Jeanette Strode and James Hunter’s publishing journey reads like a real-life Progression Fantasy. 

As a subgenre, Progression Fantasy emphasizes structured systems of growth, in which characters can reach clear milestones through hard work, experience, and training. Many of these characteristics overlap with LitRPG, which uses explicit game mechanics, like those found in online role-playing games, to give readers the experience of living inside a computer game. What sets Progression Fantasy apart from other hero’s journey tales is an emphasis on how and why their skills improve over their ultimate success.

Strode and Hunter began their publishing journey with a single Urban Fantasy novel written as a hobby in 2014. But since then they have leveled up several times, in ways they never expected. Today, the two are the founders of Shadow Alley Press, an industry leader in publishing GameLit, LitRPG, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. They’ve shepherded more than thirty authors through the process of publication. And their relationship extends far beyond their responsibilities as COO and CEO, respectively; after all, outside of their publishing work, the two have been married since 2006 and share two children. 

Stats and Attributes 

A former Marine Corps sergeant and combat veteran, Hunter served with a multinational task force to counter piracy—literally hunting pirates off the coast of Somalia. He started writing in 2014 while he and his wife were doing international aid work in Thailand. His first book, an Urban Fantasy titled Strange Magic, immediately sold more than either of them thought it would. Hunter had not intended to write more, but reader interest swayed him to continue. 

In 2015, the couple returned to the United States to care for Strode’s father. Facing unemployment and a growing family after the move, the couple decided to focus on the early success of Hunter’s books. Hunter began writing full time and quickly brought Strode in to run their author business. “I do all of the business and marketing and finance and operations,” Strode says.

Hunter explained their roles differently: “She's the smart one who makes money. I'm the word monkey who dances for his dinner.”

Strode’s educational background is in chemistry, which may not seem related to their business on the surface, but her scientific approach helped to balance out their partnership. “She's much more analytical than I am,” Hunter says. So when she took over the business “she very quickly optimized it, and sort of blew me out of the water in terms of what she was accomplishing,” he says. 

Handing over the reins freed him up “to write more, to focus on the creative aspect while she really spearheaded the marketing efforts,” he says. He attributes much of their growth early on in their business to Strode’s work. As their careers have grown since then, Strode has taken on responsibility for “helping others find their path and begin to walk it,” per her LinkedIn bio.

With so much of the business falling under her domain, it’s no wonder people at Shadow Alley Press call her Lady Shadow.

Leveling Up 

Although publishing had never been an intended career for either of them, following the accidental success of Hunter’s Urban Fantasy books, the couple began looking for new opportunities. 

“I sort of ran across LitRPG really early on, when it was mostly Russian translated novels and a handful of American authors,” Hunter says. “And I quickly fell in love and thought, ‘Wow, this is super in my wheelhouse. I could do this. I love video games. I love fantasy.’”

Strode attributes much of their later success to “watching the market and seeing this LitRPG trend emerge and kind of being first movers into that arena,” she says. In 2015, Hunter started writing his first LitRPG series, Viridian Gate Online, which they published in 2016. When the series outperformed his previous work, he switched his focus from Urban Fantasy to LitRPG—“and we haven’t looked back since,” he says.

A year later, the two began publishing other authors. They describe the transition from solo author to publisher in much the same way they described Hunter’s initial success: “It kind of happened randomly,” Strode explains. It started when a friend and alpha reader for Hunter’s books asked for publishing advice on a book she’d written. “She had a series that she had written, but didn't have the resources to publish yet. We're like, ‘You know that? Why don't we help you out? We really believe in your work, and we kind of know what we're doing. So why don't we take that on for you?’” Strode says.

“I quickly fell in love and thought, ‘Wow, this is super in my wheelhouse. I could do this. I love video games. I love fantasy.’”
—James Hunter

The experience opened their eyes to the opportunity to help other writers they knew who were good writers but not as skilled at the business side. Shadow Alley Press grew organically from there. 

“The initial intention was never ‘We're going to be a publishing company,’” Hunter says. “It was just a way to help our friends succeed.” 

