This seems pretty momentous – another notch in Konrath’s death spiral.  Plenty of writers are going from self-publishing to traditional publishing, but not many taking the plunge backward again.  She grew her platform via Harper Collins and now she has the standing to ditch them and still make a living.

Novelist ditches publisher at book launch for ‘condescending’ treatment

Courtney self-published Golden Handcuffs, a fictional exposé of life in the City, in 2006 after quitting her job as an investment banker, following it up in 2008 with Poles Apart, about an ambitious Polish graduate who moves to London. Their success helped land her a three-book deal with HarperCollins imprint Avon, but at the launch of the third book, It’s A Man’s World, she announced that she would not be working with the publisher again.

Instead, she is planning to return to the world of self-publishing.

“My writing has been shoehorned into a place that’s not right for it,” she said this morning. “It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women’s fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it’s not War and Peace. But it shouldn’t be portrayed as chick lit.”…

Her decision to publicly ditch her publisher was the result of “three years of pent–up frustration”, she said.

The whole thing is like an advertisement for self-publishing. Of course, the fact that she was traditionally published in the first place is why she’s gotten all this attention, but not too long ago (like last year) the thought of going back to the slums of self-publishing was unheard of.


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