Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author
Zoe Winters
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 Zoe Winters
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Publisher’s Note:
This book includes information from many sources as well as personal experiences. It is published for general reference and is not intended to be a substitute for independent verification by readers. The book is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor publisher is engaged in rendering any legal, psychological, or accounting advice. The publisher and author disclaim any personal liability, directly or indirectly, for advice or information presented within. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information contained within, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or inconsistencies.
Contact: incubooks@gmail.com
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Susan and Cathy for feedback and editing. And to everyone who has supported me on this journey in any way. There are far too many people to name individually here but the list includes those who have inspired me to self-publish due to their success, fellow indies who have helped me troubleshoot, and the friends I’ve picked up along the way. Also thanks to my readers. Without them, I’d have no story to tell.
For the DIY punk in all of us
Note to Readers
All information contained in this ebook is true and accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge as of February 2011. If you find an error in the text, please email: zoewintersbooks@gmail.com so the issue can be corrected. This book will be updated periodically to reflect new prices and other information that changes over time.
Additionally, as always, every effort has been made to cleanly edit the text. However, typos do slip in. If you find errors, please bring it to my attention so I can continue to provide better books for readers.
What to Expect From This Guide
No single book can contain every facet or nuance you could ever need or want to know. And if it did, you would get so bogged down in the details, you wouldn’t be able to act. I know because I’ve read some weighty how-to tomes that made me say “Ah, screw it. This is too much crap.”
In each of those cases I was a reader and not a doer. I wanted to create a guide that would inspire you to become a doer. The idea is to break this down and uncomplicate it. Most people love to add thirty layers of complication into anything they do. Those around you will also want to try to add thirty layers of complication, and they aren’t even doing it. Maybe they’re bored and need something to do.
In the interest of not giving you information overload where you don’t know what to act on and what to leave alone right now, Becoming an Indie Author gives you the bare bones guide to get going and walks you through each stage of the process.
For many indies, this will be all you need.
The most challenging part is starting. We convince ourselves that reading endless books and websites is research and education, but really it’s just procrastination because we’re scared of moving forward and making mistakes.
No matter how much you study, you will make mistakes. I have, and I read and waffled on the issue of self-publishing for four years before I jumped in. Whether or not you make mistakes has little bearing on your ultimate success. What matters is that you pick yourself back up and keep going. Learn to start seeing failure as a part of the process toward success. This book is the result of my own continuing education and trial and error experiences with self-publishing.
Although this book can be applied to both fiction and nonfiction, you might notice a slant in tone toward fiction. This is by design. Most self-publishing guides barely mention fiction and speak primarily to the nonfiction author. Things are changing, and it is increasingly viable for an author of fiction to go indie and succeed.
Becoming an Indie Author is your crash course on the following:
Chapter One: Starting With the Right Attitude. This chapter will also help you determine if going indie is right for you.
Chapter Two: Success Predictors in Indie Authors. The qualities of a successful indie. Most of them you can cultivate if you don’t already have them.
Chapter Three: Branding Decisions and The Format Option You Might Not Know About
Chapter Four: Formats: Print, Ebook, and Audio. This chapter takes you through the three primary formatting options and what you need to know about them.
Chapter Five: Best Laid Plans. Setting up your business and marketing plan. Don’t be intimidated by the phrase “business plan”. There will be no pie charts or unnecessary tedium. This isn’t for the bank; this is for you. We’re working on a shoestring, and you won’t need a loan.
Chapter Six: Editing. Tips on getting it as well as preparing your manuscript well enough beforehand to save the most money.
Chapter Seven: Cover art. Finding and working with a cover artist and how to do your own cover (if you must).
Chapter Eight: Formatting for Print and E. Tips and tricks on how to do it yourself. While you probably don’t want to design your own cover, formatting is a whole other animal.
Chapter Nine: Registering your Copyright.
Chapter Ten: Publishing Steps. A big-picture look at the writing and publishing process. I use my process as an example, but you might choose to approach things differently. This is just a guideline to get you started in organizing a process of your own.
Chapter Eleven: The Hard Part. Marketing and platform-building basics. What you need to know to get started getting your name out there and building a fan base for your work.
Chapter Twelve: Troubleshooting and Caveats. Problems I’ve run into. Things I wish I’d known when I started. Potential landmines to avoid.
Okay, that’s enough blah blah. Let’s roll.
Starting With the Right Attitude
The New Viability of Self-Publishing
Publishing is changing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know this. The time for arguing about whether this is true, is over. Indie authorship is becoming an increasingly viable alternative or stepping stone to traditional publishing. NY is no longer the only game in town. Anyone who still thinks it is, has set up camp beside a lovely river in Egypt.
