Well, that was underwhelming

Eight books into my half-assed writing career, I got tired of begging my friends and family to write me reviews. So for my ninth and tenth books, I tried different strategies.

When I published Mary Monster, I focused on giveaways. The week the book came out, I distributed 1,200 copies. Fifty of those were to readers who promised to post a review in exchange for an advance copy. The other 1,150 were through a promotion I supported with paid advertising. The result? Zilch. I saw zero sales after my giveaways ended. And the reviews online are mostly from my friends and family. To date, Mary Monster has sold maybe 80 copies.

So for Camille, I focused on advertising a special $0.99 launch price. I invested $300 in different platforms, one of which "guaranteed" at least 50 sales. The result? Again, basically nothing. Camille has sold about 20 copies, at least six of which were purchased by personal friends. Only one review has been posted on Amazon.

I sort of expected Mary Monster to flop. It's too stylized for a self-pubbed genre thriller. But too supernatural to be considered serious literature.

But I really thought Camille might take off. The cover design is killer. The keywords and book description are solid. It's a popular genre. It's very dark, in a way some readers might miss until the book's final chapters, but I don't think it flopped because the hero was an antihero.

Anyway, I have four different books marinating, but I'm ignoring them for a bit. I shared some of my songs back in 2017, and I'm going to focus energy on writing more music and publishing an EP. Once that's done, maybe I'll write another novel the world can ignore.

Indie Reader reviews Mary Monster

This is one of those reviews where you get the feeling that if people'd just read it, surely they'd give your work a shot.

Writing a horror novel that plays off a seminal classic of the genre is a huge risk, but Matt Ingwalson does more than a credible job of pulling the feat off in MARY MONSTER. Rather than focus on her most famous literary work, Ingwalson instead brings Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley forward as both monster and creator... An interesting premise and a well-done presentation wrapped in a horror novel, MARY MONSTER is an engaging, fun and thoughtful critique of the creative process and relationship between artists and inspiration.

If that's enough to grab your attention, here's the link.

Sever, The Perfume All At Once and Mary Monster. And The Witch.

There are days when I think Sever is the best thing I've ever published. It's a novella about a tiny college town that's inexplicably set upon by four ax murderers. Sever is a long and extremely bloody metaphor for growing up. For saying goodbye to the consequence-free days of college and accepting adulthood.

The novella is narrated by one of its only survivors, a Finny-like character named Leo. His perspective is extremely limited. He's just a 21-year-old guy, mostly decent but kind of self-involved in the way college kids usually are.

A year later, I wrote an unsettling short story about three teenage witches. The powerful Rapathia, the devious Josephine, and the unreliable narrator Camille, who is possibly a homicidal lunatic. This story obviously existed in the Sever universe. (Leo actually makes a cameo.) But there was a problem. In Sever, the witches meet an inglorious and abrupt end. For the two pieces to coexist, there had to be more to the story.

Something Leo couldn't see.

So, with my short story as my first chapter, I started writing. How did the witches get to Epshire? How do they interact with the various ax murders? And what really happened the night of the final ritual?

At some point, I decided my witches existed in the same universe as Robert Eggers' brilliant film The Witch, which makes this new novella fan fiction, in a way. But instead of Black Phillip, the devil deer from Mary Monster showed up. And like that, everything became connected.

This new novella is neither a sequel or a prequel to Sever. It's the same series of events told from the reverse perspective. It'll probably take me a few months to get it edited and published. But right now, I'm just high on finishing a rough draft.

Sever will be free from April 2 to April 6. So if you haven't read it, now's the time.

One reader's lyric is another reader's labor

Kirkus's review of Mary Monster isn't always positive, but it's fair. And anytime anyone compares me to Thomas Pynchon, I'll take it.

In this ambitious novel, Ingwalson’s (The Baby Monitor, 2017, etc.) prose slips in and out of Otis’ Mancunian dialect, flecked with rich allusions to rock, literature, and various Colorado locales. Otis’ voice is noirish in a way that will strike some readers as lyric and others as a bit labored... This is an elegant mystery in the mode of Thomas Pynchon or Jonathan Lethem, invested more in the journey than the outcome.

As an example of "labored" prose, the reviewer offers this, from my novel's third chapter:

For a few seconds I stared back, my eyes gone black as cats as I surveyed the silk of her neck. This one’s world had been night for far too long. She’d never seen a beach, she’d never cared for light. A streetlamp kicked on and it made her flesh milk-flesh.

Which is fine. If you don't like that, I'd urge you not to buy this book. Because the whole thing is like that. I swung for the fences on this one. I regret nothing.

I've written an unpublishable mashup of a novel

Between January 3, 2013 and February 8, 2017, I put out eight novellas. That's a clip of a new book every six months. What's been the hold-up since?

The good news is I'm on my third draft of a novel. The bad news? I'm fairly sure it's unpublishable.

Mary Monster isn't going to be easy to sell. It's a mashup of urban surrealism and gothic horror. Dance Dance Dance meets Penny Dreadful. My first-person protagonist narrates the story in an awkward combination of 1976 Manchester and 2002 Manhattan slang. He drops dozens of indie music references, some explained and some that'll only make sense to the sort of person who obsesses over The Smiths. Meanwhile, the titular Mary speaks in wholly imagined accents, double entendres and literary allusions.

I tried to embrace all this artifice. In fact, I ran at it. In places I rewrote things to feel purposefully self-conscious, so readers have to slow down and make choices about what to Google and what to let go.

How do I explain this work in a query letter? And even if I could, who'd want it? Fantasy publishers will find my style obtrusive. While literary agents are going to be turned off by all the zombies.

But I can't self-publish, either. The type of people who download self-published fiction are looking for error-free genre fun. That means the first wave of consumer reviews would be terrible. Some jerk would claim my book was filled with typos. Another would drop the where-was-the-editor bomb. And snap, Amazon's algorithm would bury Mary Monster before it got a chance to find a niche.

To publish this book, I either need to find a publisher who believes in it. Or an audience ready to champion it. And I'm not sure either exists.