Brisbane author John Birmingham likens the break with his trade publishers to jumping out a window, but insists the leap was not suicidal and that he has landed firmly on his feet.

The successful author, renowned for his iconic 1994 autobiographical novel He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, has garnered worldwide acclaim in more recent years for mystery thrillers and alternate history novels including The Disappearance trilogy and the Axis of Time series.

All were released with big-name publishers. But in 2015 Birmingham found to his chagrin how quickly those ties could unwind.

As a consequence, he spent much of 2016 stepping boldly into the realm of self-publishing.

After successfully releasing three novellas under the banner of Stalin's Hammer, his year of living dangerously culminated in this week's publication of his first self-published novel, A Girl In Time.

"The book debuted at five on Apple, which is very gratifying when I see my former publishers further down the list. That was fun," he said.

The change of fortune was due to disappointing sales of his David Hooper action adventure series.

The Hooper books were published by a coalition of publishing businesses who had loosely agreed to release simultaneously worldwide.

But his Australian publisher broke ranks and went early with both the print and digital versions of the first book, which resulted in heavy online pirating and a resulting hit to sales.

From there on, the series struggled.

Birmingham summed it up thus: "I was the author of a failed series. My options were limited. It's the equivalent of seeing my business collapse. I had to come up with a new business."

Birmingham's first self-published novel, released this week. ( Supplied: John Birmingham )

"I'm 52 years old, I have three saleable skills. I write, I drive a car so I guess I could be an Uber driver, and I've been doing martial arts for a long time so I know how to hurt people.

"That's it, that's my three saleable skills and two of them I'd prefer not to use, so it was down to writing."

'I waited until the series tanked'

Most publishing contracts (his included) contain a clause preventing authors from releasing any works in competition with the publisher, and before the Hooper farrago Birmingham had figured self-publishing risked burning too many bridges.

"I waited until the Hooper series tanked and then they spent eight months twiddling their thumbs saying, 'we'll offer you a deal but it won't be very good'.

"I basically allowed myself to be backed into a corner. That was the point at which I said I'm going to do this instead — you know, I'm jumping out the window.

"They'd just released a book they probably weren't going to make their money back on, so what were they losing?

"If I'd tried to do it before, there'd have been real trouble — lawyers at 10 paces."

He admits his agent has not been quite so keen on the move, but this is largely because there is no obvious payday in it for him.

"He's within the industry and he has the industry attitude, which is that indie publishers are all peasants — peons he calls them. You know, they're people who couldn't get a deal," he said.

"And you know what? It's true. But it ignores the fact that indie is now a massive, probably billion-dollar maybe multi-billion-dollar market."

Birmingham said it also ignored the reality that there were many talented writers who had failed to secure a publishing deal.

"There are people working indie who newspaper literary editors have never heard of but these people are banking millions of dollars a year because they've built their own readerships and they're servicing them."

Indie game becomes main fare

Birmingham has not entirely severed his trade links. This year he also cut a deal with Penguin Random House in New York to write a space opera sci-fi series.

But independent publishing has become his main game.

Publishing independently gave authors ultimate control and responsibility, he said. ( ABC News: Matt Eaton )

"The indie side of the market is shaking itself out into seriously professional operators who are basically now running businesses, some of which employ up to a dozen people, then gifted amateurs and then the vast majority of people who don't have a clue," he said.

"Most indie authors lose money on their books and probably sell about 50 or 60 copies, mostly to friends and relatives, who mostly don't read it.

"But there are these operators who have been doing it for ages, and a lot of them are actually pretty good writers, some of them are very good writers.

"Indie publishing makes explicit something which is unstated in trade publishing, which is that you are not just a writer — you are a publicist and a marketer and a salesperson."

He said this was also why they attracted a lot of ill feeling within trade publishing, "particularly within the circle of authors who are exclusively trade publishing towards indie authors".

"Because they look at the great success that some of them have, they look at the nature of the books they're writing and they look at the amount of work that indie authors put into marketing and publicity and they just go, 'these guys are just basically running an email scam'.

"They don't credit them with the hard work they've done to build up the business and they don't even like thinking of it as a business.

"It's in the interests of the trade publishing industry to discourage their authors, particularly their literary authors, from thinking in business terms because that then allows them to keep control of the business."

Birmingham said he had personally witnessed the birth of fear, uncertainty and the growing resentment within trade publishing toward the ebook phenomenon.

"I've always thought it was silly because I don't know why the two sectors can't co-exist," he said.

"It's not a zero-sum game. If I build up readers with my email list and my independent publications then those readers are probably 80-90 per cent likely to go off and buy the next trade published book I do down the track.

"But it's very, very difficult to get the trade publishers to relax and unlock themselves a bit."