First Leg of my Media Tour

Ok, that title is tongue and cheek, but I have somehow managed to find myself with two writing related interviews coming out this month.
The first of which you can find Here

This was for a company called Atmosphere Press—which is a Hybrid Publisher.

For me, hybrid publishers present an interesting model.

While my eyes are still set firmly on the traditional route, this choice isn’t based on any grand moral stance. If anything it’s probably embedded in a bit of insecurity on my part. I guess, I feel being accepted by a traditional publishers indicates some higher level of validation. Which is probably immature, but that’s where my head is positioned at the moment.

Hybrid publishers are often mistaken for (yet aren’t the same as) something called a “vanity press” —which have a bad reputation for accepting every manuscript that is tossed in their direction for publication, but the catch is….the author has to pay for everything. Note: I’m not talking self publishing here. They’ll take a cut, make artistic choices for you. But you’ll be the one putting down the cash.

Slightly backwards, but hey, you get to have your name on the front cover…

While Hybrid publishers do still require the author to put down some money, the company has some skin in the game themselves both financially and reputationally, therefore are incentivized to see your book do well. For this reason, they ply a bit more scrutiny to unsolicited submissions, and (hopefully) acceptance by one of these publishers means a bit more.

But you do give away a bit of creative control in exchange for utilizing their infrastructure, so it’s not entirely a win/win. Going this route definitely demands some consideration of what you value most, and perhaps some soul searching on why you want to see your work published in the first place.

As I said, I’m in no way affiliated with Atmosphere Press. They simply put out a call for applications from writers, I made my pitch, and in return, they were nice enough to entitle the following post, interview with Author Hamish Kavanagh. Not a title that I can accept at this stage, but hopefully one day.

Now, as the title of this post “First Leg of my media tour” implies, there’s more than one interview involved here.

In a recent post, you may remember me discussing a writing competition for a publication called Macabre Monday. That second place submission is going to be published in an upcoming anthology, I just went through the surreal experience of signing a contract with them, and I have just finished up an interview with them which I think will be coming out in the next few weeks.

It’s funny how these things work. For the longest time I’ve been chipping away, feeling like I’m getting nowhere, then things like this come along and it suddenly feels like I’ve got a whole lot of momentum.

Strange.