It didn’t take much to burn John Sheppard out on the book biz. In the late 90s he sent a novel he’d completed in the University of Florida’s MFA program–a book he worked on for six years but now describes as “postmodern crap”–to an editor at Algonquin Books. She passed, and so did one agent whom Sheppard was referred to by Bridge magazine fiction editor Mike Newirth. Then one day in 2001 he picked up a flier for iUniverse, a print-on-demand service. “Eh, to hell with it,” he thought. “I’ll do this.”
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He published his first two books through iUniverse, and though both sold only a few dozen copies Sheppard wasn’t all that surprised or disappointed. “It was enough to see them in print,” he says. But in 2002, about six months after he self-published a third novel called Small Town Punk, he started getting regular fan mail from teenagers across the country. People were actually reading his work. It felt weird, he says. “I just kind of wrote the book for myself and threw it out there.”
Despite the Florida setting, Small Town Punk isn’t autobiographical. Sheppard says that other than two grandparents modeled after his own, down to their names, the characters are composites of people he’s known. And as for the events depicted, “you tell a story a thousand times and it just morphs into something else,” he says. But he did work at the Hut, and so did his younger sister, Nancy. “The heart of the book is the truth of our relationship,” he says. “When we were kids my father was a salesman, and he kept getting fired, so we’d move to a new town. We did this a number of times, and my sister and I just became best friends.”
“If I’d written this book 20 years ago, I’d be jumping up and down excited that it was being published,” Sheppard says. “At this point? It’s nice. It’s been a long road. Being a writer isn’t the central fact of my life anymore. Just living is the central fact of my life.”
