Don't Say Self-Publish

My experience writing my first two novels

I thought it would be fun to share some of my experiences writing and publishing my two novels, Top of Mason and Off Clark, as insight for the curious or as a resource for other writers out there who are considering releasing their work in a similar way. There is a stigma around self-publishing, and I hesitate to even use that phrase. What I have done with the two books I’ve written feels more like selling a product that I’ve collaborated on with friends, similar to the many other things I’ve sold through Old Friends over the years. As a brand, we’ve sold skateboards made out of wine barrels, hand-made leather wallets, shirts, hoodies, hand-knit beanies, zines, and fitness gear. Top of Mason and Off Clark just happen to be books. 

First, I’d like to start with why I started writing these books in the first place. I’m from a family of serious readers, and my obsession with skateboarding arrived at the same time I began to branch off and read books of my own choosing. Every now and then I would come across a book about skateboarding, but they were never fictional—biographies, memoirs, photo books, and dated tutorials. The first novel I read with a skateboarder as a main protagonist was Nick Hornby’s Slam, which wasn’t published until I was in college. I’m a huge Nick Hornby fan, High Fidelity is one of my all time favorite novels, but Slam seemed targeted for a younger audience. I wanted a novel that bridged the more interesting and funny life situations of a book like High Fidelity, but within the skateboarding world. The best skate writing I had come across was usually found in skate magazines, particularly travel pieces in Thrasher written by Michael Burnett. His writing is funny, straight forward, and usually captures the best part of the experience of skateboarding: the characters. Not just the characters who are skateboarders, but the people you encounter while skateboarding. His articles bring to life the goofy, weird situations we get into that are unique to skateboarders, but relatable to the masses. I wanted that in a novel. 

Another deep void in the skate media landscape were fictional depictions of skateboarders in film and television. I wanted to see the industry and professional skateboarding represented accurately. Again, what I found were documentaries, bio-pic dramas, and movies that seemed aimed at a youth audience. When they do include the industry, the movies are coming-of-age stories following a more traditional teenage, sports-story narrative. They also tend to be unbearably corny. That’s not what I wanted to watch.  

So in collaboration with my friend Nic Henry, we set out to write the first, good TV show about skateboarding. We called it Kooks, and we wrote a pilot for a show that we thought would begin to capture the silliness of the skateboarding industry. Our protagonist was a soon-to-be sponsored young man in college navigating the weird world of professional skateboarding in San Diego. At this point I was a rookie pro and working on this project allowed me to observe the bizarre subculture I was a part of through a new lens. Nic, a lifelong skateboarder who was equally curious about the inner workings of this world, was working in production and getting into writing scripts. After we finished writing the pilot and a rough second episode, our plan was to self fund it, find skaters to act, and barge the filming of it DIY style. Unfortunately, piecing this together proved much trickier than we anticipated, and the project fell to the wayside. My traveling picked up for skateboarding, Nic got a more serious job, and scheduling so much as a read-through never happened. 

Fortunately, the exercise of inventing characters, developing plot, and writing dialogue was irreversibly switched on in my imagination, and a new story idea formed that I couldn’t kick. It was  about a skater who never made it, living in San Francisco and working as a hotel maid. I wanted to write about how floundering it can feel to wake up at twenty-nine years old, having dedicated your life to an athletic endeavor that gives you nothing in return. I hoped to capture how close to the brink of homelessness many skaters often live, and what dire situations can result from a few wrong decisions. I also wanted to explore the fame and glory side of the world of professional skateboarding, but from the perspective of the not so famous or glorified. After picking away at it in secret for almost four years, by mid 2018 I had a finished manuscript that I was ready to share with people. I sent it to friends and family, and began what would become a near three-year revision process. 

