A Look At 13 Years Ago… For Fun…

In 2012 Indie Publishing Was Just Starting…

Since I started this blog 13 years ago today, I thought it might be fun to look back.

Kris and I had been getting books up indie for over a year, and I had just finished time taking care of a friend’s estate. I had also done all the covers and loading and everything. Over 300 books at this point, mostly short stories by me and Kris and some of Kris’s novellas and some of her novels.

I had put up about sixty of my short stories indie, but if you looked at the Amazon sales page under my name, the only thing you saw was Star Trek, Men in Black, Spider-Man, and an occasional gaming novel I had done under the Dean Wesley Smith name. (Now, the only media books you see under my name are sponsored ones by Pocket Books.) Back then you had to go almost 40 pages deep to find any of my original short stories.

Everyone said I was so lucky coming out of traditional publishing into indie. I never argued with them because the truth was exactly the opposite.

So in August of 2012, as I started this daily blog, I had two choices with my writing.

1… I could change my name to Dean Edwards and just flat start over, which was the sane and smart thing to do.

2… I could write fast and publish so many books that my own books would beat out my own media books under the Dean Wesley Smith name. Plus I had to bury Dean Smith the basketball coach’s books.

In essence, I would be in a battle with myself. I have nothing against all the media books I had done, in fact I am proud of a lot of them, but I make no money from them. All the money came in the advances back in 1990s and early 2000s.

So if I was going to make a living with indie publishing, I had to write fast year-after-year.

So after a month of back and forth with Kris (she got real tired of that discussion, let me tell you), I decided to stay with Dean Wesley Smith and I put my head down and really started to write. I needed to produce enough indie books that sold well to push down the list the media books.

My available inventory at that point? I had a bunch of short stories, one older novel, and one unpublished novel when I started.

I was 61.

I also started Smith’s Monthly, 70,000 words of my original fiction every month. I did all the layout and everything. 7 x 10 magazine size, 2-column format, lots of ads for my own books, all done in InDesign. That really got me writing, let me tell you. For years I had a new novel every month in that magazine.

If anyone ever came to me in that situation and asked what they should do, I would tell them to change their name. Dean Edwards is a family name and I had published some stuff with that name. I would have been fine with it. But not sure under that name if I would have written as fast and as hard and as consistently as I did trying to defeat my own books.

Smith’s Monthly took a break when Kris got sick and we moved here to Vegas in 2018, then it came back up to Issue #67 before the previous folks we had working for us killed it because even though I was doing anything, it was too much work for them. I hope to bring it back shortly. Just need a new computer that can handle InDesign.

In hindsight now that I have done this blog for 13 straight years, I am happy I made the decision to stay with this name. In my 70th year on this planet I published 70 major books. Might have to try that challenge with my 75th year. But Smith’s Monthly has to be back up and running if I am going to try that.

I turn 75 in November.

Here is an image of the 70 books I did from November 2020 to November 2021. This was a really fun challenge. So November 2025 to November 2026 might be interesting.