After a decade of submitting his poetry to contests and magazines, Josiah Bancroft "just didn't want to do it anymore." He was tired of waiting for other people's approval, tired of the process, and frustrated by the amount of success he'd been able to achieve in the genre. But he wasn't tired of writing: He had an idea for a quirky fantasy novel set in the 19th century. Bancroft decided to give himself one year to finish the book.The result is, the first book in a four-part fantasy series . It's a gripping tale that's been praised for its engaging plot as much as its poetic prose. The story follows Thomas Senlin, a small-town school headmaster who takes his wife to the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. Once they arrive, Senlin realizes that the Tower is not the pinnacle of culture and technological advancement, as he has always believed, but in fact it's a treacherous den of thieves and tyrants, where no one can be trusted. And when his wife disappears, Senlin must navigate the Tower's bizarre layers in order to find her.Originally self-published in 2013,was no instant success. Bancroft estimates it sold just 250 copies in its first three years. Last year, after the book caught the attention of some high-profile fans, it was sold to Orbit (an imprint of Hachette Book Group), which releases it this month. Bancroft talked to Kerry Shaw about his unlikely ascent in the publishing world.: It wasn't a second choice; it was my first choice. The reason I decided that, even before I began writing the book, is because I knew it was going to be a little strange. I didn't want to compromise the idea I had in my head. I had read so many accounts of writers taking their carefully crafted novel to an agent or a publisher and hearing, "We like this, but can they all be robots in space?" And I was like, "I don't want to compromise. I have a very clear vision.": One of the main things I knew would be a sticking point for some publishers was the protagonist, Senlin. I think there's this wrong idea that readers only want to read about very strong, very virtuous protagonists who have what I call "false flaws"—like they don't think they're pretty enough or don't believe in themselves quite enough. And those are not real flaws! Yet some publishers are more comfortable presenting that sort of protagonist to readers.I personally don't find that interesting. I want to read about someone who is flawed, who needs to grow. When I started writing Senlin, I thought, "This guy can only improve." I presumed that there would be some pushback from publishers with a character like that, and they'd say, "Can you make him, like, a little more handsome, more active, more certain, more capable?" I didn't want to do that.So that's just one element of the book that I thought they'd want to fiddle with. And I was not looking for input. I decided that if I went the self-publishing route, it would probably mean that I'd have a smaller audience, but they would be very interested in my strange book. And I didn't want a filter between me and that niche audience.And it was completely naive. If I had a time machine, I would go back and tell myself, "You have no idea what you're signing up for. This is not how you go about this!": The advice I was given was very good, and I'd repeat that to somebody else: Set specific and realistic goals.The worst thing you can do as a self-publisher is say, "I'm just going to put this out there and see what happens!" Because if you do that, the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens! You have to have a complete vision of what you want to do, and that needs to be reasonable.When I self-published, my goal was to sell 500 copies of the book. That was helpful. But the rest of the stuff, like how to connect to a readership, how to engage social media, I had no idea how to actually do that. The ensuing three years was me trying everything I could think of. I would read a self-publishing blog post about why you should definitely try Google Ads or Facebook Ads or why you should submit to this contest or do this thing. I was running around and trying my hand at a thousand different things, but I didn't have a lot of focus.And so the advice I'd give to anybody who's going to undertake this is: Set goals and be focused. Pick your platforms and do them well. Don't try to do everything.: Absolutely. I certainly struggled with finding an audience. What worked best for me was selling the book directly to people at conventions. I'd go to comic cons and book fairs with my little stack of books and flaunt them in person. And that worked out well because it was easier to identify people who were interested in what I was producing. And it was easier to form a bond, which is sometimes hard to do over the internet. You're loosely related to everybody but not really connected to anybody.: Right. It was the most uncomfortable thing in the world for me! I'm not an outgoing person, but I was told by many friends that if you could have that moment and form that connection, you had a fan for life. It's a little odd to sell books at cons. The first book I sold, I was like, "Really? You're gonna buy this? OK…all right…here you go." It felt like a surprise.: No. If I had just continued along the same path, I would have achieved my goal of selling 500 books and had a rabid, though very small, cult following.But what happened was, I got to a point in the spring of 2016, where I was pretty discouraged with the whole process. For three years I'd been going to conventions, spending money on advertisements, spending my weekends trying to figure out ways to disseminate the book. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that anymore. I was running on empty, just in terms of passion for the project.One of the last desperate acts that I did was submit the book to this contest run by Mark Lawrence , who's out of the U.K. The contest is the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off , and it's just for novelists who have self-published a fantasy or speculative fiction book. Authors submit their novel to this pool of bloggers and book reviewers. It goes through a championship system: Each blogger has 30 books and picks two to advance, that sort of thing.And so I entered this contest and didn't really think anything else of it. But four months later, I got word that the reviewer who was looking at my book had chosen a different one, and I was out. I was like, "Oh, OK." I wasn't expecting much; that was fine.But the reviewer wrote this impassioned explanation of the difficulty he had in choosing between my book and Phil Tucker 's, which is wonderful. Mark Lawrence , who read the review, decided that he was curious about this book that got knocked out. And so just on a whim, I don't know why, he read my book. And he decided that he wanted to be the book's champion.He put me in contact with this agent, which is something I'd never really pursued before. He got the community on /r/Fantasy , through Reddit, interested in the book. They started to read it. He put it on the radar of some Goodreads reviewers. That summer, Emily May [ the most popular reviewer on Goodreads ] read it, and she liked it.: From there I think they called it "the hype train." You know how it works: When a reviewer who has some visibility gives something a positive review, and it attracts the attention of other reviewers. The attention that it got on Goodreads was contagious in a very helpful way, and my book started selling.The reviews that had been trickling in for three years suddenly started coming in in batches. I can't understate the role that Goodreads played in the success of the book. It went from being invisible to suddenly being on people's radars. It's not something I take lightly. If not for the community, I would not be here.Another testament to Goodreads' reach is how many international orders I started getting. They weren't just from U.S.- and Canada-based readers. I was sending books to Finland, New Zealand, Russia, Australia, and Norway. There was global interest. Once that started to happen, once I realized I was appealing to readers across that stretch of communities, I thought, "This whole thing might work." That all came from Goodreads.: Most of it. The story has this big arc, and pieces in that arc were clear to me from the beginning. The plotlines that developed out of secondary characters emerged from the process of discovery while writing the book. But the big story was something that I always had in mind, and I had the four books planned out before I finished the first one.: Why? I don't want to celebrate too early! There's actually a lot of work left to be done. But I've never done this before. I've never written a series before, and I'm learning a ton. And that's made this whole process very interesting for me. I stand back going, "You know what? I had a poor understanding of how this would really go." It's been very educational.: No. Well, I will say that I had completed novels in the past, but they were terrible. And so I don't want to count them.: When I started working on this in the spring of 2012, one essential book was Italo Calvino 's, which is this fabulous travel guide. It's definitely not narrative in its structure, but it has this sense of the fantastic and awe that I was missing. When I read that, I was like, "I want to write this.": I have never had any luck with any consistent habit for writing. Once, I bought a candle and said, "I'm going to sit at this desk, light this candle, and while the candle burns, I will write for two hours." And I just never did it. Never happened.I have what I would call an obsession as opposed to a process. I don't know how I wrote the first book; I just know that I was obsessed with it. Was I staying up late working on it? Yes. Was I writing on it in the middle of the day? Yes. I had a little tape recorder in my car because I had this monster three-hour daily commute, and I would just fill up this recorder with notes and ideas and quotes. And so my process is pretty much: the rest of life becomes eclipsed by the effort to do this thing.: I always tell other writers and students I've worked with, "Write to one other person. Just write to somebody." I didn't do that. I think I wrote that book to myself, which is a mistake. No one should do that! You should write books with an audience in mind! But I was just sort of doing what I wanted.While I didn't have a reader in mind, I was actively trying to make it enjoyable and entertaining to readers. Whenever I started a new chapter, I told myself, "Something important or exciting has to happen in this chapter, and if it doesn't, then it gets axed.": That's one of my golden rules. I don't talk about the work while I'm doing it. It's very tempting to talk about a creative project that you're working on, but doing that, I think, lessens the urge to do it. Because you have that reward of people's interest—sometimes feigned, sometimes genuine. And that's, of course, what the author ego feeds off of. If you can get that kind of jolt just from talking about it—which is so much easier than writing the thing—why would you ever write it?And so I've given that advice to every writer who will listen to me. And it's funny, most of them say, "Yeah, that makes sense. That's what I do. I talk about it for two years, and I lose interest in it.": No. I'm still in correspondence with some of my old creative writing students through Twitter, and they'll say, "I want to tell you about this great idea." I'm like, "That's exciting! Don't tell me. Write it. Give me the book."by Calvino . I just finishedby Arkady and Boris Strugastky , who are Russian brothers. And before that I was readingby Jeff Vandermeer andby Mark Lawrence : Not yet. But that would be a lot of fun.