Indies are kicking asses and taking names. Amanda Hocking, for example, has sold over half a million ebooks. As an indie. Karen McQuestion, another indie, has gotten a movie deal. Indie author, R.J. Keller, has been picked up by AmazonEncore. I started self-publishing with no platform or previous publishing experience at the end of 2008 and I’m making a living with my fiction.
Chances are good if you’ve picked up this book, you’re looking for help to get you on the path to being indie, and you want someone to be straightforward with you. I’m not going to make hard things seem simpler than they are, but I’m also not going to pander to the contingent of people who want to click one button and be done. If you’re lazy, being indie is not for you.
I’m a big believer in using the power of your mind to drive and motivate you toward your dreams and goals, but in the least New Agey Froo Froo way possible. The simple reality is that you have to believe you can achieve something before you do. You can’t think yourself successful, rich, thin, or anything else. Anyone who says you can, is lying to you.
You have to follow your belief with action, but the belief in yourself has to be there first because you will put in the exact effort to match how seriously you take what you’re doing. If you don’t think you can sell 5,000 copies, you probably won’t put in enough effort to reap those kinds of rewards.
Although word of mouth is a powerful thing, there are many steps along the way you’ll have to take to help ensure you get to that happy point. Starting with a lack of belief in what you can accomplish is only going to hold you back. You’ll then put in less effort than someone more driven and optimistic about their prospects, which will give you bad results. Those bad results will only help reinforce your poor beliefs about yourself and what you can do. Lather, rinse, repeat, until insane.
I’ve been in this loop with previous ventures. I know what it’s like to sit and think “Well I can’t really do this, I’m kidding myself, so I’m not going to put that much work into something that’s going to fail anyway.” If you never want to succeed, this is the attitude you start with.
Failure is Part of the Process
Is it possible I could have done everything right and still failed? I suppose so. But success and failure are unlikely to be as black and white as you’ve been led to believe. Failure is often a stepping stone to success. It’s those who quit when they screw up who can’t see that.
If you’ve been on the traditional publishing train before this, you’ve had drilled into your head that rejection is a process. It’s part of the journey to publication. If you already understand that, the same thing applies to being indie.
No one succeeds at anything without challenges or bumps in the road. No one does everything perfectly the first time without making mistakes. The issue isn’t whether you’re going to screw up at some point. The issue is what are you going to do with it?
Are you going to beat yourself with the self-pity stick and say you’re no good anyway and go sit in a corner and cry about it? Or are you going to figure out how to fix the problem, and try again? And if you choose the self-pity stick, are you going to quit or stop whining and get back to work? I’ve had many emo spaz-out moments. The goal is to get to the point where you have them less frequently, but it’s probably going to happen at least a little. If you know that going in, you can be more prepared.
One of the big problems is that many people self-publishing do not understand that rejection and failure are a part of the process. I chose to go indie partly because I don’t feel the need to stand in line waiting for permission to play the publishing game. I’d rather get out there on my own, try, fail, try again, succeed, than wait in a line for someone else to tell me I’m worthy. I believe my readers have more of a right to determine that than a large corporation does.
By this point, I have a complete cognitive disconnect when it comes to the idea that an outside corporation should determine which creative endeavors should or shouldn’t reach the general marketplace. The concept doesn’t even make sense.
People get scared to believe in themselves because they look around and see those who aren’t achieving. People who may even be smarter than them, prettier than them, or funnier than them. (Or maybe they just have a low opinion of themselves.) So it’s easy to say: “Who the hell am I? Why do I think I’m so special that I can do better?”
The 150 Copies Boogeyman
A common statistic passed around to discourage authors from self-publishing or going indie states that the average self-published book sells less than 150 copies. Some even go so far as to say less than 75 copies. I don’t know about you, but I could stand in a parking lot and sell that many copies in a couple of weekends.
I’m not saying I’m going to stand in a parking lot; there are far better uses of my marketing time that don’t involve leaving my house. The point is: Selling 150 copies is just plain mediocre. It may take you awhile to get to 150 in the beginning, so don’t misconstrue what I’m saying.
It takes time to build an audience. In our fast food world where most traditionally published authors get 2-3 months for their books to sell before bookstores start sending returns to the publisher, we have a skewed perspective of things. But the 150 statistic is about the life of the book, and usually that’s at least a year. (In the digital age it’s more.) What are you doing for a whole year that you can’t move 150 copies?
