Silver Empire: How It All Began

The Origins of Silver Empire

On December 31, 2014, my wife Morgon decided to just do it. She’d written several short stories and had a novel (more than one, actually) in progress, and she just decided to publish one. So she hit the button on her story Wishing Only Wounds the Heart on Amazon.

As it happened, I had a novel in progress myself and had also written a few stories. And we’d talked somewhat about this before. Writing fiction was something we both wanted to do, and we’d known it for a while.

We decided - well, to be a little more honest, I decided - that if we were going to do it, we’d have much better odds of success if we didn’t go it alone.

I thought that we could amortize our costs across multiple books and multiple authors. I thought that we could take the audience from one author and grow that to include other authors. I thought we could learn lessons from each book and apply those lessons to our future releases. I thought that we could take profits from one book and apply them to the next book so that we’d have more money for marketing each new release. I thought we could market the books together, with marketing dollars gaining us wins across multiple releases.

Boy did I have a lot to learn.

A few of these ideas proved to be half correct. The rest proved to be utterly, thoroughly wrong.