Base Building 

From a starting goal of having five to ten authors publishing at the same level as Hunter, Shadow Alley Press has grown to a roster of more than thirty authors in seven genres. The company now employs a direct operations team of six, though Strode wishes they had started hiring sooner. Looking back, she says, “I would have hired someone immediately. I would have had an administrative assistant right away.” Though she acknowledges that hiring out can be expensive for new authors, she maintains that having that help could be “life-changing … because of the tasks that they can offload.” 

The expansion of their publishing company has allowed Strode and Hunter to provide their authors with support that goes well beyond basic office management. The team helps guide authors through every phase of the publishing process, including cover design, editing, proofreading, and marketing. “We have lots of connections to reach out [to] and contacts within the broader publishing community to get deals for our authors that they might not be able to get for themselves,” Hunter says. Strode meets with their authors regularly to run projections and plan for the future. They also invite their authors to attend conventions with them, where they can sell their books, and host an annual retreat at a luxury cabin in Kentucky, where they play D&D. 

They’re interested in building a community that supports all their authors in growing their brands and going full time. But they have to be pretty selective about who they choose to publish. They no longer take open submissions because of the increased popularity of LitRPG and related genres. Instead, they tend to find people through conventions and other connections. These authors then are vetted by the company’s acquisitions editor to make sure their work is “appropriate for our marketplace, appropriate for our audience,” Hunter says.

Because of the significant investment they make in terms of time, money, and relationships, Strode says the company asks its authors to follow a few rules. “One, you can't be a jerk because we like to spend time with people. It's like a second family, so it needs to be someone that we don't mind spending a lot of time with,” she says. “Two, you have to be coachable. And three, you have to be able to write fairly quickly and hit deadlines.” 

Game Mechanics

Strode and Hunter hold themselves to the same rules of engagement: communicating their needs, staying open to learning new things, and sticking to their schedule as much as possible. Finding balance in their work relationship, as well as between their work and home lives, has required the development of clear boundaries and defined roles. 

Prior to starting their publishing business, their careers were very different. So while “it felt natural for us to be building something together,” Strode says, there were times in the beginning where the two would get frustrated, often from miscommunication on their roles and expectations. 

“Success in indie publishing is mostly about persevering.”
—James Hunter

A business mentor recommended a book that changed the way they approached their partnership: The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. “The book really walks you through this process of looking at your business and parceling it out so that you can have more rapid growth and [are] being careful in how you're building it,” says Strode. 

The book helped them define their roles within the company and identify places where they could hire people to take on some of the work. Once they had clear job descriptions, it became easier for them to curtail any overlap. “We were just tired all the time. And it helped us figure out, okay, these are areas where we can immediately offload this stuff to somebody else, create those job positions,” says Hunter.

Over the next two years, Hunter and Strode reorganized their growing publishing business in order to scale more efficiently. Strode explains that many authors considering hiring start by looking for “another me,” someone who can also do all the random things an author needs and work forty hours to take off some of the pressure. “But what you really need is, like, five people, each doing 20 percent of what you were doing in very specific areas,” she says. 

Hiring five people to join the team at Shadow Alley Press removed most of the non-writing responsibilities from Hunter’s job description. He’s now the creative director of the company, overseeing “big picture stuff: looking at where the market's going, working with my acquisition editor to find books that are going to fit the space and hit our audience in a way that's going to be meaningful to them,” he says.

These clearly defined boundaries at work are mirrored in their personal lives. “One of the things about indie publishing is it's basically a black hole that will eat as much time as you're willing to give it, and I think a lot of people fall into that hole of 'I can always do more,’” Hunter says. To combat the overflow of work life into their home, Strode says they create a clear line between work hours and family time. At five o’clock, they switch over to “family mode,” taking care of the kids and including a weekly date night to ensure they have time for themselves as a couple apart from work. 

Hunter agrees they need that time “where we're not talking about business, where we're not talking about work things or other things, where it's just us doing fun things together.” He says at one time, when he was producing eight or nine books in a year, he would often work overnight. As a result, his health suffered. “I was grumpy. I was really out of shape, had terrible sleep,” he says. Now, they have designated times where they agree not to work, to maintain normal work hours, and to reconnect and be present for their kids. “That takes a lot of intentionality, but it's worth it and makes for a long-term career,” he says.

