Kim Kelly on Self-Publishing Her Latest Novel

Kim Kelly is the author of seven novels, all lorikeet-coloured tales about Australia, its heritage and its people. An editor and literary consultant by trade, stories fill her everyday – and most nights, too.

Can you tell me about your latest novel Lady Bird & The Fox?

Lady Bird & The Fox is a rollicking historical fiction set in 1868 – during the gold rush – when bushrangers roamed the wild west of New South Wales.

The story centres on hardworking farm girl, Annie Bird, who must leave her sleepy village on the outskirts of Sydney when she’s orphaned, forcing her to head for the goldfields in search of her grandfather, a legendary Wiradjuri tracker. She is a feisty and determined young woman but she’s also dangerously naïve – she sets off with little but a swag full of hope, and is promptly robbed of it on the road.

Her cries for help attract another sort of rogue: Jem Fox, the waster son of a wealthy silversmith and prominent Sydney Jew, who’s already in trouble with the law – up to his neatly trimmed eyebrows in gambling debts. And when he comes upon this unusual damsel in distress, he does something much worse. He ‘borrows’ a horse and rides after the thieves, throwing Annie over the saddle as he goes.

What follows is a breakneck gallop through the Australian bush, where the heroes are mistaken for bushrangers themselves and must negotiate all kinds of bigotry and bastardry before tale’s end. They are two headstrong opposites tossed together by fate, their lives entwined by a quest to get back home – and, of course, the irresistible forces of love.

Part picaresque, part bildungsroman, Lady Bird & The Fox is a return to the dual-narrative romantic adventure of my early novels – packed with the kinds of historical detail that are generally overlooked in Australian fiction, and told with a bit of a wry smile and plenty of warmth.

As with all my stories, there’s also a serious social and political exploration operating under all the fun, and this time I delve into some of the origins of Australian racism, the devastation of the Wiradjuri wars that occurred across the country I call home today, and the messy mid-Victorian version of Sydney my own Jewish forebears would have known. It’s a homage to the small pocket of Australia I grew up in, too – La Perouse – where we were blessed with an understanding of diversity, cultural difference and Aboriginal sovereignty long before the ideas hit the mainstream.

Almost four years in the writing, this novel was an absolute odyssey of revelation for me, both joyful and harrowing. I’m busting to share it with readers. It’s always exciting to put a new novel out into the world, a new little piece of my heart, but I’m excited about this one in a way I’ve never been before.

Why did you choose to self-publish this time around?

The short answer is: impatience. It’s not unusual for publishers to take several months before making a decision on a manuscript and, after some soul-searching and discussion with my agent, I decided I just couldn’t wait any longer for this story to make her way out into the world.

The last major publisher to look at one of my manuscripts held onto it for eight months before deciding that, while they thought it was a bit fab, it wasn’t for them. For an author like me, with six novels already out there and plenty more to give, that kind of waiting around is sapping and just…blergh.

I also had one hideous morsel of corporate publishing feedback tell me that you can’t have an Aboriginal heroine and a Jewish hero in a commercial fiction and expect it to sell. That kind of malarkey is a red rag to this little bull, and has played a part in spurring me on to go for it – along with my lovely loyal readers who’ve been harassing me to get on with it.

But probably most influential has been the unexpected success I had last year in experimenting with republishing my backlist myself – my first four novels: Black Diamonds, This Red Earth, The Blue Mile and Paper Daisies. I’d thought bringing them out again under my own imprint would be an exercise only in making them available and learning a thing or two on the way. I didn’t actually think they would sell! But they have and, to my constant amazement, continue to. It’s been too marvellous a ride not to want to do it again, and do it bigger, with a brand new book.

Did you work with an editor or designer on this book?

Absolutely. I worked with the same editor and designer as I did for my previous two novels – Wild Chicory and Jewel Sea. I am a book editor myself, I’ve worked in the trade now for more than twenty years, and with every kind of book and author, from mass-market potboilers to Miles Franklin winners and everything in between. I wouldn’t dream of sending a book out into the world without making sure it’s as good as it can be. I wouldn’t do that to any fellow author’s work; I certainly wouldn’t do it to my own.

It’s a significant investment, though, and an emerging author might see all that as too great an outlay. For those who might be wondering how to go about investing in their writing, hands down I’d say put whatever resources you have into editing. Covers are important marketing tools, but your words are the magic that is going to make readers fall in love with your work. Engage the services of an accredited industry professional. You really do get what you pay for when it comes to editing, so avoid throwing good money after bad.

What are the positives of self-publishing?

Let me count the ways: complete creative freedom across every aspect of production, flexibility in when and how I do any of it, and authentic marketing. In short, I can be me, totally and all the time, without anything being filtered through a corporate lens. I don’t think it’s any accident that my profile has risen and that my backlist is selling again in unexpected numbers since I took charge of it myself. Major publishing houses are cumbersome creatures and they don’t do nuance or direct marketing well, but individual authors can. File that under things I wish I’d known when I was starting out…

Then there are the royalties that self-publishing pulls in. Of course I outlay my own publishing and distribution costs, but after that, all earnings are mine. I’ve never been one to pay much attention to my own earnings, being too grateful in the past to be published to have a proper look; let’s just say the scales have fallen from my eyes. While traditionally published authors receive 10% less their agent’s 15%, selfies receive somewhere between 40-60%. I’m not too crash hot at arithmetic but even I can see the difference there. I’m hardly laughing all the way to the bank, but each month my royalty arrives I do actually laugh – mostly that I was so ignorant for so long.

I do take the publishing side of things very seriously, though, and I’m learning so much that I wouldn’t have learned any other way. It’s really quite inspiring. Most importantly, I’m learning what it really means to back myself – and that has done wonders for my confidence.

