Ryan M. Patrick

Up until about a year ago, I had always planned to traditionally publish. I grew up reading books that had gone through the agent->editor->publish route, if I was to be a “real” writer, why wouldn’t that be my path as well?

But the world has changed. Self-publishing is a viable – and respected – route, and can be a path to traditional publishing as well as Andy Weir’s journey with The Martian showed.

So, what am I going to do?

Some of my books – The Martian Incident and The Rigel Conspiracy – they’re written for the self-publishing market. I read extensively in the genres I write in and I’ve found myself reading plenty of self-published sci-fi books, and I think mine will fit in nicely.

Other books – Lag Delay, The Europan Deception, and their associated sequels – I have written to be traditionally published. I see them as more similar to trad-pub books I’m fond of (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child’s standalones, and the Expanse series respectively). The current plan is to query agents with those books and see how that goes. If it doesn’t go well, I’m open to self-publishing those as well, but I think that’s a decision to be made down the line.

Note that I’m not really considering the monetary aspect of either in my decision. I want to share my books with people and give them something fun to read; money is a secondary consideration. I make enough money from my day job that benefiting financially from my writing is really just a “nice to have.”

I’m planning to release The Martian Incident once it’s cleaned up in a few months on the Amazon KU platform and then see how it goes!