On Being a Self-Published Indie Author

Are you a self-published indie author by choice, or are you one of those losers who couldn’t get a book deal?

Yes.

What’s the process like? What happens between conceiving a book and getting it into the marketplace?

You get an idea, and you turn it over in your head for a while. You write a draft, and you think it’s great, so you show it to some friends. Then you think it sucks.

You do some major revisions, throwing out whole chapters and adding new ones. When you get to the fourth or fifth draft, you give it to an editor. Ideally, it should go through a developmental edit and a copy edit. The dev edit addresses big issues like plot development, pacing, character development, and themes. The copy edit addresses line-level issues, like sentence structure, clarity, and word repetition. Then proofreading catches typos, spelling errors, and other minor issues.

I’m lucky because my wife is designer, and in fact, she used to design book covers. She reads the book and comes up with a bunch of design comps. We go through them and pick one to develop. Sometimes she posts the comps on Facebook and asks people to vote on their favorites.

A good cover is a big deal. If your cover is alluring and gives some sense of what the book is about, people are willing to look at it. If you have a bad cover, particularly one that looks amateurish, people will assume you didn’t put much care or effort into the project, and they won’t look at it.

After we have the cover, my wife sets up an Adobe InDesign project with the interior layout and pours in the text. Then I fiddle with it for a long time, breaking the chapters into sections, making sure the formatting is correct, fixing widows and orphans.

When we have the cover and the interior ready, I assign an ISBN and upload the files to Ingram Spark and order a proof copy, which I actually read, cover to cover. I correct whatever errors I find, send the new PDF to Ingram, and then the book can go into production.

By then, it’s been a year or so since I first sat down to write the thing.

I’ll order a few dozen copies to send to friends and reviewers. Then I’ll create the e-book copies from InDesign and upload them to Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. I stopped selling through Google, in part because they kept changing the price of my book without telling me, and their price changes forced price changes on Amazon that I couldn’t control.

I chose Ingram over CreateSpace because Ingram lets you price your book on standard terms and accept returns. Bookstores require that, or they won’t stock your title. And Ingram is one of the two big suppliers in the US. Bookstores already have a relationship with them.

The production process is long and tedious. You’d better like the book you’ve written, because you’re going to be looking at it a lot.

And that’s just getting the book into production. Then you have to sell it. That part is really hard, especially for an Indie writer who doesn’t stick to any particular genre.

What kinds of challenges do indie writers face in selling their books?

The biggest problem is just getting people’s attention. Many people who would have been readers in prior generations are not readers today. They’re watching Netflix, or playing video games, or spending their leisure time on Facebook and Instagram. In the 1950s and 60s, those people might have been reading one or two books a month. Now they might be reading one or two books a year.

Then, keep in mind, when you write a novel, you’re creating a product that nobody asked for. And it takes, like, a year. What sane person does that? Would you spend all day cooking a big meal on the off chance that a bunch of people might stop by for a dinner party?

You get your book out there, and then you’re competing with millions of other titles on Amazon. Literally millions!

If you’re writing in a popular genre like Romance, Mystery, or Thriller, there are actually quite a few channels to help you reach your target readers. Paid promotional sites like Just Kindle Books and Kindle Nation Daily can promote your title to their huge mailing lists. It costs money, but it does help you build a readership.

If you’re not writing squarely within some well-defined genre, you’re going to have a hard time. I learned that the hard way with my first book. There are no readily available marketing channels for general fiction.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being self-published is that many high-profile publications whose reviews could help put your book in front of a large audience will not even consider self-published books. They say so outright in their review policies. Even some of the more popular independent bloggers won’t look at self-published work.

I get why that is. There are too many books out there, and most of them are really bad. Most reviewers don’t want to open the floodgates and drown themselves.

As a self-published indie author, you also don’t have access to the kind of paid placements the big publishers can buy. You can’t purchase prime listing space on the Kindle storefront, or on the new titles shelf at Barnes and Noble. Not because of the cost. Because they won’t sell that placement to indies.

So you have to go out and find as many small channels as you can, like bloggers with modest followings who review books like yours. You share things out on Facebook or Twitter and urge your friends and followers to pass them along. You write a blog to give people a sense of who you are, and you give away books to help build a readership. You have grassroots and guerrilla tactics, and you have to learn to use them.

In many ways, I think it’s a better system for writers and readers. Success shouldn’t be easy, because easy things attract lazy and untalented people, but it should be possible. The old system, in which agents and publishers had to guess what was worthy of publication, was never all that efficient, and its errors of omission–what was excluded from publication–were worse than its errors of commission–the published works that didn’t sell.

Publishers had no interest in the Pulitzer Prize winner A Confederacy of Dunces. One of Elmore Leonard’s finest novels, 52 Pickup, received more than eighty rejections, even though he was an established author with a proven sales record. And J.A. Konrath’s novels were rejected over five hundred times–five hundred!–before several million readers got together and overruled the entire publishing industry.

I’m not saying the publishers short changed anyone. Most of what they turned down was probably crap. And who knows how many good books are lost in the current sea of publication?

Being an indie author today is a lot like being a standup comic or an indie musician. You can take your work directly to the people, though you usually have access only to small venues and limited audiences. If your work sucks, people will tell you. But at least you heard it from them. If it’s good, they’ll tell you that too, and they might even buy the next thing you put out. But you have to keep working. Getting people to read your book requires a combination of talent, quality, exposure, and persistence.

What do you like about being an indie author?

Being able to write whatever I want. And the sense of satisfaction when something turns out well. I like working with my wife on the design. I like to hold the final product in my hand. I like to send copies out to my friends.

I’m not in it for the money, because there is none. In fact, like most hobbies, you put more money into it than you get out of it. But when you send a book to someone you like, and they say, “Hey, I really enjoyed that,” it’s priceless.