Indie Success Interview #1: Talking with Gay Rom-Com Author D.P. Clarence
A copy of The Paper Boys by D.P. Clarence. (It looks even better when you don’t drop the ball and have to ask your spouse to photograph it at 8:00 p.m., with no natural light, because you realized you don’t have a photo…)
As an editor, not every book you work on is right up your alley—and that’s fine. Some of the most rewarding projects I’ve tackled involve books I would never have read if a publisher hadn’t assigned them to me. There’s something special about an editing project that starts as a chore but ends as a delight.
And then there are projects you love instantly. D.P. Clarence’s The Paper Boys was one of mine. As soon as I started work on it, I felt as if P. G. Wodehouse had come back from the grave and written a gay rom-com. The prose scintillates, the jokes hit bull’s-eyes, and it’s packed with insights into UK culture that, as an immigrant in the UK, I’ve pondered hundreds of times since I edited the book. It’s got characters that engrave themselves in your memory like the cast of Dickens novels did for the Victorians.
I’ve edited mountains of excellent rom-coms, and The Paper Boys rivals the best of them. And astonishingly enough, it was D.P. Clarence’s debut.
What’s nearly as astonishing? It was immediately evident when I started working with Clarence that he was well versed in the publishing and marketing side of things—something that thrilled me, since it meant this book I loved was much more likely to reach readers.
It’s hard to be great at both writing and marketing, which is one of the reasons self-publishing intimidates many writers and why some excellent books struggle to find an audience. But Clarence came to me already knowing reams about how indie authors sell books. This was a level of knowledge I tend to see from established indie authors, ones with at least a couple of books under their belts (and sometimes dozens), but not as often from debut authors. (This, of course, is one of the reasons I offer publishing support services!)
So when I decided to start interviewing successful indie authors, D.P. Clarence was one of the first authors I thought of. How did he manage to pull off such a great debut novel without a traditional publisher behind him? How has the book been doing as it makes its way into the world? What does he envision for the future?
Let’s dive into his answers! (And hope he forgives me for being way less good at writing content than he is.)
The Background: Where Did the Book Come From?
As soon as I asked Clarence about his background, my understanding of his success started to cohere. Although successful writers come from all backgrounds, certain experiences make it easier to pull off a highly polished first novel (as D.P. Clarence has done) rather than having to work through several practice novels before nailing the form down.
I’d been amazed by how well Clarence’s humor landed: The Paper Boys isn’t just funny; it’s professional-level funny. As it turns out, he did standup comedy for a few years: “[that] taught me a lot about crafting jokes, what works and what doesn’t.” Few things can be better than a live audience, or more brutal, when it comes to letting you know what’s funny and what isn’t. He’s also written “a humorous daily column,” meaning he had substantial practice at putting humor onto the page.
But that daily column is just the tip of the iceberg: “I’ve spent twenty-five years writing for a living,” he noted. He’s a content marketer now, but his background is journalism. “I’ve worked in print journalism, magazine, radio, and even a bit of TV.” That’s excellent experience for a fiction writer, of course, and in more ways than one: Clarence’s insights into UK culture, which give The Paper Boys heft, have clearly been nurtured by all his time in journalism—and that’s not even mentioning the plot, which revolves around rival journalists who fall in love.
What else in Clarence’s background prepared him to write this book? “I’ve also been gay for a really long time,” he observed, “which was finally useful.”
The Dream: What Does the Author Want?
Plenty of authors dream of writing full time—but not everyone does. And not everyone enjoys that dream if they do achieve it. When writing fiction is your full-time career, the pressure to publish and make money can be paralyzing. And a full-time writer’s life, with its relative solitude and lack of structure, can be devastating for many types of people.
D.P. Clarence confirmed he’s one of those authors who do dream of the full-time writing life: “that would be the ultimate success.” With his professional background in writing, I suspect he’d weather its stresses well. “I’m not sure I see that in my future, though,” he added. “I’d settle for getting to a point where my accountant stops asking me when my books are going to make money.”
If you ask me, Clarence’s attitude, with its mix of aspiration and realism, is ideal. Very few authors make money on their first book. Yes, if an author is traditionally published, their publisher will cover editing and marketing costs, but royalties and advances rarely compensate for the sheer expenditure of time put into pursuing traditional publication. And a successful indie author often has much higher expenses than a traditionally published author does, especially for a debut. Learning the craft of writing and the business of selling costs money, time, or both. Marketing can get costly, and when an author hasn’t built a backlist, there’s less return on that investment. And so on and so forth.