The only way this statistic applies to you is if: A) You haven’t written a good book or B) You haven’t marketed or distributed it properly. Despite the whining and doom and gloom you’ve heard, there are plenty of ways and places for you to distribute and market your books as an indie.
Many things pull the numbers down to create the “150 copies sold” platitude. Remember that self-published books are the slush pile. There is no one stopping anyone from self-publishing. Unless you’re at a site like IndieReader.com where the books have been vetted before being put up for sale, we’re talking about every person who thinks they can write. Not everyone who thinks they can write, can write.
A lot of these individuals also seem to think if they put their books up in a self-publishing company’s bookstore, that somehow they’re going to sell a lot of books. Self-published authors can become an insular little group where suddenly all you’re surrounded by is other self-published authors, and everybody is just trying to hawk their wares.
This happens in the larger writing community as well. It never ceases to amaze me the number of traditionally published authors who spend all their time marketing to other authors. It’s like they forget there is this whole world out there of readers who don’t fancy themselves professional writers. It’s boggling because there are a lot more readers out there to reach that few people seem to be marketing to.
Most people don’t read a lot of books, but look at how many copies Harry Potter sold. Every one of those people is a reader if you get something in front of them that they want to read. But if you’re spending all your time marketing to other writers, you’re cutting off a lot of opportunities to reach these other people.
And because many of them aren’t voracious readers, they don’t have nearly the book marketing noise in their face that your fellow writers do. Yes, writers read a lot, but we also write a lot. We don’t have as much time for other people’s books as many seem to think. Many writers have full-time jobs or other obligations besides writing. Many also critique other writers’ work in exchange for having their own work critiqued. Where are most writers supposed to find the time to read your book in addition to that?
About the only way I have time to read fiction anymore is with audio books, where I can listen to stories while I drive, clean, cook, or exercise.
Another thing that drags down statistics is the books that aren’t meant to sell a lot. Plenty of people self-publish because they want a copy of their writing in their hands, in a physical book format. There is nothing wrong with that. If we can make handmade soaps and candles and other arts and crafts projects, why can’t someone make a book for this same purpose?
Print-on-demand makes it possible for someone with little up-front investment to see their words bound attractively in book form. Many of these books were never intended to sell. Some are family histories or about topics of limited personal interest to a small group of people. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The problem comes in when there is no way to separate these books from those produced by people who intend to market and actually sell their work to strangers. And yet, most people who want to discourage others from self-publishing, trot this number out like it’s some secret weapon, and “Gee, how are we going to get out of this one?”
I’m not sure if those who use this statistic to beat indies over the head with, know it’s a BS statistic or if they just don’t get it. But it is a BS statistic. It’s the epitome of mediocrity, and unless your aim is mediocrity, you will most likely sell more than that. If you don’t sell more than that, go back and figure out if you’ve written a book that is ready to be in the marketplace, if it’s packaged right (good cover, good description), and if you’re doing anything to market it.
There comes a point in sales numbers where you either have to be a writing and publishing savant or really lucky, but 150 copies is not that threshold. I don’t even really believe 3,000 to 5,000 copies is that threshold. The world is big. We have the Internet. Welcome to it.
Developing Realistic Expectations
Having said that, there is the concept of the snowball. Rolling a snowball up a big hill is hard. It seems like one step forward and two steps back. But when you hit the top of that hill and your snowball starts to roll down it, it reaches critical mass, gathers steam, gets bigger, and starts growing on its own, without your personal intervention needed to push it constantly.
When you first release your indie book, you may go a few days or more before you see a single sale. This is especially true if this is your first book and you’re just starting to build your marketing platform. It takes some time. I had a friend get in instant message with me to lament how her Kindle book had only sold 18 copies in the two days it had been out.
That’s not bad for the first two days. My first Kindle book sold 6 copies in the first week. That was when there were only 300,000 books in the Kindle store. And I’d been making noise about the book online beforehand.
This stuff takes time. It’s hard. It’s not get rich quick. As a side note here, don’t let people pull you into the “OMG get in NOW. Build your backlist NOW. This is not a “literal gold rush”. Making money on the Internet is not a limited resource. The greatest opportunity is right now, but don’t release something before it’s ready just so you can “get in on it”. Because at the end of the day, for most of us, quality writing will win out. Respect your readers enough to give them the best you can do, and take the time to do it right.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking if you don’t sell 150 copies in 2 weeks that you’re just some big failure. You have to be willing to be in this and work it for the long haul. It’s pretty pointless to put a bunch of time, energy, and money into producing your own book, only to drop it out into the world and then abandon it like an orphaned child on a cathedral doorstep.
