How Artificial Wisdom went from indie to traditional publication

Three feet behind my desk is a wall covered in whiteboard paint. It's where I scrawl long-term to-do list reminders or key dates that I need to continually keep my eye on. You know the kind: the ones that can't disappear into a notebook somewhere or into a bottomless notes folder on my phone. It's where I put the publication dates of my upcoming books. It's where I list the deadlines that I have to meet for my editors.

And it's where, in the bottom right-hand corner, a faded word has sat for more than a year, waiting to be crossed off: 'newsletter'.

The fact is, I don't love receiving newsletters that much. Since the dawn of email, I’ve found that getting an email in your inbox is like being handed someone else’s priority list, versus choosing to read something online. A lot of unread emails stress me out. Why would I do that to other people?

On the other hand, a lot of people have signed up to my newsletter. You may not even remember doing so. A whole bunch of people joined during campaigns we ran for the indie release of Artificial Wisdom back in 2023 and 2024. If you've not been following since then, the big news is, um, I'm now traditionally published by Penguin Random House.

This week, Artificial Wisdom launched for the very first time in bookstores across the US and the UK, with a whole bunch of other countries to follow shortly. And since it's publication week, it figures I should update everybody on the story—how the hell did that happen?

I first started writing Artificial Wisdom during the pandemic. Sometime in early 2022, I started to put it out to agents. Getting an agent is hard. There are many more people trying to get an agent than there are slots that can be filled, and of course more books already with agents than acquisitions a publisher could possibly make. And so, those slots tend to be filled by the books that are easy to figure out how to put into boxes. Right now, for example, there's a huge demand for Romantasy.

But Artificial Wisdom isn’t a neat book. That's what people love about it. It's cross-genre. It's a futuristic murder mystery set in 2050. It's a conspiracy technothriller with cli-fi vibes. We've been talking about it recently as being like "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" meets "I Am Pilgrim" meets "Dark Matter".  So agents didn't really know what to make of it.

Firstly, there was a lot of waiting for responses. It can take months to hear back from a query. A couple of people read the full manuscript. But ultimately? Rejection, rejection, rejection.

I made changes as everybody does when they get fifty rejections in a row, but the second time I was ready to query agents, I decided I didn't want to anymore. I wanted to do things my way.

As somebody with some experience in building startups, I decided to start my own independent publisher, Chainmaker Press, and have my books offset printed and beautifully designed to be something I would be proud to see on my own shelf. I'd already had a significant amount of editing and paid for even more. I hired great marketing teams in the UK and the US, and set up sales and distribution channels. I sourced printers, typesetters, designers, all sorts of agencies up and down the stack. We launched in the UK in mid-2023 and got a really lovely base of reviews, but it took a little bit longer to pull it off in the US because distribution for a one-book publisher is almost impossible.

It took five months longer than I'd hoped it would do, and we launched in May 2024.

And then everything changed. In particular, two incredible TikTok influencers—Kris & Mads, and Smitty—read the book and loved it within the same week. Both of them had over 100,000 followers at the time.

A lot of those followers overlapped. They interconnected. They followed each other. They were a community of people loving the same books. And they all went out and bought Artificial Wisdom. Some incredible reviews started to pop in and then things ramped up a notch. I was talking to one of my wonderful marketing agencies about working with the Fable book club, and I noticed that Kris & Mads had a Fable book club of their own, The Sisterhood, with about 10,000 participants.

I reached out to Maddie to ask her advice about whether I should launch on Fable. By the end of the call, we'd agreed that Artificial Wisdom would be the June 2024 Fable pick for their book club, The Sisterhood. I wanted to do something really special for them—providing a significant amount of behind-the-scenes looks at the book, bonus content, and engaging with every single reader leaving comments on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Everybody got very excited, and before I knew it, Artificial Wisdom was at the top of the Amazon charts, reaching the number one slot above Dark Matter in Techno Thriller, and reaching number 19 on the overarching sci-fi list just above Dune.

I spent pretty much my entire month of June 2024 engaging with the Sisterhood, and it was one of the most incredible months of my life. Getting to follow along in real time as people dissect the clues in your book and see what lands and what doesn't… where motivations didn't quite work or where they worked really well)… what people were spotting and what they weren't spotting… It was like having your own consumer panel for a new product you were launching—except this product was already out there in the world.

By the following month, I couldn't keep up with the demand. It takes six weeks to print a book in the UK (longer and more expensive for cheaper quality if I did it within the US), another few weeks to ship it, and I'd underestimated how many we needed to get printed.

With thousands of hardbacks arriving at the warehouse in New York, I was being told already that we needed more. I was on the call to the printers trying to work out how many to ship by plane (which is expensive) and how many to send by boat (which is slow). And I knew that I couldn't sustain this. I wanted to be a writer, dammit.

But I had three things going for me. The first was that I'd had three months of steady growth in my sales. The second was I'd had three months of steady growth in my Goodreads reviews on Goodreads. And the third was I’d had three months of steady growth in the volume of TikTok posts about the book.

If I knew anything from my startup experience, it was that three months of month-on-month growth is a powerful way of showing you found some degree of fit with the people that are going to love your product. And I had genuinely found my fan base. I could see it in the reviews. There were people that loved Artificial Wisdom by this point, had bought multiple versions of it across multiple formats. Not many books, even in the traditional space, ever find their fans.

I sat there one night doing some research on authors that had successfully traversed from self-published to traditionally published, particularly within the sci-fi space. There are a few names that stand out here.

Hugh Howey (Wool) is an exceptional example, as is Andy Weir (The Martian), who was doing very well self-published before an agent came along and convinced him to go traditional. I tracked down Weir’s agent and wrote him a query letter.

This time there was no wait for the response. Within 48 hours I'd heard back from the agent, and 24 hours after that, we'd signed a deal. Six weeks later we had a pre-emptive offer for publication from one of the most respected editors at Del Rey, part of Penguin Random House in NYC, and everything was about to change.

A year later, the books have just hit the shelf, and I'm going to talk in a subsequent newsletter—I promise—about what that year was like, and how the shift from being an indie author to a traditionally published author felt. If you'd like to follow that story, stay subscribed. If you're still wondering who the hell I am and what the heck you signed up to, feel free to jump off at this point and hit unsubscribe at the bottom.

If you can’t wait for that, here’s my launch day interview with Kris & Mads on YouTube.

But I'm truly honoured to have the book out there in the world and to see so many fans sending pictures of it in bookstores, “in the wild”. If you'd like to get a shiny new edition and are wondering what the differences are between this and my independent edition, the main thing to know is this is like the extended cut, whereas the indie version is like the cinematic cut.

I've been able to add five additional chapters to spend a little bit longer with our characters, digesting what's really going on—as well as having one of the best editors in the world work over the existing text and tighten it up! And the hardback has an exclusive bonus chapter from an unexpected character's point of view.

If you want to buy online, there's some links here, but I'd love to see your pictures if you find it physically in store.

I can now wipe off that whiteboard reminder. But I probably also need to scrawl it back in again, in fresh ink.

Until next time,

Tom

THOMAS R. WEAVER

Author, Artificial Wisdom

linktr.ee/thomasrweaver