They admit there are periods where that intentionality requires more effort. They approach these periods as deployment cycles, modeling their planning after Hunter’s time in the Marines and rebalancing their household responsibilities around what needs to get done. “We have very hard boundary lines of when these deployment cycles end,” says Hunter. “When that comes, it's over. And we usually try to take a long weekend or several days off, where we can kind of recharge and reset before going back into the more normal rhythms of life.”

Loot

The couple’s work has paid off for them in ways they never imagined when they started the business. “There's a monetary component, but money was never really the end-all, be-all for us. It was really about giving us access to the time and the lifestyle choices that we want, and being an author has allowed me to do that while also doing something that I love,” Hunter says. 

“It's been a real privilege and a blessing for us that we have always been able to be present with our kids, which is not a lot of things that most parents get to say,” he continues. “We have never, since the kids have been born, had to have a normal job where one of us is outside the home.” 

In the early days, the parents often traded work and childcare responsibilities for a few hours every day, but now that their kids are in school, they have a more defined work time. The kids have grown up alongside the business, even helping with packing things or selling books at cons. But their perception of their parents’ jobs may not be completely accurate. Strode described a moment when their son was younger. “Our son would put on his bathrobe, get in his [Little Tikes] car and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to work,’” she says, laughing. “So they might have a little bit of a misconstrued idea of what work is like.”

Although there is definitely more work to publishing than their kids see, both Strode and Hunter are grateful for the opportunities their careers create. “I get to tell stories and play with my imaginary friends all day, and that pays all of my bills,” Hunter says. “The fact that we get to be at home with our kids, the fact that we get to make our own schedules, the fact that we have the freedom to be at soccer games and to be at rehearsals and to do all of those things—for me, that's success.” 

Hit Points

Building a company together was not without its challenges. Strode and Hunter admit they’ve made a lot of mistakes, from not optimizing a mailing list early on to spending “tens of thousands of dollars … trying to figure out a way to get into physical bookstores,” says Hunter.

But those kinds of mistakes come with the job, they agreed. 

“It felt natural for us to be building something together.”
—Jeanette Strode

“You’re going to fail a bunch,” Hunter says. “And that’s okay. A lot of the new authors overthink things. And there's this decision paralysis where [the new authors say], ‘Well, if I can't do it perfect, I'm not gonna do it at all.’” He argues that it’s better to have something done, even with an imperfect solution, because then you can iterate and learn from it. This ability to try new things, make mistakes, and change course quickly sets indie publishers apart from traditional publishing houses.

And failures aren’t always caused by mistakes. Hunter recognizes the role luck has played in his success, but he emphasized the aphorism that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. “I absolutely got lucky. I also capitalized on that luck and turned it into momentum, but there's a factor of luck, of hitting the market in the right place at the right time, that is a little bit outside of your control,” Hunter says. 

Instead of letting the market’s sometimes mysterious behavior discourage them, he recommends new authors keep taking chances and trying new things. “Success in indie publishing is mostly about persevering,” he says.

Taking those risks has opened doors Strode and Hunter never would have considered ten years ago. Audible Studios is producing a new series for them. An agent is shopping one of his backlist titles with traditional publishers. They have plans to expand Shadow Alley Press’s listings.

“There's just a lot of possibilities that just weren't on the table for us before,” Hunter says. 

From solo-authoring an Urban Fantasy novel to becoming a LitRPG bestseller and founding a thriving publishing company, Strode and Hunter have evolved like the heroes of a Progression Fantasy. And like those heroes, their skills continue to grow with each story arc. “We set new goals as we go, but in terms of when we first set out, we surpassed what we ever thought we would be able to do,” Strode says. 

Their next adventure will be in the translation market. As with everything else, they are preparing to take advantage of any opportunities luck brings their way. “We're excited to be exploring that more and adding that to our repertoire,” Strode says. “We have a lot of big, big dreams.”