The Pro Files

Writing To Remember — Every Single Day

Q&A with Jason McGathey

Author’s note: Online publication The Pro Files recently contacted me for a little discussion about “the writing life.” What follows is an emailed Q&A session by the editor, Ben Human. Though it may have been best for all parties if I were edited somewhat, they have allowed me to ramble more or less unchecked…

What novels have you published? Through what channels?

I have published 8 books, but only 4 of them have been novels: Night Driving, Accelerated Times, Days Without End and The Doom Statues, in that order. The history here is interesting in that it demonstrates how far this industry has progressed since the turn of the century. The first one was in the early stages of Print On Demand, published by a company called iUniverse — at the time, this was just about your only option for self-publishing. So you’d have to pay them a little bit to put together your files for you, but no out of pocket expense for the books themselves. And people could order them online, which seemed totally mind-blowing and huge at the time.

Then by around 2010 or so, CreateSpace entered the picture: same concept, but no start up cost. Things were still kind of primitive then, though, as far as your…