"Penpal" Author Dathan Auerbach: From Anonymous Reddit Poster to Published Novelist
The publishing industry has changed dramatically. Here's one inspirational, though inadvertent, success story.
Image via Complex Original
Dathan Auerbach only wanted to scare a few people on Reddit.
It was September 2011, and the Pensacola, Florida, native was checking out some user-posted stories on "NoSleep," a subreddit. The message board thread allows registered visitors to upload original, personal tales of terror, and Auerbach had a whopper to share. Titled "Footsteps," the then-26-year-old college philosophy teacher's story was a foggy first-person perspective recollection of the time when, for no discernible reason, he woke up in the woods, not his comfortable bunk bed. NoSleep readers loved it and wanted more, so Auerbach—who'd never written any fiction prior to "Footsteps"—quickly put together a follow-up, "Balloons." The cycle repeated itself through the beginning of October.
Eleven months later, Auerbach self-published—via his own imprint, 1000 Vultures—his well-received Reddit stories as a fleshed-out, meticulously refined 240-page novel entitled Penpal. By December, without a publicist or an official marketing team behind it, Penpal landed on the leading horror website Bloody Disgusting's list of 2012's 10 best horror novels and was on its way to a movie deal.
In its completed form, Penpal (available for purchase here) is an engrossing, chilling blend of coming-of-age storytelling and realistic, non-supernatural horror that'll should keep readers far away from dreamland. So, mission accomplished, only it's on a much larger scale than Auerbach ever imagined.
His success story is indicative of the book publishing industry's recent shift in release dynamics. Gone are the days when aspiring fiction writers had to hunt down agents and cross fingers that corporate publishing houses would read their manuscripts, let alone want to produce hard copies for bookstores. As seen by accidental novelists like Auerbach and, on a bigger scale, Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James, the endless possibilities afforded by the Internet have changed the game.
Best of all, the paradigms of self-publishing aren't nearly as daunting as one might expect. In his own words, the Penpal author walked Complex through his unplanned yet highly effective path to becoming a published, buzz-worthy novelist.
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As told to Matt Barone (@MBarone)
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It All Starts With a Good Idea
"My mom denies that this ever happened, but as a kid I distinctly remember waking up on my porch outside, cold and in my underwear. My mom insists that it couldn't have possibly happened, so I guess I'll never know. But I've carried that memory around for years.
"When I was a kid, most of my nightmares were really short and really simple. I was raised in a single-parent household my entire childhood, so whenever I had a dream about parents, it'd always involve my mom. I would have these dreams where I'd be hanging out and then all of the sudden some dude would approach me, scoop me up, and walk away. Sometimes my mom would be waving goodbye, which didn't help—that wasn't too comforting. And then that was the end of the nightmare.
"The idea of disappearing, of someone kidnapping me, was something always manifested itself in my dreams. Everybody can understand the inherent horror of that idea. That combined with this idea that people can't perfectly remember everything from their childhood, that was really the impetus for 'Footsteps.' "
Unintentionally Building a Buzz Through Reddit
"I read a bunch of stories on this subreddit called NoSleep, and I thought it was interesting. The whole premise of that part of Reddit is that readers are expected to give the benefit of the doubt to authors about what's true. I thought it would be neat to throw a little short story out there and I hoped people would dig it. That really was my first official venture into writing.
" 'Footsteps' and 'Balloons,' those I wrote on the fly. I didn't have a stock pile of stories or anything; I posted 'Footsteps' the day that I finished it, and I wrote it in one day. When I saw that people were responding to it, I came up with the plot for 'Balloons,' wrote that over the next couple of days, and posted it that following week. The whole timeline for everything, from first finding my desire to write and then writing and posting everything, has been fairly compact.
"At first, my stories were only ever going to go on NoSleep, that was the plan from the beginning. That's one of the big benefits of a site like Reddit. There's Reddit.com, and there are dozens and dozens of subreddits. There's NoSleep, and then there's a subreddit for movies, a subreddit for news, and they all have their specialties and focuses. Each of them have subscribers who put the subreddit on what's called their Front Page and people vote on the posts. So when you subscribe to something, it allows you to see it when you log onto the website.
