard drive. Over the last couple years, I’ve started selling a bunch of short stories. Some of the outlets they end up in are smaller than others, but I’m already being paid for my fiction. This doesn’t feel like that big a leap to me.
That said, I am on-bended-knees grateful this publishing environment did not exist 5-10 years ago, because I would have published my early work, and I would be humiliated by it now. In this new environment, young or beginning authors are going to have an extremely hard time knowing when they’re ready to self-publish.
IR: Do you read other independently published authors works?
EWR: I got a Kindle earlier this year and just started to dive in to other
The White Tree
indies’ books. I’m currently reading Name Your Link
IR: Where can people find your books and which source has been the most successful for you?
EWR: As of this moment, they’re available for Kindle through Amazon
IR: Do you have any advice for some one who would like to be an indie author or publisher?
EWR: First off, make sure going indie is something you actually want to do. Many stunning, wealthy careers are still going to come out of traditional publishing. Doing it all yourself cuts into your writing time. It’s a lot of work. Yeah, even big press writers have to self-promote and all that these days, but at least they have some support. And you know what, advances are a pretty cool thing, too.
I touched on this earlier, but if you’re just starting to write, wait to publish. I know it’s a very exciting time and every indie author in the land is instantly becoming as rich as a gold brick with diamond teeth and the original draft of Jesus’ secret memoir, but if you want to have any hope of successfully promoting your book, you have to be confident in it. For your first few projects, expect to revise heavily. You’ll learn so much over the course of writing your first book(s) that the words you’re writing at the end will be evidently better than the ones you wrote at the start. I wrote four books before I could output a first draft I was happy with. I still revised it twice.
Publishing too early won’t be a total disaster for anyone. It’s easy enough to delist books later on down the line. But think of it this way: five, ten, twenty years from now, you want to be able to read your published work and be happy with it. There’s a world of difference between “Well, if I’d known a little better I would have realized the story actually started midway through the second chapter” and “Oh my god, that thing I wrote is an affront to the very notion of literacy.”
IR: Do you have any new works coming out soon that you can tell us about?
EWR: I’ve got a space zombies novella that’s revised, ready, and formatted. Just waiting on my cover art. Right now I’m outlining an alien invasion novel that should be ready by the end of the summer, but I’m ready to switch gears and launch into a sequel if The White Tree takes off. In the meantime, I expect I’ve got a new story coming out somewhere. I list any new publications on my blog.
Website: http://edwardwrobertson.blogspot.com/
More Info:
Ed’s been writing sci-fi and fantasy since he was 12 years old. His terribly original first story was about a boy who found a baby dragon, raised it, and had to let his new best friend go when it got too big.
His short fiction has appeared in The Aether Age: Helios anthology and will soon appear in Fantastique Unfettered and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. It can also be found in back issues of Reflection’s Edge and M-Brane SF, among others.
Born in the Northwest in 1982, he’s since moved to LA’s South Bay, where he sometimes channels his inner Patrick Swayze and practices kung fu on the beach. Besides writing fiction, he covers movies for the Tri-City Herald.
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