Are there any negatives to self-publishing?

It’s all on my shoulders! I guess that’s the main drawback. All the responsibility and risk is mine. So far, the support from my readers, industry comrades and other writers has been very heartening but it is fairly nerve-wracking. Not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But hey, everything worth doing is terrifying, isn’t it?

I’m not convinced self-publishing is a great place to begin for beginners, though. I’m a great believer in learning lots and lots and lots about writing and going through the process of developing as a writer before jumping in and publishing things that might not serve you well. Take the time to educate yourself or be prepared to pay for advice, and be prepared for a long game – just as you would if you were traditionally published. A lot of selfies seem to have a crack, work out that it is actually challenging, and then give up – and that’s a shame.

Also, and of more relevance to where I am right now, while self-publishing allows for global distribution (which is fantastic in reaching new readers overseas), traditional bookshop distribution at home is an issue, as is broad-reach marketing. I’m exploring some interesting opportunities in this respect, but the industry is changing so rapidly that I’m reluctant to lock into anything until I can see the benefits. At present, I have the support of a couple of wonderful booksellers and I’m content to sit with that for a while and see how things go.

Anyway, for me, the negatives, so far at least, have been few and easy to walk past.

Can you discuss the process of publishing?

Uploading, downloading, digital, schmigital, it’s all witchcraft and sorcery for me at this stage. I am not technologically savvy. I work with a consultant – Critical Mass – to organise these practicalities and help me make decisions. For example, if I didn’t set the price high enough for my print edition, I’d end up paying the printer each time a book was purchased. As much as I love my readers, this would be a little bit self-defeating.

Of course, none of it is rocket science, and I will learn more about it one day. Honestly, I will… If I’m going to grow my little imprint, Jazz Monkey Publications, into a press that reaches beyond only publishing my own work, then I’m going to have to. That thought is overwhelming right now, but it’s there nevertheless.

Promotions, on the other hand, are one area that has become really easy as a result of having personal control over all aspects of publishing. I can drop the price of any one of my books and tie it in with any event or advertising at any time. And it’s worked a treat not just in terms of sales but in making readers aware I exist.

Another area of production that has surprised and delighted me is print quality. I was initially reluctant to self-publish as I’d thought the physical books might look a bit rubbish but printing with Ingramspark, as I do, there’s a good selection of trim sizes, finishes and paper stock, so that my books look as schmick as any trade paperback. In fact, I think my self-published editions look a bit smarter than the old traditionals. Again, though, I worked with the consultant to help me figure all this out – a fellow industry-head who speaks my language – to make sure I got it right the first time, and didn’t waste money on making mistakes.

Can you share a short passage from your novel to give potential readers a taste of it?

This is a passage from early on in Lady Bird & The Fox, when Jem is just beginning to get to know Annie, and has a bit of an epiphany about where she’s really come from; it’s a favourite passage because it puts the loss of cultural heritage into some perspective in a clear and simple way:

‘I wish I knew my mother’s language,’ she says, and her voice is so small I want to hold all her wondering in my arms and never let it go. ‘I can’t seem to remember a word, and there’s no-one I can ask about it, any of it, not now Dad’s gone.’

‘No-one?’ I don’t quite understand what she means.

But she doesn’t answer me; she asks: ‘Do you know any other language?’

I do – a bit of Hebrew, a bit of German, bit of in between the two, bit of Latin and Greek tossed in from St Sav’s, but I tell her: ‘No.’ Because I think I’ve just understood something unusually profound, for me, a glimpse of it at least. Things change, times change, names change, people come, people go, like tides, Jews flee Tangier once every century, and return to begin again, but there’s something about Annie Bird’s loss, some lonely-moon marcasite enormity in it, that’s overwhelming. The idea of my never having met an Aborigine before suddenly seems the most crushing, dreadful fact – in this, that was once their uninterrupted country. There’s all that you read and hear, of course: a cricket team travelling to London; the astounding athletic prowess of native stockmen; the brutality of Stone-Age existence matched only by the brutality of its reportage; actual Christians calling for compassion and some sort of compensation. There’s the native camp near Farm Cove on the harbour, where some few dozen or so of some remnant Sydney tribe survive on government rations – I bypass it every time I bother to go home. There’s the neighbourhood gossip of a pair of diamond earrings stolen from a house down at Darling Point, a black girl of fourteen charged with it only a month or so ago. But I’ve never seen an Aborigine personally – not in almost ten years of being here. Not one. Where have they gone? How does one begin to ask that question, never mind live it?

I hear her shift inside her tarpaulin tent; I can sense her back to me, as she says: ‘Don’t sneak all that barley sugar in the saddlebag.’

As if she’s known me since time began. And was born to make me promise: ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t dare.’

Born to make me promise that I will help this girl find her grandfather, take her right to his door, if I can.

Do you have any other work in the pipeline and will you be self-publishing in the future?

I do. I have two manuscripts with my agent right now. I don’t know if I will end up self-publishing either or maybe both of them. I have a loose plan that I’d like to continue to put out a book each year for as long as I continue to keep writing (which I intend will be until I drop off the perch), so it’s really a matter of whether a publisher wants to get on board this KK bus in the future. I’m a natural collaborator. I love the process of working with a bunch of people to make something happen, I love learning new tricks and replenishing my love of story through writing more and more of them, and I’d love all that to happen with a publisher again one day, but it’d have to be the right publisher, at the right time. I’m in no hurry. It’ll come if and when it does. In the meantime, I have a new book to celebrate – Lady Bird & The Fox – and it’s a different kind of celebration this time, because in every conceivable sense she really is all mine.

Read the press release for Lady Bird & The Fox

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Lady Bird & The Fox will be available on 18 April 2018