"NoSleep, at the time, had somewhere around 50,000 subscribers who were at least semi-regularly reading NoSleep. As soon as I posted it, I was excited to get feedback. If you write a story and it's published in a magazine or an anthology, you have to wait weeks or months to receive letters or any kind of feedback. When you want a book review, you have to send the book off and wait for weeks to hear anything back.
"With NoSleep, it was immediate. I was seeing people's reactions in the comments section almost immediately, and that was a huge inspiration for getting me to continue the story. I knew that night, maybe about an hour or so after I posted 'Footsteps,' that people wanted more. That offered me a kind of gratification I wouldn't have otherwise gotten if I'd posted it anywhere else."
The Importance of Engaging Readers on the Internet
"I thought of the concept for 'Balloons' [the second story] that same night I posted 'Footsteps.' People were asking me, "So what happens?" They wanted more information, and I was giving them vague, half-assed responses in the comments section.
"As more and more people made it clear that they were interested, I knew that I had to give them something. I figured out 'Balloons' and waited no more than a week to post the next story. At the time there were 50,000 subscribers, and nobody knew who I was and I'd only written this one story. I didn't want to lose people's attention. 'Footsteps' gave people an awareness of me, and I didn't want to post another story too far down the line when people had already forgotten about the first one. That's how I posted the rest of the stories, about five to seven days apart from each other.
"Stephen King has done stuff like this. The Green Mile was published piece-meal over time, as well as The Dark Tower series. I knew that there was precedent; at the very least, there was a semi-proven model for how this kind of publishing approach worked. The immediate feedback that I received was what motivated me; if I wasn't getting feedback immediately, I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't have continued."
Subverting Traditional Storytelling Methods
"I didn't have the unifying name Penpal until I was done with the entire thing. I came up with that name because NoSleep does an audio podcast through iTunes for some of their stories; they have a contest every month to pick winners who get to read. The guy who runs it, David Cummings, was putting together a collection of his favorite stories, and he used 'Footsteps,' 'Balloons,' and 'Boxes.' He then wanted to do the whole thing once I was finished with the entire project. It needed a title.
"I didn't know how long I would hold people's attention and how often they would come back for more chapters, so I knew that each story had to be self-contained. Each story had to have a real ending. I didn't want to do something that seemed gimmicky. I wanted to enable people to stop at anytime; I didn't want to do that 'Come back next week to see what happens!' kind of thing.
"I didn't want to be cheap about it, and I knew that I couldn't necessarily assume that people who read the third story had already read the first two. They all needed to work on their own. I'm happy that, in the end, it works well in a book format, but that wasn't the initial plan. I wasn't thinking that far in advance."
Realizing the Monetary Value
"People offered to send me money when I'd written the short stories. They'd say, 'I feel like I owe you something because I've been so entertained by these stories. Can I Paypal you money?' That felt weird to me; I didn't accept anybody's money. But there is this thing on Reddit called Reddit Gold, where you as a user gets some extra features. You can see who has Reddit Gold, so it's supposed to be a status symbol, but then again anybody who bragged about how much Reddit Gold they had would get laughed out of any chat-room. But, really, it's a nice and simple way to show that you like something that someone did or wrote on Reddit, so it was a nice gesture that people bought me some Reddit Gold just to say thanks.
"I did get money through Kickstarter. From the second or third story, these comments would pop up in the threads that said, 'This should be a book,' or, 'This should be a movie.' I won the NoSleep writing contest with 'Balloons.' Carolyn Nowak [a cartoonist/illustrator], who I ended up working with later on the Kickstarter, originally wanted to turn it all into a comic book. There were a lot of people who seemed interested.
"Other people approached me who wanted to monetize my stories, turn them into an E-book, and sell them, but I didn't feel ready. If I was going to do that, there was a lot of work I needed to do, editing and additions. I never wanted to charge for something that I'd already given away for free.
"Before I ended it, somebody said that I could have just cashed out then, not finish the story on Reddit, only finish it for a book, and force everybody who wanted to know the ending to buy the book. Clearly that would've been a genius business plan, but I thought if I did that people would be unhappy with me. So I finished it, and then I expanded and revised everything for the book."
