And Then There Were Three

In Sci Fi Agonistes III, I chatted about starting on the path toward Indie Publishing for my science fiction novelette, And on the Eighth Day.  As I continued to surf and read more about the process, I found a number of websites and books that have been extremely helpful, and I've mentioned them all in that earlier post.  I'll just say there are many, many, wonderful folks out there blogging and posting and linking great tips and guidelines, and you can really learn from them...so be sure to thank them as well.

So, here I am, exploring and making notes and nodding, "ah ha, didn't realize that," and wondering where to begin--not to mention how I'd be able to accomplish all that new work and still be able to do any writing, oh, and yeah, that other something called a job--when a good friend and fellow member of our fiction workshop, Michael Bloom, says over coffee one day, "How about we team up on doing the Indie thing and start our own boutique publishing company?"  Eureka!  "And let's see if George Evans wants to join us."  Double Bingo!

Michael and his wife, Lisa, had previously started a venture called Random Acts Media, and they offered to let us use the name Random Acts Books and to riff on their fabulous logo.  Voila!

So, we had a name and then came the work.  We decided quickly that we would do everything professionally, including forming our own LLC, and working with pros for editing, book design, compilation for all the different formats, and even maybe some marketing with a publicist.

Between the three of us, we have a few novels, including some Civil War historical, a fable spinoff, and some science fiction, plus quite a few short stories, probably enough for at least a couple of collections.  But where to start?  As we chatted at our first official meeting, wine and cigars included, someone came up with the idea of publishing a "miniology" of one story by each of us to introduce our writing and to hopefully interest some readers in the larger works to follow.

As we chatted about which stories to include, we realized we each had a story or two that reflected on and linked one art form with, or through, another.  Ekphrastic!  (See my post here.)  Thus was born An Ekphrastic Trio, with the "Trio" theme to be used as a series title, with a second Trio most likely to be A Speculative Trio, a miniology of sci fi stories.  We'll probably also come up with a single word title to appear above the trio title, something a bit more catchy than "Ekphrastic."  But the Trio names are our placeholders for now.

The next step toward getting our work out there, we then decided, would be to find a great editor to help us make our stories the best they could be.  We researched editors and reached out to several we found at a great source of info and guidance for Indie Publication, Joanna Penn's great website, The Creative Penn.

And at this moment, we're in the midst of that exploration and have traded emails and Skyped with a few folks and are in the process of sending them the stories for our first Trio to dig deeper into what they feel we might need and how they might be of help.  We all agree we want to work with an editor we feel excited about, and who we feel is excited about our writing and our future projects.

By my next post, Random Acts Books hope to have finalized an arrangement with an editor and be officially on our way to publishing our first Trio this coming fall!