Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing

EP 313 - Pioneering In Digital Indie Publishing with Peter M. Ball

Jul 6, 2023

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Mark interviews author, publisher and RPG gamer Peter M. Ball who has been engaged in experimental and digital publishing since the very beginning of its appearance in the book industry.

Prior to the interview, Mark shares a word about this episode's sponsor.

You can learn more about how you can get your audiobooks distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.

In the interview, Mark and Peter talk about:

Peter being a night owl who is most comfortable starting to write at about 10 PM at night and working through the night
How, through necessity with a regular life schedule, Peter will get the writing done first thing in the morning
Peter having wanted to be a writer since he was quite young
The way that most of the work he has taken on in his life has been somehow affiliated with the writing world
Describing the Gold Coast of Australia as Miami with slightly less charm
The undergraduate degree focus which mostly avoided genre fiction
How you can never escape poetry once you've done it, even years later being introgued as "Peter the Poet"
How in the early 2000s Dungeons and Dragons open-sourced their rules, allowing people to provide material within their realm
Getting involved in DriveThruFiction back in 2005
The hunger for content that came out in that time period
How changes in the RPG industry that happened were later echoed a few years later in the eBook fiction publishing space
The issues Peter recognized in 2006 in creating role playing game material where somebody else held the licensce for it
Challenges of submitting fiction to markets from a country like Australia
Spending six weeks at an Australian branch of the Clarion Writers Workshop and how that dramatically changed the perspective forced on him from his university education
Continuing to submit his fiction to the traditional markets but paying attention to what was going on in the self-publishing, digital publishing, and indie publishing space
Launching Brain Jar Press in 2017 largely as a vehicle for publishing his backlist
Why cutting your teeth in short fiction can be great
Having a plan to indie publish his own books for about ten years, make all the mistake on his own books, rather than someone elses, and getting solid learning and experience from it to benefit his press
Working with Kathleen Jennings on a poetry collection right at about the time her first book with Tor went huge
The idea for a series of short chapbooks with four or five essays per writer in order to bring these remarkable articles the authors had already written back into availability
Borrowing the cultural capital of all the people they're publishing so that they can grow and eventually launch new writers
How Peter fell in love with print quite accidentally
The requirement of having to have an online store for the press
The joke that it's cheaper to get things to Narnia than it is to get them to Australia
The thought exercise Peter does regarding how many books he has to sell to make it to $100
Understanding the market base that you're likely selling to as a small specialized indie press
Peter's impatience for just replicating what midlist are publishing is doing in the face of such wonderful, free, and dynamic digital tools when one can be breaking the model, expanding, and forming new ideas and new products
ether Peter has been doing much of his own writing since launching Brain Jar Press 2.0
The flash fiction writing Peter has been able to do during a few 8 minute breaks at work
What Peter is most optimistic about with what's happening in the publishing world now
And more...

After the interview Mark reflects on Peter working in publishing and writing related realms, the value of connecting with others in the industry, and Peter's thirst for innovation and experimentation within digital publishing.

Links of Interest:

Peter M. Ball is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The Hobbit, Star Wars, David Lynch’s Dune, and far too many games of Dungeons and Dragons before the age of 7. He’s spent the bulk of his life working as a creative writing tutor, with brief stints as a performance poet, gaming convention organiser, online content developer, non-profit arts manager, and d20 RPG publisher.

Peter’s three biggest passions are fiction, gaming, and honing the way aspiring writers think about the business and craft of writing, which led to a five-year period working for Queensland Writers Centre as manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace and convenor of the GenreCon writing conference. He is now pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Queensland, exploring the poetics of series fiction and their response to emerging publishing technologies.

He’s the author of the Miriam Aster series and the Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thrillers, three short story collections, and more stories, articles, poems, and RPG material than he’d care to count. He’s one-half of Brain Jar Press with his partner, Sarah, publishes his own work under the Eclectic Projects imprint, and resides in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two very affectionate cats.

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0