Using Kickstarter
"After tinkering with the revisions and the editing, I realized that it would work as a book. Then, I figured out a way to publish it that would be low-risk. I wouldn't have to dump a fortune into it. Once I figured that out, I made an announcement on Reddit saying I was going to write a book. I set up a mailing list and a Facebook page so people could keep up-to-date with my stuff, so I wouldn't have to keep coming back to NoSleep and making obnoxious posts.
"A couple people in the comments said I should make a Kickstarter to cover the costs. There were some costs involved, but nothing too crazy. I didn't have to buy a printing plant or anything, but I had to buy my own ISBNs, pay people for the artwork, get proofs done and shipped to me. I calculated that it would cost me about $1,500. At first I was really against doing the Kickstarter because the cost wasn't prohibitive—it wasn't like I couldn't swing that on my own. But people were really insistent that I at least consider it, so I realized there was no reason not to do it. It seemed like it would be fair for everybody.
"It turned out to be way more successful than I ever imagined. I was having conversations with a friend, D.R. Tuzzeo, who designed the covers and all of the images associated with this book. Before the Kickstarter launched, we were talking and I said how I'd need the $1,500, but that I wasn't sure if that seemed like too much. I'd say, 'I don't know, maybe I should just set it at $1,000.' The way Kickstarter works is that if you don't meet your goal, you don't get any of the money. So I said to him, 'I'll just set it at $1,000, so I can then get the ISBNs and pay you, and I'll be OK from there.' It took some convincing to get me to bump it up to $1,500, but then I ended up doing ten times that, which was just crazy. It ended just short of $16,000.
"It wound up being the best idea because, on top of it being successful, it got me to do some things in terms of design and how I approached the book itself. It put me on a time table that I otherwise wouldn't have had. I knew I had the cover ready by this day, and I had to have the revisions done by this day, and that helped me."
Getting Your Book on Websites Like Amazon
"I figured that 100 or so people wanted this book, I wanted my own copy, and I'd give a copy to my mom. I just wanted to get it out there. I decided I'd do it myself. Anybody who has a computer can publish a book on Amazon. I can type up something this afternoon, and it's not even a story—I could type up, "I went to the store and I bought a fan but it didn't work," and that's the whole story. I can publish that on Amazon, or anywhere, really. Anybody can write something that has the potential to be seen; whether or not it's ever seen is another thing.
"So that was actually the easiest part of this process. I just had to have the file, and the whole thing had to be formatted properly. I uploaded it to Amazon. If you're self-publishing through Amazon, there's no investment on behalf of the company. Amazon isn't losing storage space, or even warehouse space, to have my book on their site, because of how it's printed. So they don't care if it's good or bad, or if it's successful or not successful—they make money when you make money. Every time I sell a book, I get a royalty and they get what they get. If the book's selling, they're making money; if the book's not selling, they're not making money, but they're also not losing any money.
"And that's also true of iTunes, especially places that only do digital stuff. There's no risk on their part. Anybody can publish anything that they want. It's becoming a really powerful and popular way for people to get their work out there. It used to be the case that, if you wanted to come out as a writer, you'd have to go to a publisher. You'd have to court these suitors to sell your book, but now the business model has changed. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. It means there's a lot more stuff than there used to be, and it's not all good. The market is becoming saturated with self-publishers. Anybody can self-publish a book."
Non-traditional Advertising Methods
"I haven't paid any money for advertising. I said that on the Kickstarter: If the Kickstarter was successful, I'd be able to better handle marketing costs. Whatever money I had left over from that could potentially be used for advertising purposes. But here's the thing: I don't click on Internet ads. I have software installed that blocks pop-up ads on my computer. They don't do anything for me, so my thinking was, I'm not going to pour any money into this campaign that I wouldn't even see if I was just casually cruising the Internet.
"I could buy a Facebook ad and a GoodReads ad and I'll have exhausted all I know about advertising. There are about 35,000 people on GoodReads who buy ads—the odds of people seeing or caring about my ad are really slim. For me, it's important that people talk about Penpal on blogs and social media sites. That's what happened with the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey; it started out as fan-fiction and people liked it because it's a bunch of BDSM stuff. They read it, started talking about it, and sharing it with their friends, and it took off from there.