People often ask me if there are any parallels between skateboarding and writing, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that there are many. But the number one connection between the work of writing and professional skateboarding is the sense of delayed gratification. As a skateboarder, I have put the majority of my energy into filming videos. From middle school and into my mid thirties, if I’m healthy enough to skate, my goal is to connect with a videographer and film something that could be used in a video part. That means a trick or combination of tricks that is as difficult as my body and mind will allow me to perform. A single trick might take years of repeated attempts. These tricks consume my mind at every waking (and sometimes dreaming) hour. The number of tricks that comprise a video part varies, but the projects I’m most proud of are usually filmed over the course of several years. One such project, which I worked on during the revision process of my first novel, is called Wilshire Wonderland. This was my first concept video, meaning that I gave myself parameters for filming. I wore only one outfit, which after a year and a new shoe sponsor turned into a second outfit, and I only skated spots on or within a block radius of the Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. In the company of Ewan Bowman, who filmed and edited the piece, we might spend thirty minutes or a ten-hour day working together, Ewan patiently pointing his camera at me as I repeatedly fail. If I land something, we rejoice, and then hold onto it in secret until the final project is complete. A trick I might be eager to share with the world immediately must stay on a hard drive until the forty or fifty other tricks are completed. Once it’s done, the video is released onto the internet and all I can do is hope that people enjoy the experience of watching it. 

The novel is similar. It’s a slow and steady practice that happens mostly in my mind. The times I actually work on it are done sporadically, sometimes in short bouts and sometimes in long ones. The ideas take time to develop and see to completion, and nothing can be shared until every piece is finished and it all fits together nicely. And just like the skate video, once it’s finished you try to find someone to publish it for you. In skateboarding, the optimal publisher is the media channel with the best credibility, the farthest reach, and the most subscribers. In the past, the only way to do this was through brands and magazines who would fund and produce the videos themselves. Today, if you can’t find a brand, magazine or media platform, you can do it yourself on YouTube. For the novel, it’s a bit more complicated.  

While I mentioned that I’m from a family of serious readers, many of those readers are also writers. My father was a writer and lover of poetry and my mother spent the first twelve years of my life as a dedicated writer, finishing three novels and a number of short stories. In addition, just about everyone on my mother’s side has written at least one novel or book of some kind. The matriarch, our beloved Grummy (Susan Trott to the rest of the world), has written dozens of novels, fourteen of which were published in the traditional manner, meaning pitched by an agent and picked up by a big New York publishing house. Through Grummy, I learned the discipline of sticking with one’s craft, as she essentially wrote to completion a new novel every year or two. Her steadfast dedication, along with my mother’s, inspired not only my own writing, but my approach to skateboarding. I also learned about the pitfalls of the publishing world and the increased difficulty of finding agents and publishers to put out her work. Though she tried, my mother had been unable to find an agent and a publisher for her novels. Knowing this, I assumed it would be incredibly unlikely that I, an unproven novelist or fiction writer, would find anyone to publish my novel. But I held out hope, and while I revised the novel, taking in the helpful notes and critiques of my trusted readers, I sent out agent queries. 

The Query. Ugh. Just looking at that word brings me to a dark place. The query, as I learned through countless (and very kind) advice blogs and websites, is the letter you send to prospective literary agents, selling them on yourself and your work. I sent out close to ninety agent queries, only receiving about ten human responses, which was pretty demoralizing. Of those rejections, I have no idea if the selected chapters I attached were even read. For months I constructed carefully worded emails, explaining why I thought I was worthy of each particular agent’s consideration. I used the website “query tracker” to research specific agents who would be suitable for my style and genre. Every email felt like a disingenuous brag. The only thing I could compare it to would be if, when I was a kid trying to get sponsored, I had sent around my two minutes of video footage with a letter attached, explaining in words why the brand should sponsor me. “My style is like a new Tony Hawk meets Tyrone Olson, with a twist of Rodney Mullen.” If a kid sent something like that to a brand, the letter would be framed in the company’s office for its legendary kookiness and haunt the skater for the rest of their days. Even though I mostly avoided boldly comparing Top of Mason to other great works of fiction (which I read is what you should do), the emails I wrote were so cringey and unnatural I wish I could retroactively delete every blind query I sent out. 

So after a couple years of rejections, I moved to my plan B, which in the back of my mind had always been my plan A. I would put it out myself. After locking in a copy-editor, hiring my friends to illustrate and design the cover and title accents, and figuring out the right company for print-on-demand production and shipping, on December 1, 2020, I made Top of Mason available in the Old Friends webstore, announcing it via a mass email and an Instagram post.  

