I have heard of now-successful novelists having collected enough rejection slips to wallpaper their front rooms. Frankly, I can’t see how this is possible.

It’s not that I haven’t received a few rejection slips myself. I have. My comic fiction novel, Major BS: A Top Secret Mission, has done the rounds of plenty of Australian publishers the past year or two.

But do the arithmetic. If each publisher typically demands to see the manuscript exclusively and then keeps it for about three months, just how many rejection notices will you get?

I recently went to see the production of Chess in Queanbeyan (I live in Canberra) and took heed of a line from one of the lead characters: “Old Russian proverb says: Patience is a virtue, but why wait.” So at the age of 50, with more than 30 years behind me as a journalist on newspapers up and down the eastern seaboard, I have bitten the bullet and decided to make things happen myself.

Heck, I had the product, 93,000 words honed with ample advice from a whole raft of how-to books, including Get Your Book Off The Ground by Anthony Santoro and Suzanne Male.

I opted to give up on trying to get my novel printed by a mainstream publisher and go instead with an Australian print-on-demand publisher, Equilibrium Books, in Western Australia.

POD makes a lot of sense in these days of diminishing resources. Fifteen years ago I self-published a novel in Tasmania called Apples – I had to print 500 copies, sold about half of them and the rest are in my garage where they capture no carbon at all these days.

EQ Books wasn’t free. It cost me $349 to set the book up but, once the publisher was satisified with the product (it won’t take just anything and it has to be edited to a fairly reasonable standard), the process has been quite quick, from the artwork for the cover to the formatting. But, in October, it was out!

I know EQ Books’ product is good. I published a book of columns, How Much Is That Scorpion In The Window with them some years ago. That was hardly a raging success but I have to be honest.  It was all old stuff that had already been on my web site or in various newspapers. And I lacked motivation in promoting it – I had a career to sidetrack me.

Now, however, I’ve ticked off the things I wanted to do in that career and I see fiction writing as my new challenge. So I am much, much more motivated this time around.

I’m being much more proactive in seeking publicity with this book, including contacting newspapers and asking them if they will take review copies, I have set up a Twitter account and a graphic designer friend is helping me redesign my web site to promote the book. When the book arrives, I’ll make sure the local library gets a copy and I’m trying to get some token copies into a couple of bookshops.

My main point of sale will be via the Internet. EQ Books will promote and sell the book from its web site, and post them to the four corners of the earth.

Before I finished the book I asked some acquaintances to read it, including a woman in Texas who gave it the thumbs up. Although the book is based in Australia, three of the main characters are British so I’m hoping that by word of mouth, I might sell a couple of copies in the UK too.

I figure I have to sell about one-hundred copies before I start earning.

I am realistic. I’m not going to sell enough copies to give up my day job – but  I want it to be a stepping stone. I don’t want to be like my father who was also a journalist. He was forcibly retired with ill health at 60 and died 10 years later.

When I was growing up, my dad wrote three novels. He was a Pom who, as far as I know, had never been on a horse his whole life but he made some good money writing western stories for American girly magazines in the 1950s. But he never cracked the novel market which I think is sad. He had to fall back on journalism for a living.

POD is giving me a chance for a different future. I am trying to grab it with both hands.

The bonus is my wife won’t make me wallpaper the front room with all those rejection slips.

About John Martin, author
Author John Martin is a Canberra writer. By day he works as a journalist who is a stickler for accuracy; by night, he writes frivolous fiction with little regard for the facts. Or, he wonders, is it the other way around?

He grew up in Tasmania and has written three previous pieces of nonsense: Apples (1994), How Much Is That Scorpion in the Window? (2004), and Adventure By Flip-Flops Under The Southern Cross (eBook, 2005).

John's new book, Major BS - A Top Secret Mission is available at: http://www.equilibriumbooks.com/majorbs.htm

Or, visit John’s official web site: www.dunno.com.au

Follow John Martin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JohnMartinfict