Are you an Indie?

Not long ago being an Indie author meant paying to get your books printed and shipped to you, and then selling them, one by one, as best you could in your local area. Waterstones would look down their nose at your slim little volume and local libraries would take one grudgingly, flick through it and say “Oh, but it’s such small print.”

Then the ebook and Kindle appeared on the scene and everything changed except the work - the hours, days, weeks and months of research, writing, editing, and re-editing to get a manuscript ready for publication – that hasn’t changed at all.

But everything else has and is still changing. An indie author now needs to market and sell their books in a very different way.

An ebook can be transmitted, in an instant, anywhere in the world. But to make this work, you must be online, with internet, blog, website, and a working knowledge of social media. You also need to be alert to the constant changes in this world.

Never heard of metadata? You need to check this site: an expert at writing metadata. Make sure you know about keywords and categories. Decide if you are sticking with Amazon and ignoring every other selling channel, or if you want to sell through other outlets as well.

Then there’s the question of designing a cover yourself or paying someone to do it. Some people believe you must pay for editing not once but twice and sometimes three times. By the time you have paid out all this money, it is doubtful if you will ever get that money back in royalties.

Then there is advertising. Such a tricky business many authors are signing wannabe authors up to expensive courses on how to achieve success with online ads. Teaching people to write has become a college, university and freelance opportunity - and an expensive one at that. How many people can afford £20k for a university course to teach someone to write a novel? 

Not I. I'll just soldier on, learning by doing it the hard way. By trial and error. Doing something and seeing if it works. Discarding it if it does not. It keeps me out of trouble. If I were twenty something and craving a career as a successful author, all thee expensive routes might be worth taking, but I'm not, so it isn't. Oh, and by te way, have you noticed I now have an author page? Jen Black's Author page should find me.