Author Shea Serrano Is Changing the Game for Independent Publishing

By Sarah Gonzales

Photography By Larami Serrano

Reporting Texas

There wouldn’t be a Halfway Books if Shea Serrano had never inspected his royalty statement in the mailbox.

Serrano, a critically acclaimed writer and journalist from San Antonio, thought he was receiving “free money” when he opened the check for his New York Times best seller “The Rap Yearbook.”

But when Serrano sat down and did the math, it didn’t add up.

“I never looked at the numbers and this particular time I happened to look at the sales numbers, not just the money I was getting,” Serrano said. “Where is the other $2.9 million? Where did that go?”

Serrano saw that 85% of each sale went to the publisher, and he began to wonder how the money would look if he held on to more of the profits.

With his experience from working with editors and designers, Serrano felt he understood enough of the process of making a book and decided to try things independently.

“I started looking into doing my own thing,” Serrano said. “I said, well, what if I just make it myself, pay for everything myself,” Serrano said. “I don’t get any royalty checks, but all of the money that I’m making now comes to me instead of anybody else.”

The now 43-year-old writer followed his “shoot your shot” mantra in 2018 to launch his independent digital publishing company, Halfway Books. The toolset Serrano developed over 10 years as a writer helped to ensure the success of the project.

Starting off as a freelance writer for the Houston Press to make extra income, Serrano didn’t always intend to be a full-time writer. But when the money made through freelancing began to exceed the money Serrano was making as a full-time teacher and coach, he reconsidered.

“I was like, well, what would it look like if I just didn’t teach,” Serrano said. “What if I had those extra hours to write.”

Serrano’s success as a writer, mostly on sports and pop culture, wasn’t overnight. The more he wrote, the more things turned in the right direction.

“Every year got a little bit bigger,” Serrano said. “And now this is, you know, for the last coming up on 10 years now is what I’ve done.”

Serrano recalled an article he wrote for the Houston Press about racism in the city’s nightlife scene as one of the first pieces that drove him to journalism full time.

“The first time I got to write something there was like the first time I really got some meaningful interaction with the editors and so that was just a big thing for my own confidence as a writer.”

Eventually, Serrano would write an article for LA Weekly, “Drake Was Whispering Encouragement in my Ear While I was Having Sex,” that would catch the attention of Molly Lambert, a writer at the sports website Grantland. This would open the door for Serrano’s career to flourish, earning him a full-time staff position at Grantland. His work there would eventually connect him to Bill Simmons, a successful and influential writer for pop culture and sports that would play a key role in Serrano’s rising writing career.

“When you have somebody like that, who sort of reaches across the internet and touches you on the forehead, everybody else all of a sudden they look at you and they go ‘oh wow like what’s that guy doing is cool and important because Bill Simmons said it was cool and important,” Serrano said.

The key to Serrano’s consistent success? He’s not afraid to take chances and credits his writing voice for his work being well received.

“I had sort of figured out what my voice was. I had figured out how I wanted to present the things I was writing. I knew the way I wanted it to look in the way I wanted it to feel and so I was able to just sort of use all of the tools that I had learned up to that point on those projects, which I assume is why they were received as well as they were,” he said.

A few of Serrano’s notable projects include a basketball-centered podcast called “Six Trophies” that he co-hosts with fellow writer Jason Concepcion and two television shows — the coming-of-age comedy “Primo”  about a high school teenager growing up in San Antonio and “Neon,” a comedy about an aspiring reggaeton artist who moves to Miami alongside his two best friends. He also wrote the “And Other Things” trilogy, a collection of essays on hip-hop, movies and basketball, that was illustrated by Arturo Torres.

Halfway Books, another standout in Serrano’s career, currently houses his recent projects and published “Conference Room, Five Minutes,” his 2018 illustrated essays about “The Office” television show.

“I said all right well, I’m gonna try it,” Serrano said of publishing digitally through Halfway Books. “I put it out and you know you’re nervous at first cause you’re like is anybody even gonna buy — who would pay for a PDF? This is like the dumbest thing.”

Serrano’s hesitations were proved wrong when the launching project was a quick success.

“People were into it and they liked the convenience of it,” Serrano said. “I was like, yo this is great, now all of a sudden, the split square reversed. I have a website that does everything, but now I get to keep 85%.”

Serrano’s experimentation with self-publishing didn’t stop there. In the summer of 2020, he launched a Halfway Books pilot program on X, formerly Twitter, to encourage writers to submit a pitch about an album they were interested in writing about.

The program received over 1,000 submissions, and five were chosen and set up with their own websites. Serrano used the money made from his short story “POST” to fund the project, which cost $20,000.

Taylor Crumpton, one of the writers selected for the pilot program, commends Serrano for connecting them with editors, designers and fact-checkers.

“He walked us through the literary process of working with an editor,” Crumpton said. “He really prepared us for the event in our careers to sign with an agent to work on a book proposal to get a book deal, which was really the goal of Halfway Books.”

Crumpton published the 3,000-word downloadable essay “Taylor Crumpton Considers: Big Tuck’s Purple Hulk” through Halfway Books and found that being a part of the program and working with Serrano built up the confidence needed to boost their writing career.

Crumpton said working with Halfway Books “was really not only life saving, but affirming as someone who is a journalist of color, a writer of color, a Black woman journalist, a Black woman writer and is not traditionally trained or did not go to journalism school.”

“I can say now that I am a columnist for Time magazine, and I’m working on two books, and I have an amazing literary agent,” Crumpton said. Halfway Books “really helped me get to this place in my career, so I have a lot of adoration for Shea.”

John Morrison, another one of the writers selected, also recognizes the Halfway Books program as something that advanced his career.

“I was first published in high school and I can’t think of a single opportunity that’s advanced my work and career more than doing the Halfway Books pilot,” said Morrison, noting the financial support, editing and connections he’s received.

“I literally got an agent because of Halfway Books,” Morrison said. “It absolutely opened a bunch of lanes for me that I’m still exploring today, five years later.”

Serrano hopes he can do something similar to the pilot program in the future with Halfway Books. He recognizes that the digital publishing company serves as a stepping stone for young aspiring writers.

“That’s always nice to hear when somebody’s like, ‘oh I saw what you did with this thing’,” he said “‘so I tried to do my own version of it.’”