While T.O.M. is not a memoir, this book was the most vulnerable piece of writing I’d put out into the world. Sure, I’d maintained a blog, published some travel writing, and occasionally got a little loose in the comments section on Instagram, but this story packed in a lot of me that I was nervous about sharing. Thoughts and musings on the fragility of my own skateboarding career, failed romantic relationships, drug and alcohol abuse I’ve watched my friends go through, and negative takes on the skateboarding industry at large. More than the vulnerability displayed openly on the page, I was nervous about the product itself being sold. I’ve put thousands of hours into this project, but will people even buy it? And if they buy it, will they read it? 

Professional skateboarders have long dabbled in the arts. From the inception of the “job,” skateboarders with big names have used their notoriety to enter many different creative fields. Stacy Peralta as a filmmaker, Mark Gonzalez and Brian Lotti as artists, Mike Vallely and Tommy Guerrero as musicians, Jason Lee as an actor, Ed Templeton as a photographer. These were some of the pioneering “video stars” of skateboarding, and while I’m sure their talents would have landed them with success in their second act pursuits regardless of their skateboarding careers, their existing notoriety surely helped.

Professional skateboarders continue to juggle passions, and today you see plenty of models, actors, TV Personalities, and an abundance of photographers, painters, designers and musicians. But from my landscape, I still couldn’t find any active professional skateboarders who were aspiring authors. There are a couple notable skateboarders who published books after stepping out of the limelight. Scott Bourne, Evan Schiefelbine, and my new favorite “skater/writer,” Michael Christie. So the void made it difficult to gauge how a novelist in the space might be welcomed or perceived. 

The result was . . . pretty surprising. A lot of people bought the book! And judging by the amount of dms and messages I continue to receive, a lot of people are reading it. In the first year, I sold almost 2000 physical books, which far exceeded my expectations. A number of skate shops around the country stocked it and I released it on Kindle as well. I hired one of my best friends to record an audio version, which I then published on Audible. In the end, I was able to do nearly every single aspect of the “publishing” process myself.

All of this encouraged me to move forward with the second novel I’d started working on, which by early 2021 I was already half way done with. The idea for this one started on a skate trip in Japan back in 2017. My friend Michael Mackrodt had just come back from the States with an incredible story of being confronted by a CIA agent in Chicago who interrogated him on suspicion of being more than just a professional skateboarder. He writes about it in a Free Skate article here. Drawing from this unusual encounter, along with my experiences traveling the world for many years as a professional skateboarder, I assembled another skateboarding adventure story, with a new cast of characters. 

Off Clark is about Mo, a professional skateboarder who goes missing. Determined to find him, a budding podcaster, Nina, sets out on a mission to figure out what happened. Set in Chicago and the Middle East, the story dives into the relationship between professional skateboarders and videographers, while offering a critique of the modern skateboarding industry. Most of all, like Top of Mason, Off Clark is meant to be a fun read. 

I found I already had an incredible team of people to make it all come together through my experience with Top of Mason. First are the first draft readers who I like to think of as one, thorough editor. These are friends and family members who don’t just read early drafts and pat me on the back and say, “Good for you!” These are novelists and novel enthusiasts who pick apart my writing honestly and critically. Then, my dear friends Sebo Walker and Chris Collins, seasoned artists who make the cover art, design and inside accents become a reality. Next is my copy-editor, Amy Medieros, who each time I deliver a manuscript I consider near immaculate she returns it with literally thousands of comments and corrections. She’s amazing. Rudy Behrens, one of my best friends from St. Helena (also my longest running friend who still skates), is the voice actor for the Top of Mason audiobook. He is currently working on the Off Clark audiobook, which I hope to have out by the end of summer. Finally, through the company Lulu, I am able to print one-off copies of the book to test interior and cover appearance. The final stage is integrating the finalized PDFs of the interior and exterior on Lulu with the Shopify integration and boom! I click publish, someone buys it, and it ships to nearly anywhere in the world. 

As of writing this, I’m about halfway finished with a third novel that continues to expand the fictional skateboarding world established in my first two novels. My goal is to create a collection of novels which loosely revolve around a fictional shoe company, with eclectic characters inspired by the many interesting personalities I’ve encountered through my skateboarding career. 

If you have read or supported these books in any way along this journey, I thank you dearly. I find the process of writing them deeply fulfilling, and putting them out in this DIY fashion is a fun way to connect with the international skateboarding and reading community in a new way. 

I encourage anyone out there who’s toying with book ideas to stick with it and if all else fails, do it yourself!

If you’ve read my books and enjoyed them, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads. This is super helpful for discovery.