"That was the benefit of starting how I started. By the time I published the book, people already knew about it and were waiting for it, through Reddit and Kickstarter. And, fortunately, they went out and bought it once it was available. If you've got, say, an iPhone case on Kickstarter, you can have a video that shows off its flashy features, and somebody could stumble upon that and support the project and give you money. The video gives them something to see and get excited about. But with a book, it's much harder to do that. I can't put together a video of me sitting in a Corvette, reading passages from the book, and dazzling them with my stature.
"I got messages from people on Kickstarter, when I had my page up, asking me how mine was successful and what advice could I give them to make theirs successful. The bottom line is that I already had a reader-base established before I did the Kickstarter. Some people stumbled upon it and supported that way, but most of the people were carryovers from NoSleep."
The Importance of Appearing Legitimate at All Times
"1000 Vultures is my Reddit user name, and so I couldn't just leave the name behind. There was this transition from being this anonymous dude on Reddit who was only known as 1000 Vultures to when the book was coming out and I had to give out my real name. I didn't want to completely leave 1000 Vultures behind, so when I bought my ISBN, I set up a DBA, or a 'Doing Business As' name, as 1000 Vultures. That way, I could use that a publishing company of sorts. Granted, I don't have any resources. I have a printer and an HP Deskjet center, but that's not really going to do the job. So 1000 Vultures is my 'publishing company,' but it's really just a name. It brings the two worlds together.
"One thing that I came across in my research is that most people, like retailers and publishers, don't like self-published books, because there's no quality control, or at least none that's inherently understood. With a big publisher, you have a whole team of editors and formatters who get the book ready for its official publication long before anybody reads it. There's a squad that at least makes sure it meets grammatical rules, it's legible, and it's not published in some annoying font. That's not the case for self-publishers.
"It's a small thing, but I thought if I could at least put another layer there, if I could at least have a second name there, it might help ward off people who have reservations about checking out self-published books. I thought, maybe people will see '1000 Vultures' and think it's a big publishing house.
"It's the stupidest thing in the world, it doesn't matter. There are plenty of books in Barnes & Noble released by big publishers that aren't good, and there are all kinds of self-published books that are bad. It's a mixed bag either way. It's just that the self-publishing market has exploded within the last couple years, due to these big success stories like Fifty Shades of Grey.
"The way I printed my book was through Create Space, which is this Amazon-owned company. It's a print-on-demand service, and the reason I did that was I don't have to have an inventory. I don't have to get 10,000 copies of my book and then sell them to my friends and at swap meets and set up booths at flea markets to unload all of these tomes. I didn't want to do that, so I went with this Amazon-owned company.
"Barnes & Noble is a competitor of Amazon's, so I don't even know if it's possible to get Barnes & Noble to stock a book like mine, because of the way it's printed, because of who's doing the printing. I had hoped that could happen, though. It would be really cool to see my book in their stores. I knew they would shy away from it because of how I went about printing it. So, it's available on their website, but not in the actual stores."
Preparing for the Next Step: Hollywood
"It's kind of like when you go on YouTube for the hell of it and an hour later you're watching some bizarre videos. From what producer Rich Middlemas seems to remember, that's similar to how he came across my stories on Reddit. He won an Oscar last year for a documentary called Undefeated.
"He didn't know much about Reddit, was using it because of a project he was working on. At some point, he stumbled upon my story—in the future, if the movie happens and I'm doing interviews for it, I'll make up a cooler story about how he discovered my work. But he found the original short stories, read them, and emailed me. This was after the Kickstarter but before the book debuted on Amazon. I'd ordered all of the books and I had posters and T-shirts. I was getting all of that together when I got an email from him saying how much he liked the stories.
"He found the Kickstarter, saw that the book was coming out, and I asked if I could send him a copy. I did, and a week later or so he emailed me back, said he really dug it, and we got to talking on the phone. The things that I think work for the book are what he also cared about. But his vision for it is really exciting.
"We signed an agreement shortly after that. Right now, we've got a couple really big places reading it. We're shopping it around. I don't have any experience with screenwriting. Rich is sending the actual book around, not a screenplay or anything like that. He's getting the book in front of people to find the best possible fit. We've got a ways to go, obviously, but I would've never imagined that there'd even be a process like this. Never in a million years could I have dreamed about these stories I posted on Reddit possibly becoming a real movie. The whole thing is crazy to me."