Decide now to run your publishing like a business. If you don’t treat this seriously, no one else will treat you or what you’re doing seriously. You can’t have one foot in both camps. You can’t say: “Well I don’t have any big expectations, I’m just doing this indie thing,” then get upset when someone else doesn’t take you seriously as an author or publisher. You have to commit, even if you risk falling on your face, being rejected, or being mocked. It doesn’t matter. If you stick to your guns and do your thing, people will stop laughing soon enough.
If they have time to waste to mock you, they can’t be doing anything all that impressive with their own lives, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Success Predictors in Indie Authors
Before setting up your business, it’s a good idea to think about your goals and motivations and if you’ve got the qualities to succeed as an indie. If you don’t have these qualities you can choose to lower your expectations and go forward, or you can choose to develop what you need.
You don’t have to be a magical elf. There is no requirement to go through the cave of uber awesomeness, battle three dragons, answer a troll’s riddle, then whisper the correct incantation to open the magical secrets of indie author awesomeness. It’s just not mystical.
So what do you need to succeed as an indie?
You need to be a good writer
Good is subjective, but there is a level of proficiency you need to have achieved with the language and your expression of it in order to give you any chance of decent sales numbers. This applies to nonfiction as well. I’ve read nonfiction so boring I’d rather spork out my eyeballs than be forced to read another line. But with nonfiction you’re just talking and explaining something.
Fiction is a tougher nut to crack and tends to be a lot more subjective. Though there is a point where you’re breaking every rule and clearly don’t know you’re doing it. In that case, you’re not ready for prime time and should study the craft of writing more. Just because you can put something out on your own, doesn’t mean you should.
You may put out a bad indie book and keep going and put out another and another until you get good. And hey, that’s an option. I’ve seen authors published by traditional houses who started out with small ebook publishers, and their first books were not very good. But they kept working and growing as an author.
If the first books you publish aren’t ready for prime time, at some point you’ll have to decide whether you want them to stay out in the world representing you. You may have to pull them off to rewrite because a reader’s first impression of you will stick with them. Even if you’ve improved a lot in the intervening books, your debut may be the first thing they see, and it may cause them never to give your work another chance, despite how much better you’ve gotten.
How do you find out if you’re a good enough writer?
Don’t ask your family or friends. They mean well, but while you may have fantasies of your big future success as a rich and famous author, so do your friends because of how it reflects them. Have you ever spoken to someone who was doing something like acting or singing and thought about what it would be like if they were famous and you could say you knew them?
Well, the second “hey I wrote this book” comes out of your mouth, if they show any real enthusiasm, that’s likely what they’re thinking. They want to be proud of you and say they know you, which is all very flattering. But before your first book goes into the world isn’t the time to be doing something silly like over-inflating your ego. Egos are like tires; you really can put too much air in them.
The other option is that they will read it, hate it, and not tell you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings or the personal relationship you share.
A few will give you some good, honest feedback, but they’ll still hold back because of not wanting to overburden you with too much nitpicking. What they don’t understand is that every grammatical or typographical problem, every story error, every clunky paragraph will be noticed by a reader. And if that reader had to pay money for it, they’ll be upset.
No book is perfect, but before you put it out there, you should make a solid effort to make sure it’s the very best it can be.
Look for other writers in your genre to act as critique readers. Choose people whose writing you admire and who are a step above you in at least some areas of writing proficiency. Find your target readers. Let several beta read, and get their honest opinions. These people are strangers and have no vested interest in you.
You can also submit query letters through the traditional system to agents and editors. If you get to the partial or full manuscript request phase, they may decide they like it and want to publish it. At that point you’ll have a decision to make over whether you really want to go indie, which will depend largely on how good the offer is.
If they reject it, what you’re hoping for is a personalized rejection letter with some encouragement that indicates they think you can write but for whatever reason your work isn’t right for them.
If you’ve been trying to get traditionally published, you may have already accumulated several rejection letters. If you suffer from the type of writer masochism that leads to stockpiling these letters in hopes of wallpapering the spare room someday––because we’re all too poor to buy real wallpaper––then now is the time to pull the stack out and re-read. How many are just form rejections? How many are personal? How nice are the personal ones?
Editors and agents get tons of crap sent to them every day. They won’t waste the time to encourage a bad writer. If you’ve received a lot of encouraging rejection letters, that’s a good sign. Full speed ahead.
You need to have the ability to separate yourself from your work
If you’re traditionally published, you have several monkeys on your back making sure you don’t publish too soon.
