Adam Glendon Sidwell is here to tell us about his publishing house, Future House Publishing. Adam founded the house in 2012, to publish his first book, Evertaster. In November 2014 he turned it into a full LLC company, and began publishing other people’s work. Over the last year it has published over a dozen of YA, Middle Grade, and Picture books, from a variety of authors. Based in Utah, many, but not all, of its authors are LDS.
The more I attend conferences such as LTUE, Storymakers, and Salt Lake Comic Con, the more I am surprised at the number of science fiction and fantasy writers scratching out stories in the state of Utah. It’s as if a comet were hovering overhead (perhaps Calamity itself), bestowing imagination and character arcs on the populace, turning them to their keyboards in droves. Is this perception a result of confirmation bias? Maybe. Or is there something to the fact that Salt Lake Comic Con is the fastest growing Con in the nation? And Utah ranked highest for number of google searches for the term “Star Wars”? Utah is a nerd gold mine!
So where will all those stories go?
With the shifting state of publishing, more and more authors are looking for alternatives to the Big 5. And more and more authors are succeeding. Future House Publishing was founded to help find those books and authors a home.
Raised on a diet of Isaac Asimov, Lloyd Alexander, Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Bradbury, I started Future House Publishing so I could surround myself with more of the same. I suppose it’s my natural environment, as a Visual Effects Artist for movies like Tron, Thor, and the upcoming Warcraft. I love helping these great stories along, and producing the art to match. It feels right.
Through this journey, I’ve learned that a publisher should provide 3 things:
- Editorial and Production Expertise and Execution
- Investment Capital
- Distribution and Marketing
If a publisher isn’t providing any of those 3, then they probably aren’t worth signing on with.
At Future House Publishing, we have a staff of editors and a close alliance of trusted artists we use to provide #1. That work requires #2. And we have built and are expanding our network for distribution and marketing — number #3.
Can anyone do it? Yes. That’s what I found out 3 years ago when I set out to self-publish my first book, Evertaster. Evertaster is a Middle Grade book, which means that most of my readers aren’t on E-Readers (yet). After selling 33,000+ copies — 29,000 of those print — I figured that I might be able to help other people do the same. It might be possible for us to help others avoid the pitfalls and mistakes I made over three years and take a more direct route to success for other authors.
You have self-publishing Kindle phenomena like Hugh Howey, or Amanda Hocking, or even nearer to us, Kelly Oram or Michaelbrent Collings. They know how to sell books. They likely don’t need, or even want a publisher. But there is a common misconception that if you throw your book up for sale on Kindle or Nook, people will come out of the woodwork to buy it. Sometimes that happens. Most times it doesn’t. A large portion of the submissions we receive come from authors who previously self-published, only to find that they weren’t getting the traction they hoped for.
One example is the book Sherlock Academy, by F.C. Shaw. Shaw self-pubbed Sherlock Academy, but after a couple of years she decided she wanted to broaden her reach and move to the next level. We loved her manuscript, and so we published it. We fronted the capital (as in #2 above), we designed a killer cover and our editors worked on the story with Shaw, until the book was at least twice as good as before, and F.C. Shaw was ecstatic. So were we. She wrote a great book, and it was time that more people knew about it. In the past six months, we’ve already sold through the first printing. She’s been signing in Barnes & Noble and had a really good run with her books in Costco. Now we’ve published book #2 in the series, Watson’s Case.
That’s our objective with Future House Publishing. We want to make each book fly as high as it will go. That’s not an easy task. Will some of those books fail? Probably. Will even more succeed? We hope so. Experience dictates that there are brilliant books out there that have been rejected by the Big 5 publishers, and just need a publishing home. We want to find those brilliant books, and get them into readers hands. We’re nimble and adaptive, with a high focus on innovation.
In the science fiction and fantasy realm, Caretaker by Josi Russell and Etherwalker by Cameron Dayton have been break out successes. Having hovered at a 400-600 ranking overall in Kindle books for over a month, they’ve sold thousands of copies in their first month. They’ve raised our bar as to what a book is capable of. Then we have very steady sellers like Sands, by Kevin L. Nielsen, which has proven that good fantasy is what readers are looking for. Storms, the sequel to Sands, is due out in January 2016. We’ve sold audio rights to Tantor Media for all three of the above mentioned books, with audio star Kirby Heybourne set to narrate Etherwalker. And we’re constantly looking for more places to put our books.
If you attend the Salt Lake Comic Con FanX event coming up soon, stop by our booth. We’d love to meet you. As our Editor-in-Chief, Helena Steinacker put it:
Give me your aliens, your pirates,
Your giant robots, yearning to break free,
The finished stories of your teeming mind
Send these, the homeless, the publish-toss’d to me.
To submit a manuscript to Future House Publishing or to check out our books, go to www.futurehousepublishing.com.
Adam, thanks for introducing your company. When Future House first appeared, I saw an announcement that it the publisher was being created in conjunction with the prestigious literary agency Trident Media. That was interesting, as literary agencies don’t usually create their own publishing houses. Is that right? What role does Trident play in the company today?
Thanks for the post, Andrew.
As for Trident Media Group, they represent my books when it comes to selling foreign rights, film rights, etc. They also published the e-books for my first two titles, as an e-book arm of their agency. But they aren’t currently involved in the publishing process with the rest of Future House’s list, other than my agent, Alyssa Henkin, being a great go-to resource when we have questions about subsidiary rights. In that way Trident has given us some great recommendations and connected us with good people in the book publishing business.