If your only measure of success is making a full-time income, you’re almost bound to feel crushed and see yourself as a failure. Being realistic about financial prospects isn’t about crushing dreams—it’s about keeping them alive past the inevitable rocky start.
As D.P. Clarence noted, his own genre, gay rom-com, isn’t particularly profitable. When you see an indie author making six figures, more often than not, they’re writing straight romance. Gay romance doesn’t have that kind of market share. Clarence said he hopes he’ll be making money by about book five, and this sounds reasonable to me.
The Money: How Did the Book Sell?
D.P. Clarence was generous enough to share some metrics about his book sales:
He launched The Paper Boys on February 1 with about 40 preorders.
Through October 1 (so, the first seven months), he sold about 2,500 books, about three-quarters ebooks and the rest in print.
He got a coveted BookBub deal, which he considers one of the best things he did: thanks to it, sold about 800 books over four days.
His ratings on Amazon have hovered around 4.5 to 4.6 stars. He currently has 178 Amazon ratings, which means those high numbers are meaningful: overall, the readers who rated this book have really liked it.
He’s published through IngramSpark as well as Amazon/KDP. Although he’s sold only about 220 copies via Ingram, his book has gotten into four or five brick-and-mortar bookshops this way. As he said, that’s very cool: it’s something writers dream about, and it’s hard to achieve for an indie author. (And Ingram is by far the easiest way to do it.)
In my experience, those are phenomenal numbers for an indie debut in a niche like Clarence’s. As you’ll often hear in the self-publishing space, the best way to sell your first book is to write the next book. Building an audience happens over the course of multiple releases. As he releases more books, more readers will discover The Paper Boys, and the numbers will keep growing.
Has he made his investment back yet? No, he said: “I haven’t broken even. Nowhere near it, really. But the best thing I ever did was write a free novella to giveaway to readers, as this has helped me gather more than four hundred email addresses of readers. Those are all warm leads for the next book.”
(I worked on this novella, The Silly Season, too, and I can vouch that it’s delightful—and perfect for the holiday season!)
The Reach: How Did the Book Get Out There?
Aside from the successful BookBub deal (about which Clarence noted, “There’s a long tail on that, too, because as people read the book they sign up for the free novella, I get more email addresses, everyone wins”), Clarence observed that building his profile on Instagram made a noticeable difference: because his genre is “super niche… there’s a really tight and active community on social media.”
But most of all, he ascribes his success to the book’s quality. He self-edited; he paid for a professional developmental edit; he used beta readers; he paid for professional copyediting and proofreading; he hired a cover designer he loved. And readers noticed this all. “On a podcast that reviewed my book, someone said, ‘This book is self-published, but it reads like it’s been edited.’ Yeah, well, it had!”
As he observed, “When you have a quality product, readers are more likely to recommend it to other people.” And recommendations sell books.
What about investments that didn’t pay off? “I think everything is a learning experience,” he said, though he noted he spent money on an Amazon ads course that didn’t bring him results. “That’s probably more about me than about the course,” he allowed. (From my experience, though, he’s far from the only author to have found studying Amazon advertising unprofitable.)
The Bottom Line: What Should We Take Away?
In sum, Clarence said, “Find good professionals to work with. People who get you, who get your work and believe in it. People you vibe with. Find those people, and life will be so much easier, and much more fun.”
And my key takeaway? I’m dying for more D.P. Clarence books—not just for my sake but for the sake of all those readers who will love them but haven’t discovered them yet. I’m tremendously grateful that Clarence has the know-how and fortitude to keep writing and publishing. It’s not an easy path.
But even if The Paper Boys were the only book Clarence wrote, I’d consider it a resounding success. It’s an excellent book. It holds its own against the very best traditionally published rom-coms I’ve worked on (or even just read). It’s made its way into the world, and it’s found an audience that loves it. Those are tremendous accomplishments, and they matter.
A great rom-com isn’t just frivolous fun; it gives people hope when things look grim, and it brings people together in the communities that sustain them. And right now, what do we need more than hope and sustaining communities?
Get D.P. Clarence’s The Paper Boys here or order it from your local bookstore. The Silly Season is available free from his website, here.
Read the introduction to my Indie Success Interviews here.