If you’re an indie, you don’t have those buffers. You have to find them and put them in place, i.e. editors, critique readers, and beta readers. Many self-published authors think they can edit themselves. No you can’t. I’m a pretty good self-editor. I catch a lot, especially the more times I go over a piece of writing. But I don’t catch everything. No one does. This is especially true the longer the piece of writing is.
Unfortunately, many people who self-publish do not have the ability to separate themselves from their work. There does come a point in the rejection process when it has nothing to do with the quality of your writing, but the vast majority of rejected authors aren’t at that stage yet.
If you don’t have the ability at least to read your own work and see that it’s not the best it could be (even if you don’t yet know how to fix it), then you’re going to have a difficult time succeeding as an indie. One way to overcome this shortcoming if you have it, is to assume there are things wrong with the work, whether you see them or not, and choose wise council to help you whip your manuscript into shape. If you don’t know who to go to, get recommendations from people whose writing you admire.
You have to be a self-starter
As an indie you don’t have a deadline. The opposite problem from rushing unpolished work into the marketplace, is the person who stalls indefinitely because they are afraid of disappointing readers.
You have to be able to get up and write every day, and edit, and handle all the other issues an indie has to handle, without someone standing over your shoulder asking if you’ve done your work today. You have to be able to shut off the Internet and stop pretending tweeting about what you ate for lunch counts as work.
Being an indie author is like being self-employed. In fact, if you’re successful at it, over time you will find yourself self-employed. Being able to make a plan and follow it, is essential to your success.
You have to be organized
You’re going to have about a hundred things going at once, and you need some kind of system in place so you don’t forget half of it.
One thing I’ve found effective is Google Calendar. You might want to sign up for a gmail account for this feature alone. You can use it like an appointment book and get an email alert every day with your to-do list. It’s easy to lose track of random slips of paper even if you write things down somewhere.
On any given day you may have to do one or several of the following:
Design or update your website, design cover art or work with a cover designer, write rough draft, edit, work with an editor or critique partner, return the favor for someone else, typeset your book, market your book, distribute your book, get blurbs for your book, answer mail from your readers, do interviews with people about your book and work on various publicity or marketing campaigns, general bookkeeping, etc.
You can’t afford to be disorganized. The more disorganized you are, the more opportunities will slip through your fingers. As an indie you need every opportunity you can get if your book is to succeed.
You have to be in it for the long haul
Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.
Those in traditional publishing are fond of talking about how an author’s career is built over many books. This is equally true for an indie author. Readerships build organically over time. It’s going to take several books, several marketing campaigns, many many satisfied readers telling their friends about you, a consistent web presence, etc.
I’ve told people I’m on a ten-year plan. Don’t expect wildly amazing things from me until I hit year ten on the plan. Then we can talk about whether or not my plan to go indie was worthwhile. It’s silly to even have the discussion before then. Though many others consider me a successful indie author, I’m still far from where I want to be.
While at the time of this original writing I’m entering my third year as an indie, I’ve had several years of business and marketing experience before that.
I worked in the marketing department for a small audio book publisher who catered to the library market. I’ve owned a few small businesses. I’ve been raised in an entrepreneurial family and watched and learned from the other entrepreneurs in my family. I’m the resident paid blogger at IndieReader.com and I’m involved with publetariat.com, a resource site for indie authors.
If you’ve got to wait until I get to the tenth year of my ten-year plan to benefit from the information I’m sharing with you, then you will miss the best chance to get started now before the biggest window of opportunity shrinks.
You need the ability to blaze your own trail and forget the naysayers
While it’s a good idea to hear many perspectives about things before you run off half-cocked making random decisions, at the end of the day you have to be confident enough in who you are and what you’re doing to say, “to hell with the naysayers.” Most of the naysayers in life are not doers. Even if they are doers, chances are good they haven’t once tried the particular thing you’re thinking of trying.
They’ve instead read thirty different people chanting the same opinion but with different wording, and decided to internalize it as fact. Ignore these people. No one else knows what you can or cannot accomplish. And chances are good, you don’t even know.
Some will intentionally try to sabotage you based on their own personal insecurities. Your sabotage may come from within your own camp or outside of it. It may be you sabotaging yourself (been there, got the t-shirt, sometimes I still visit). It may be other writers, trad published, unpublished, or self-published. It may come from your children, or your parents, your spouse, or your best friend.
Though my friends and family have all been very supportive, there have been others who discouraged me from self-publishing, citing that I couldn’t make any money at it. My reply to that is and has always been “As opposed to what other option?” Publishing, especially fiction, hasn’t traditionally been the path to financial stability for most people. Even most NY published authors still have day jobs.
