Steven William Hannah, Curator at Your Paper Quest, gives us an insight into why he and Ryan set up their indie book box subscription service.
Almost every author I’ve ever spoken to has one goal in mind, and it is neither money nor fame. Most authors want people to read their work - and if they’re being really honest, they’d love for you to talk about it too. It was that endeavour that led me to the website once known as Twitter, where a massive community of indie authors dwell. I wanted to read indie novels and talk about them, and whilst I knew that this would go down well with other indie authors, I wasn’t quite ready for how well.
My first post asking indie authors to drop links to their work earned me a list of 30 books. Perfectly doable. After working my way through them, I asked the same question, and this time was snowed under with more than 300 titles. I would need a process. First chapters became the first hurdle a book had to survive to make it on to the reading list, and as I worked through them, I posted about what made me keep a book, and what made me stop reading.
This caught the attention of Ryan, a recent graduate who wanted to do a book box exclusively for indie authors. Ryan had run into an issue in trying to find good indie books: he couldn’t get through them quickly enough. His plans were in their early stages, and so I came aboard and started seriously putting together a huge list of indie authors and their work. Each one went through the first chapter test, after which it went into a list based on genre.
Your Paper Quest was borne from Ryan’s imagination as a protest to the dominance of the big publishing houses. Indie authors deal with a lack of exposure more than anything else, and they usually do all of their own marketing. We both wanted to give indie authors more exposure, more readers, more people to talk about their work. We wanted interviews with authors who are paid for taking part, and we wanted to give them a chance to put their personal touches in the boxes.
We started from the very bottom. Two books, a handful of subscribers, some massive stacks of leaflets and flyers, and a home-made website that couldn’t do half of the stuff we needed it to. Our first box contained Mark of Eternity - a lost-in-space survival thriller, by Zachary Moulder - and Red Darkling, a Hitchhiker’s-Guide-After-Seven-Cocktails space adventure by L.A. Guettler.
We’ve always been really confident in our selection of books. Once, we were asked why we didn’t commit to a single genre, or let people decide what genre they would receive; but the intent of YPQ has always been curating taste-breakers for readers who want to find new authors. The books that we look for usually involve a little genre-blending, a bit of something for everybody. Some of us might think that we’d never read romance, for example. I’d have said so too, until I read Rachel Bowdler’s Safe and Sound, a sapphic bodyguard romance thriller.
The best part (for me, at least, by far) is that the indie community contains a lot of great writers who are not afraid to experiment and push the boundaries in their work. With no publisher oversight, we can choose stories that do new and unusual things. We’ve featured all sorts of books, from lady sleuths at fashion shows and musicians-turned-detectives (Death In Velvet, by Rose Donovan and Straight River by Chris Norbury, respectively) to dark fairy-tales and body-horror fantasy (When Shadows Fall, by Lindy Enns and The Bee King, by Mathilda Zeller, respectively).
There are a lot of scams that target hopeful indie authors with promises of huge marketing pushes and expert editing at low costs, if only they pay a fee to join. The chance to get paid for work that is already out there, luckily, was an easy one to approach authors with. As we grew, we found it easier to bring authors onboard. With 13 boxes under our belt now, we’ve hit the point where submissions (which you can send in at yourpaperquest.co.uk/submissions) regularly trickle in for us to read.
As we gain more subscribers, we can pay authors more, and shout louder about their work to whoever will listen. That lifting up of authors is what got us started on this project, and it’s what sustains us still. If you’re the kind of reader who loves to find new authors and get lost in their work, if you like to read outside the box, then you can subscribe to Your Paper Quest for a box every one, two, or three months.
You can find out more about Your Paper Quest at the website.
Listen to an interview with Ryan Haidar, from Your Paper Quest on The River Is Lit podcast, episode 2, available on YouTube and Spotify.
Comments