Coming to terms…

I talk to a lot of creators, and the weight most of them carry around their necks is “I wish I had done more”, or “I wish I had done that”, or “I wish I hadn’t done that”.

Here’s the hard truth:

You can’t do anything about your career up until yesterday. You’ve already written those books. You’ve already wasted that time. You’ve already lost that publishing contract. You’ve already spilled your energy into one thing or another.

However, that is not wasted time, either. It is time in which you learned things, and you can use that to twist the future to your advantage.

I know, because it happened to me, too.

I love Ichabod, I really do, but for years people used it to label me as a horror author, when I am in fact a fantasy author.

I have nothing against horror authors, but if you come into my work expecting horror, you are going to be sorely disappointed. I use none of the conventions of horror storytelling in my stories.

What I do is take horror elements and use them to tell fantasy stories.

Yes, if you are open-minded in the types of horror you consume, I think you will absolutely love my books, but I am not Stephen King. I’m much more like Terry Pratchett or Michael Moorcock than anyone else.

People did the same thing with Katrina Hates the Dead.

While it uses horror elements, it’s a fantasy story, with magic, and gods, and all the conventions of fantasy. If you expect horror when you read it, well I still think you’re going to have a good time, but it’s not the book you think you’ll get.

I also wrote a lot of “off brand” not fantasy in my life, which meant when I really looked at my career, and the kind of thing I wanted to be known for, I had a couple non-fiction books, some YA mystery and sci-fi, and really not a whole lot of fantasy.

It was really depressing, honestly, when I really sat down in 2016 to figure this all out, and where I wanted to go with my career.

You might say “why do I have to do one thing?” and it’s because people will put you in a box. They will. I hate it, but they will, and when they put you in that box, you are expected to stay in that box.

Yes, you can step out of that box, but it’s basically like starting your career all over again when you do. Some people will follow you between genres and formats, but most won’t, and unless you have a huge audience, it’s really hard to have enough of them willing to read your other stuff to make it profitable.

I’m all about creating what you want to create at the beginning of your career, before you know what you want to do, and it took me a LONG time to figure out what kind of author I wanted to be.

In fact, I railed again the “people will know you as one thing” for a LONG time, and it wasn’t until I released a bunch of off-brand stuff to crickets that I realized the truth of it all.

If you are going to step out of your box, you had better be willing to start your career all over again. I feel very strongly about being a novelist. So strongly in fact that I was willing to literally go back to the beginning and build from scratch to make it work.

If you’re aching to tell a story, then tell it, but know it probably won’t catch unless you are willing to devote tons of resources to it. That doesn’t make it any less important. Some of the most important things in life aren’t financially lucrative.

So, back in 2016 I was branded as a horror author but I really wrote fantasy. I had to come to terms with that idea, first, and then figure out how to turn it around.

It wasn’t easy. I had a lot of sleepless nights where I kicked myself for all the “mistakes” I made in my career, and all the projects I didn’t make.

Eventually, I got over myself and decided that I could still turn it around, even if it took a long time.

I did that by taking both Ichabod and Katrina and turning them into the series they should have been all along.

Ichabod became a dark fantasy series with the introduction of Necromonica specifically, and magic in general.

The truth was that I always intended Ichabod to be a fantasy story.

The first four issues just took some time to get there. When I brought Ichabod back in 2019, I made sure people saw it as a fantasy series right off the bat.

Then, with Katrina, I expanded the universe, now called The Godsverse Chronicles, which is super fantasy-y, into more fantasy comics with Pixie Dust and the upcoming Black Market Heroine, and then I wrote a bunch more books in that universe that all highlight different aspects of fantasy, from dark to science, and everything in between.

I’m currently writing the 11th book in the Godsverse, which has been my best-reviewed series, and in production on the fourth and final volume of Ichabod.

I would be hard-pressed to find somebody who has read either series and still thinks they are horror books.

Plus, it has informed ALL my work since then. All my anthology pieces are fantasy. Even my own anthology series, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, is about the mythology of Lovecraft’s work.

I was able to take a career that was moving in a direction I didn’t want, and turn it back toward the direction I wanted it to go, all by coming to terms with where I was, and where I wanted to go.

Ichabod and Katrina made my career. I love them, and fans, so much for taking a chance on them. They were a huge part of my ecosystem, and I simply couldn’t imagine them not being a center-piece of my career when it was all over.

But I had to do something to make sure I controlled the narrative, and positioning, of my career.

It’s never too late, until you are dead. I did this when I was 35, thinking my career was over, but it was really just beginning. If you’re younger, or older than that, it’s not too late for you either.

But you have to come to terms with the career, or lack of career, you have had until this point.

And what did I do with all that off-brand stuff that didn’t fit my brand and cluttered by Amazon page?

I put them inside the Wannabe+ app as exclusive content that can only be accessed by downloading the app.

This gave me a bunch of additional content I can tout to people who are true fans while not clouding my Amazon page with a bunch of off-brand books.

It took 4 years, and I’m still not done yet. I probably won’t be truly rebranded with all these new books until mid-2022, but it’s already been hugely successful at bringing the kinds of readers who will love the work into my universe.