The vast majority of naysayers I’ve run into were well-intentioned people. You will probably encounter some of the same, people who are just trying to save you from yourself. Well, they aren’t your mommy. There comes a point in your life where you have to shut off the noise and follow your own path. No matter how well-intentioned a person is, they do not know your temperament or your potential.
They only know that self-publishing, for whatever reason, isn’t right for them. That’s great for them, but it has nothing to do with you. In fact nobody else’s successes or failures or personal preferences have anything to do with you personally. Your experience may vary from theirs.
It’s a common human frailty to project your own wants, needs, desires, and challenges onto other people. If something is difficult for you, it must be difficult for everyone else. If something is easy for you, it must be easy for everyone else. If something is unappealing to you, well, you get the idea.
The moment you can truly separate you out from everybody else, and realize that everybody is absolutely unique in temperament, abilities, likes, dislikes, and needs, you’ll be much more free to follow your own way. Not just in publishing, but in life in general.
You need to be a good money manager
If you intend to make any money at all, you have to be able to manage your finances. Some people start a business and bring in a lot of money. They think they’re doing well, but then they go out of business because they didn’t turn a profit.
They didn’t turn a profit because they kept throwing too much money at every problem they encountered. They over-invested financially in marketing before they could justify the expense. They bought truckloads of office supplies acting like it was a gift from the office-supply fairy instead of something that came out of their own pocket. Citing “tax write-offs” isn’t an excuse. If you spend all the money you make on your business, you won’t turn a profit and you’ll run out of working capital, which is one of the biggest reasons small businesses fail.
If you want to survive to publish another book, you have to get serious about every penny going in and out. While you shouldn’t spend any money you can’t stand to part with forever, you should be reasonably sure it will return before you make the spending decision. And fantasizing about book sales isn’t reasonable certainty.
You need to reinvest in order for your business to grow, but it must be proportionate to the money you’re bringing in. I’ve heard many people state that self-publishing is a bad idea because you’ll end up mortgaging your house and wallowing around in debt for the rest of your life. But that is only going to be the case if you’re a bad money manager and you try to spend like you’re a major NY publisher.
You’ve got to budget and spend like a small press because that’s what you are. The average small press book generally sells between 500 and 3,000 copies, and they have to be able to turn a profit on that number of sales. (Note: this is based on print sales with print runs.)
This isn’t to say you’re only going to sell 3,000 copies of any given book. With a back list and a strong platform built online, you could sell a lot more. But until you get to that point, you can’t be spending like you plan to move 50,000 copies in the first month after your publication date.
You need the ability to determine the difference between quality and crap
There exists a contingent of people who can look at something and not tell it’s ugly or read something and not know it’s awful. You have to be able to spot quality. If you can’t, you’re sunk. You don’t have to be able to do your own cover art, but you have to know enough about graphic design to know what works so you can find a cover artist that can produce the kind of work you’re looking for. You have to be able to tell if your interior layout looks right, if your back cover copy is catchy, if the editing of your book is on-target.
It’s not enough just to get outside people to help you with these things. You have to be able to know if they’re doing a good job. This is especially true with editing. Some people are going to suggest the most ridiculous edits to you. And while you have to be able to take criticism and advice, you also need to know when someone is trying to rewrite your book as they would have written it, ignoring your voice and style in favor of their own.
If two or three people make the same comment or have the same complaint, it’s worth investigating further even if you don’t agree because it’s an indication that something is not being conveyed as you meant to convey it.
You need to have passion
Many people have the idea in their heads that self-publishing authors are sad, desperate creatures taking a last resort. If that’s you, you can still be an indie author, but it’s going to be harder for you.
Plenty of indies love what they’re doing. The business end of self-publishing feeds a business side of them, and the creative end feeds their creative side. I’m the type of person who needs both types of stimulation in my work to be happy. I like full creative control. I like all the business minutiae. I like knowing I’m the boss and the work from start to finish is absolutely my production.
If you don’t have a passion for all the little details and things you have to do, it’s going to be more drudgery than reward. It’s possible you don’t feel passion for it because you’ve allowed yourself to be influenced too much by the peanut gallery’s view about self-publishing and indie authors. Once you shed those goofy notions, you may develop a growing enthusiasm for indie authorship.
When I started, I was paranoid about the stigma of self-publishing. Originally the idea had been to build a platform because I didn’t want to get picked up by a traditional publisher and be a one-book author. It seemed counter-intuitive to waste my big break on no platform and a highly-pressurized situation in which I’d have three months or less on the shelves to prove my worth before a decision could be made to drop me. Then I’d be damaged goods in the world of publishing.
