Like every other writer, I’ve got my share of hard-luck anecdotes tucked in my back pocket for late-night barroom bull sessions. One of those sad-but-true tales recently led me to publish a 99-cent Kindle edition of my novel Finding Juliet, which for quick-pitch purposes I describe as a modern-day Shakespeare in Love. If you enjoyed that film, I contend you will love my book. If you hated that film, but have a Kindle and/or iPhone, I say, hey, what’s 99 cents among friends?

Before briefly essaying the events that led me to independently publish, I’ll share a bit of even-further-backstory. About ten years ago I was a contributing editor of a magazine called Fiction Writer. At that time, I had a couple of crime novels in my desk drawer that I’d written for my creative writing MFA thesis. I was intrigued by an early online DIY publishing site, and so wrote a story for the magazine about my ill-fated efforts to sell one of the novels through the service. The site was poorly conceived (and even more poorly named–Fatbrain, it was called), and it died during the Web 1.0 purges. But happily, an honest-to-God, advance-paying publisher brought out hardcover editions of both novels a few years later. I had, in an extremely modest way, arrived as a published novelist.

Novel number three was a true labor of love. Even as I worked in journalism and wrote nonfiction books, I kept coming back to what was then called Letters to Juliet, the story of a graduate lit student in the U.S. who falls in love with a member of Juliet’s Club, the group in Verona, Italy, that answers letters that come to the city addressed to Shakespeare’s famous doomed lover in much the same way that postal workers here answer letters to Santa Claus. When I finally finished the book a few years back, after actually traveling to Verona for research purposes, I started pitching agents, convinced I had a winner on my hands.

Unfortunately, the morning the agents were getting my letter, the New York Times website ran a front-page story and slide show announcing the sale of a nonfiction history of Juliet’s Club. The book’s name? Letters to Juliet. Great idea, but have you read the Times today? That was the gist of one agent’s reaction. Another one, though, bless her heart, guided me through a rewrite and had me write up a treatment for a potential film in the meantime. She shared the treatment with a producer she knew, and he didn’t see any film potential. Cut to, Variety announcing that the nonfiction authors had made a big flim sale! The agent and I smacked our foreheads. But then we realized the report mentioned the producers lacked only… a writer and a story! So she called the production company the next day only to be told, “Stop right there. We just hired a writer.”

D’oh. And that was pretty much the end of it. Oh, we did talk about recasting Juliet as a YA novel (good idea: a YA novel about summer exchange students in Verona, called The Juliet Club, was published last year). But then I decided to move on. Until I saw how easy it was to create a Kindle edition of a book and at least get some readers for a novel I’m still proud of, despite its star-crossed fate.

So on May 29, I stayed up late and posted the now-renamed Finding Juliet for sale. I put the word out via Facebook and Twitter, and on message boards frequented by Kindle enthusiasts. And the book started selling a bit–nothing spectacular, but enough so that on one recent day Finding Juliet was the only work in the Top 10 of the Kindle Store’s Shakespearean category that wasn’t actually written by the man himself. Not too shabby. Then the editor of Booklist Online gave the novel a four-star review on the Kindle page. Sure, he’s a friend of mine, but he actually read the book and liked it. Finally, I got a wonderful five-star review from someone I’ve never met, and I thought, hey, I might be making 35 cents a copy on this thing, but actual people I don’t know are reading it and enjoying it. And that’s the real reason to write fiction, right?

Of course, exactly a week after I published my modest Kindle edition, the announcement came that the film version of that other Letters to Juliet is going into production with a May 2010 release date. It started shooting in Italy last week, and I hope it’s a great success. Maybe someone’ll give me a contract for my book the week the movie comes out…