Authors Jonathan Lister and Kevin Fuhrman are set to release a self-published urban fantasy, Welcome to Demos, in January.  I recently corresponded with Jonathan to learn more about the book and how he and Kevin are building buzz around it.

1. Tell me briefly about your book – what is it about and what motivated you to write it?

“Welcome to Demos” is in that urban fantasy vein.  It’s a story about family interactions in a supernatural world where werewolves have lived openly with humans since before recorded history. Basically, we’re looking at the real-life implications of supernatural beings without the “coming out party.”  Everybody’s here, everyone knows it, to the next scene we go.

This story came about from what we saw as a lack of strong male leads in the market.  Our characters aren’t bemoaning their existences, they’re living them and struggling to achieve goals – with some police corruption, gun shot wounds, mysticism and coffee thrown in.

2. How have your sales been?

We recently announced our release date of January 1, 2012.  Kevin’s joked that the interest we’ve generated so far is kind of shocking to him.  In his words: “The Urban Fantasy genre is full of talented and prolific authors and the idea of something we’ve created standing out enough to get this kind of response is a shock to my normally pessimistic nature.”

3. Describe your experience with traditional publishers and how it compares to self-publishing.

From my perspective publishing with a traditional house and then going independent, it’s completely different – 100 percent control is scary, exciting, tiresome and really rewarding all at the same time.  We shopped “Welcome to Demos” to agents at first and we’d get requests for pages only to be turned away without much feedback.  If anything, this teaches us an agent isn’t a mandatory part of the process.

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