As I got into what I was doing, I found I really loved everything about it. I loved the challenge. I loved the business and creative control. And at this point I don’t see myself ever traditionally publishing outside of subsidiary rights. I guess theoretically someone could “make me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” but unless they were going to whack me if I didn’t take it, I probably wouldn’t.
I’m at the point now where I love being indie for the sake of being indie. It’s not a stepping stone to anything. Your mileage may match mine or it may vary, but you’ve got to find some kind of passion and drive to keep you motivated and going. Maybe your passion is in working toward getting the attention of a mainstream publisher. If that’s enough to fuel you and keep you going, then great! Use it.
You need to be a self-promoter
You won’t have the same distribution a traditionally published author will have. While you will have wider distribution than you’ve been led to believe, it still isn’t going to be quite the same. And while many authors with NY publishers get very little marketing support for their books, you will get NO marketing support.
The marketing is all you, baby. In a world where self-publishing is so easy and everybody fancies him or herself an author, you’ve got your work cut out for you. This is a competitive business, and you have to be willing to compete.
This does not mean spamming everybody you know constantly with blatant self-promotional messages. You’ve got to use a little finesse, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there and ask for what you want.
You need to know what you hope to gain from all of this
Before starting a journey, you need to have the destination in mind. Don’t be afraid to set high goals. You need to have something strong enough to fuel you and keep you excited about what you’re doing. Little goals don’t do that.
To quote Timothy Ferriss of The 4-hour Workweek, “I’ll run through walls to get a catamaran trip through the Greek islands, but I might not change my brand of cereal for a weekend trip through Columbus, Ohio.”
Dreams and goals are two separate mentalities. There is a big difference in the person who dreams of competing in the Olympics and the person for whom it is a goal. The goal-setters get there far more often than the dreamers because they take the steps necessary as if it were actually possible. So for many of them it becomes possible.
You may have a goal you never reach. But I think it’s better to set the goal, work for it, and fail, than it is to set a wimpy goal that isn’t that impressive or motivating to begin with. Decide what you want out of this. If you really just want to sell a few copies and build a small readership, okay. That’s valid if that’s what you want.
If you want to attract a NY publisher, and a good contract, be honest about that. If you want to grow under your own steam as your own small press, okay. If you want to sell 100,000 books on your own, don’t let someone else tell you, you can’t. Maybe you can’t, but maybe you can.
Be willing to be honest with yourself because if you won’t even let your own mind think it, you have no hope of achieving it. Think big. That’s where the magic happens. There is plenty of room at the top. It’s mediocrity that everyone else is fighting and clawing for because they don’t have the confidence to fight for more. If you have to take a freaking self-esteem workshop to get your head on straight, do it. Because in the beginning the only person who is going to believe in you, is you.
Think about these qualities and how many of them you have and how many of them you have to pick up. Nearly every one of them you can get closer to if you don’t have it already. I am constantly working to build these qualities in myself because I know they will be the keys to my success.
Branding Decisions and The Format Option You Might Not Know About
Once you’ve reasonably determined you have the right temperament for indiehood, it’s time to start thinking more closely about what you intend to publish and in what formats.
You probably have a manuscript ready or nearly ready to go, so you have a clear idea on what you want to publish. But think about it further. If you’re publishing fiction, how many genres are you going to write in?
Multiple Pen Names for Multiple Brands
Because of deadlines and publication schedules on the traditional publishing track, most writers who have other full time jobs never stop to think about this because they don’t have the time or mental energy to meet publisher demands of a book a year for more than one genre. Especially given that most publishers want you to create a separate pen name for different genres, which creates double the amount of marketing necessary to keep your publishing contracts.
You could also be in the opposite situation and able to produce work faster than you’d be allowed to under most publishing contracts. As an indie you can work as fast or as slow as you need to. I’ve taken months off before, and I’ve also written like a demon on speed.
Sometimes an author can market more than one writing identity from the same website or cross market between both author websites. Sometimes that’s not possible. For example, an author who writes romance novels and nonfiction science books is going to have to keep the identities separate because most people in the general public won’t take a scientist who writes romance novels seriously. As a general rule, people have a hard time accepting someone can be a brilliant scientist or lawyer or physician and write romance or erotica in addition to that.
