Have you thought about self-pubbing the series? A lot of authors do that now when a publisher drops the series.

M.L. Brennan Thanks for the question, Rachel, and I'm so glad that you've enjoyed the series! I currently have no plans to self-pub the series. I know some authors who have chosen to go in this route, and completely support their choice, but it does not make financial sense for me to take this path. Currently I am working on other projects, and hopefully will have new work on bookshelves at some point in the future. However, I have all of my notes on 5 and 6, and if I ever got a contract from a publisher for those books, I would be more than happy to write and release them.

I know that this isn't what people want to hear, and I get this question a lot, but writing a book takes me anywhere from six months to a year. In the meantime, I need to eat and pay my bills. To self-publish a book would mean to do all of the writing, then hire and pay an editor out of my pocket (because if the original manuscripts of the GenV books were published, they wouldn't have been nearly as good as they were after I'd worked with my editor's notes), then a copy-editor, then a cover artist. I'd be in the hole for a lot of money to make that book look even half as professional as it would working with a publishing house. Then I'd have to be begging for blog reviews, possibly paying for advertising, and spending a lot of time shilling myself on social media, because I'd have to sell copies in order to try to even break even, much less make a profit -- that's practically a full-time job in itself, and one that I don't want to do, because it means less time actually getting to write. In addition, my potential audience would be significantly less than it is -- no people finding the book on a bookstore shelf, or hearing about it through Roc advertising.

Working through a traditional publisher meant that on the day that the GenV books went on sale, I had advance money in my pocket. If I'd never sold a single copy, I'd still have come out ahead. If I self-published and sold 500 copies, I might still be chipping away at debt. While I respect those who go the self-publishing route, it is not for me.

And before anyone asks, no, I am also not interested in attempting crowd-funding at this particular time.

For another perspective on this, I encourage people to read an amazing Facebook post written by one of my favorite urban fantasy writers, Rob Thurman (her Cal Leandros was a huge influence on how I wrote the first GenV book): https://www.facebook.com/Thurmanuclea...

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