How I Became an Overnight Success in Fifteen Years. -by Doug Dandrige

*I met Doug at the Superstars Writing Seminar this year.  I haven’t yet had time to read through his work, but it is on my virtual to be read pile and I hope to get to it next month (at which point likely there will be bloggage.)  Meanwhile, I asked him to tell us something about his journey to publication. I don’t know if there will be book plugging today or not, it depends on my access to wireless!  I forgot to tell the Clam to email early.*

How I Became an Overnight Success in Fifteen Years. -by Doug Dandrige

First off, I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to do this guest blog. I have found so many authors to be very helpful to others with the same mental illness (obsessive writing), and Sarah is one of the best.

I guess in some respect, I always wanted to become a writer. I was told in high school that I had a knack for story telling. One of my earliest works was a story about terrorists taking my home town of Venice Florida, which is built on an artificial island with three bridges connecting it to the mainland. I wrote for the school newspaper, and later for the brigade paper in the Army. I finally got my chance in 1997, when I was fired from a job at a drug treatment clinic for making the observation that the clinical director didn’t do real therapy. I stormed home, sat down at my PC, and wrote an 80,000 words expose’ on the Mental Health Industry in two weeks. It came very close to selling. Next I worked on a well researched and poorly written alternate history. I had scored a 790 out of 800 on the English portion of the Graduate Record Exam, but still didn’t seem to know the difference between its and it’s. I followed that with a 260,000 epic fantasy set in a Universe I used much later. I was scammed by a fake agent on that one, and $300 later, which I understand now to be cheap, I learned to run away from scams. I also didn’t submit to agents again until 2010.

The next thirteen years I was an on again, off again writer. Some years I would write four books (seven in 2010). Other years, nothing. I kept sending them, and all the short stories I wrote, to magazines and the publishers that would accept unsolicited manuscripts. In 98 or 99 I received a rejection letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley that said, although she liked my elf vampire story, it violated three of her principles. 1) It featured vampires. 2) It featured elves, and 3) It featured elves that were vampires. She asked me to send her another one and promised to buy something from me, and then passed away. I also met Charles Sheffield and Holly Lisle online. Both told me I had the talent, and definitely needed to keep putting the effort into it. So I kept plugging away, trying to write the novel that would get me that traditional contract. Non-sparkly vampires, a steampunk fantasy, another fantasy based on my first epic, Refuge, hard scifi with strong female characters.   Tried everything I thought might break me in to what seemed like a closed inner circle of authors. The rejections got better, most of them. Some were actually two page letters with enough references to let me know they had actual read the manuscript all the way through. Others were the standard form rejections. I was told that one was better than the other, but to my mind they were both failures.

In 2010 I tried agents again, making sure I only sent them to the legit ones. Again I got some good rejections, some requests for something else, some notes stating that I was obviously talented. But no real success. The most humorous one was from an agency that replied three hours after I submitted electronically that after careful consideration they had decided to pass on my novel. I was very thankful that day that they didn’t jump to a quick decision. Most of the rejections I got said, after some obligatory compliments about my ability and how well written the books were, that it wasn’t for their list, or there wasn’t a market for it. In 2011 I learned about self-publishing at a local writer’s conference. On December 31^st, 2011 I put two books, The Deep Dark Well and The Hunger, up on Amazon. A week later I got my first review, which stated that the book, The Deep Dark Well, was a page turner, but so poorly formatted that I got three stars. That was a part of the learning process. For the next nine months I sold forty books, and kept putting out my backlog, hoping one would be the breakout.

In September of 2012 I offered The Deep Dark Well as a freebee on Amazon, and gave away 4,100 of them. The book has since sold another 4,600 copies. I did a couple more giveaways, then published what turned out to be my breakout indie novel, Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1. I was planning a promotion, but when it started selling a hundred books a day in November 2013, I left it alone. It was really fantastic seeing books one and two selling two hundred copies a day in January of 2013. The series of five books has now sold over 58,000 copies, and has 550+ worldwide reviews with a 4.4 star average. I have college professors, military officers, even an astronaut as a fan. That was when I decided to quit the day job. I have lots of other books on Amazon, and all of them are well rated, even if some haven’t sold that much.

I went to Superstars Writing Seminar this year, and was lauded and applauded for my success. But, like the man climbing the mountain, I had stopped on a ledge and was looking up at the true giants on the peak. People like Kevin J Anderson, who runs the Seminar. I came home with a depressed attitude, and didn’t do much of anything for the month of February. Until I received an email from a retired Marine major, who told me how much books like mine did to relieve the stress and boredom of a combat deployment. That email got me going again. I realized that it wasn’t about becoming a New York Times bestseller, though that would be nice. It was about entertaining people who needed to be entertained. Right now the sky is the limit, and maybe after another decade or so I may have finally arrived.

Humanity’s worst nightmare has come from the stars, as the Ca’cadasan Empire, which the human race had escaped two thousand years before, finds the species they have sworn to exterminate. The Ca’cadasan Empire is twenty-five times larger than the New Terran Empire, and has rolled over all opposition for thousands of years. While the human Fleet, which has never lost a war, has had to fight tooth and nail at every juncture, advancing as the ultimate fighting machine of the Perseus arm. A war of extermination is in the making, a war that neither side can afford to lose.

The Exodus series has to date sold over 58,000 copies, and has over 550 worldwide reviews on Amazon, with a 4.4 star average rating. Books three through five have made it to number one in Military Science Fiction and Space Opera on Amazon UK, and has hit the top ten in those categories in the US, book 3 actually reaching number two in both categories. Book 6 is coming out on April 27^th, and in celebration book 1 is free from April 25^th through 29^th.

 So, get it.

Biography

Doug Dandridge is a Florida native who grew up in the space age. Stints in the Army and National Guard, as well as entirely too much time in higher education at two Universities, have given him a very unusual outlook on life, making him really unfit for any political party. Doug currently has 18 books on Amazon, all self-published, and sold almost 79,000 copies to date. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida with four cats, and attends just about every sporting event at the local University he can. He has also discovered the joy of Cons, having attended Dragon*Con last year, and found a multitude of other people as crazy as he is. This year he will be attending the Alabama Phoenix Festival, Liberty*Con, Dragon*Con and Honor*Con. Book 6 of the Exodus series is due out April 27^th, while book 3 of The Deep Dark Well trilogy and book 4 of the Refuge fantasy series will be out later this year.