You may write in two genres, one that caters more to women and another that caters more to men. In these situations, it may be necessary to keep them separate in order to keep from diluting one brand with the other. While gender stereotypes cause all sorts of social problems, they still exist. There are plenty of men who won’t read a book if they think it’s for women and plenty of women who won’t read a book if they think it’s for men. You can’t change or unmake the culture. It’s better to just work within it.
You may later decide you want to branch out and publish other authors. This will add another layer of complication in your financial planning since you’ll have to start tracking and paying royalties just like any other publisher. Think carefully before you take this step.
Even if you find fabulous authors you want to publish, you can never be sure about their personal marketing abilities, and you may not have the energy or drive to heavily market work other than your own. Part of your profits will be eaten up in author royalties, so you’ll get less financial reward for the same level of marketing work.
As an indie you’ll have to decide not only what you plan to write and publish, but also under what brands/imprints. Even if you intend to write a lot of different nonfiction books that don’t necessarily conflict, you may have to create more than one pen name and publishing imprint for them.
Many in the general public think people can only be expert enough to write a book on one topic. If you know too much about too many topics, they tend to not trust you know anything at all. It can also confuse and dilute your brand. So while writing about relationships and fixing up classic cars might not seem to be conflicts of interest, people won’t know what your brand means, what you stand for, and what you’re an expert on, if you don’t keep it focused.
There is more than one way to focus a brand. One example is traditionally published author, Larry Winget. He’s known as the personal responsibility guy. He talks a lot about finances, but he writes books catering to many different audiences about the concept, as well as about general human stupidity. He’s got a distinct voice and persona he’s crafted that allows readers to know what they are getting when they buy one of his books.
If you start branching outside one genre or topic, be aware you may need to create multiple brands to handle everything you’re putting out into the world. And you may or may not want to connect them depending on whether it will strengthen or dilute your brand, or whether it may alienate some readers of your other work.
I’ve chosen to publish my indie author books as Zoe Winters, because while my other work under this name is paranormal romance, I’ve been very loud and out there on the Internet as Zoe Winters about being an indie author. For this reason it makes sense to continue that brand and make Zoe Winters both about paranormal romance and indie authorship. Other things I publish are under other names, so as not to dilute the Zoe Winters brand.
Your Primary Brand and Automation
If you have more than one brand, it’s wise to pick a primary brand. This will be the brand you think will be most commercially viable i.e. what you feel will sell the most. Put the main thrust of your focus here. Other brands you create may or may not be marketed as strongly depending on your time availability.
It’s okay to polish, package, and publish something and put it out there just to see how it does. If at all possible you’ll want to create ways in which people can find you on the Internet that won’t require you to spend hours marketing every day. The more you can automate or highly focus your marketing process, the more time you have to actually write and publish.
And by automate your marketing process I do not mean spamming people on your Facebook friends list or Twitter feed with blatant marketing messages. That is epic fail. You are too small to be able to afford the number of people you’ll piss off and alienate with spam. Facebook is not an opt-in newsletter. I’m talking about building a content-rich website you can drive traffic to, so you don’t have to be there all day babysitting your brand and repeating over and over what it is that you do.
Some things you publish will be more about passion than profit. You just want to be sure that the money you invest in each book isn’t more than your profit margin for that book.
As an indie you can’t afford to be like NY publishing, expecting a lot of books on your list to produce a loss while you wait for your bestsellers to rescue you from sinking. You don’t have a bestseller. Well, you’ll have a book that sells more than your other books, but you probably won’t have a mega monster NY Times Bestseller to rescue you from stupid business decisions on the other books you publish.
Publishing and Selling an Infoproduct
This brings us to formats. If you’re publishing nonfiction, there is an option you may not have considered if you’ve been interfacing with publishing through mainstream goggles.
If you’re offering specialized information that isn’t standard bookstore fare, you may want to publish primarily in ebook, and you’ll probably want to stay out of traditional bookstore channels either on or offline.
With the right topic, you can sell an ebook, classed as an infoproduct, on the Internet from your own website for $50 or more (almost all of that pure profit), depending on the amount of specialization and usefulness of the knowledge and the length of the book.
However, you won’t be able to sell a nonfiction ebook on Amazon for $50. The general consumer expectation for ebooks is around $9.99 or less. It’s really hard, especially in the traditional bookstore market where books tend to be priced based on consumer expectations rather than the value of the knowledge, to sell higher than that price point for a digital good.
In print books, most nonfiction paperbacks retail anywhere between $19.99 and $24.99. Much higher and people’s eyes start glazing over. One exception is technical computer manuals, which sometimes do approach or exceed the price point for the standard online infoproduct ebook. But it’s still a hard sell for an unknown in the market.