Indie vs Traditional Publishing: The Hypermodern Approach to a Writing Career

 

Chess pieces representing indie vs. traditional publishing strategy
Photo by sk.

Hypermodernism

In chess, there’s an opening philosophy known as the Hypermodern School. Developed in the 1920s, it broke with the classical tradition that players should immediately seize control of the board’s center with their pawns. Instead, hypermodern players waited, controlling the center from a distance by developing pieces on the flanks. They built potential energy until the time was right for an attack.

It’s a difficult strategy, requiring immense patience. This summer, after much internal debate, I decided to take a similar approach to my writing career.

I had queried thirty-six agents for my first novel, a historical fantasy. Four had rejected it by not responding, eight had rejected it with a form email, and one had rejected it with a personal note (he was the only one I knew had actually read my package). I could still have gotten a positive response from one of twenty-three other agents, and I had a list of sixty-eight others who might want to represent the book.

Those of you with experience querying might say it was too early for me to be discouraged, but I was. I began doomscrolling, looking at the odds of securing representation. No one can know what the odds are for a particular book. Still, according to various agent blogs, only one in six thousand or one in ten thousand books gets representation. And that’s only step one. According to publishing professionals, the odds of an agented book being accepted are around 20%.

Indie vs Traditional Publishing

With odds like those, pursuing traditional publishing seemed like a mistake, especially when I looked at the fantasy bestseller lists and saw that over half were self-published.

So why was I pursuing the traditional route? Was it because I somehow felt traditional publishing was more legitimate? Was it because my daughter, who had worked in traditional publishing, was disappointed when I said I was considering self-publishing?

Indie publishing was calling me, not just because of my relatively brief experience with querying. I was struggling with the “soggy middle” of the outline for my next novel, a historical mystery. The thought that when I finished writing it, I would begin querying again depressed me.

I began “hope-scrolling” indie publishing.

The problem was, I had made my opening. I needed to play the game, and I needed to play it with a hypermodern approach.

My fantasy novel and historical thriller were my key pieces. I would continue querying the fantasy, so slowly that I would still be querying as I finished drafting the mystery. I would then set the mystery aside and revise the fantasy, making it the strongest possible version of itself. Only then would I return to the mystery, armed with a fresh perspective, and give it its final polish.

By the end of this process, the end of my opening, I should have two polished novels, my key pieces, ready for an attack.

Will the attack be traditional or indie?

We shall see.



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