What you want is to have everything work out the first time.

Life could be miraculously easy if every time you tried to make something happen the way you wanted it to happen it would actually just happen fucking brilliantly.

Could get tedious, but I doubt it.

And, news flash, seems that’s not the way it happens.

For several years now many good people at Ballantine, Random House, and Del Rey have worked very hard to get my books into the hands of more people. They have, time and again, expressed their belief that they were coming up short on the full potential readership for the oddnessess I write. They have invested no end of time and effort and creativity as they have sought new ways to present my books and communicate to readers what was inside them and why they should be opening them up to take a look. None of those efforts have been wasted.

Nonetheless, I am moving to a new publisher.

After eleven books published within the Random House family, I simply feel that I want to find out what happens when I work outside that comfort zone, and how the talents and perceptions of a new team might change the scope of my readership.

It’s awkward to talk about wanting more readers. It seems both greedy and disrespectful. Jesus, it is both those thing, no matter how one colors it.

But it is also true.

Because I came to writing an an alternate career, my first several books were written very much by the seat of my pants. But after your swing around like that for a few years, you start wanting to get your feet on the ground. More time and effort and forethought goes into the work. And, aside from the business considerations involved in growing an audience, you just plain want to know that as many people as possible are reading what you have worked very hard to create.

Yes, I find writing in and of itself satisfying. Yes, the most enjoyable part of being a writer is the actual writing. But books are to be read. The tree will still make sound with now one there to hear it fall, but I do want witnesses. As many as possible.

Greedy boy that I am.

Eleven books, even though published over a short span of time, is a fucking lot. And sometimes, no matter how hard you try and apply yourself to a problem, you just can’t crack the code with the tools at hand.

Random House has excellent tools, excellent people wielding them, but as hard as we all worked together, we have not been able to crack a code that we all feel exists. Telling the people who essentially gave you your first job, who again and again expressed faith in your work and invited you to expand and create what pleases you is a hard thing.

And possible very stupid.

It is entirely possible that there is no greater readership for me. That the work Random House et al have done on my behalf already tapped the full number of folks out there who are interested in my shit.

Time will tell.