A story about running into the brick wall of Trad Publishing

Indie writers are easier to have fun/collab with.

I have a story behind this opinion, and it does not reflect poorly on trad authors at all.  It just...is.

A while back, I approached a trad author I have been reading for 20 years on whether I could include a couple of his characters in one of my series as an Easter egg.

The answer was no, not necessarily because he didn't want to, but because (and I hadn't considered this before) the publisher actually owns the IP, or at least parts of it.  To make this more complex, the publisher had been sold before, and there were deals in motion that made permission all but impossible to attain, since there would need to be many, many people to sign off on such a thing.

Authors understand doing nods for fun, but some of the folks involved in the bean counting on the back end don't understand, "fun."

I dropped it, because it just wasn't worth the effort to keep pushing for something that only a handful of readers would catch anyway.

Meanwhile, a while back, Daniel Schinhofen asked how I'd feel about a fun Delvers Easter Egg in his book.  I said sure! and that was that.

In a lot of ways, it's kind of like comparing tech startups to enterprise businesses.  Indies don't have the promo power of the large trad publishers, and we aren't in Barnes and Noble, but we can pivot faster.

This was all an eye opening experience for me in the past.  I began to think of the big publishing companies like film studios.  Studios can't horse trade or give nods to other IPs willy-nilly unless there are contracts involved, or the cameo is general enough it's not (legally) stepping on anyone's toes.

I dream of a day when the playing field is level, not just in the favor of indies, but also trad authors so they can take part in more fun stuff outside of projects of their publisher.