Indie publishing - a fact or two

Indie publishing
1) Write your book
2) Put it aside for a month.
3) Read it, self-edit, and if you think it is now ready, send it to a couple of trusted readers (alpha readers) for feedback
4) Re-write it
5) Send it to test (beta) readers – a dozen is a nice round figure, male, female, different ages, different countries
6) Commission a cover from a professional cover artist who will have fonts and pics to which they own the copyright. This is important!
7) The beta reader feedback will show you where you haven’t made your point clear, or have been misleading. Rewrite.
8) Send the book to a professional independent editor. It will cost – but without editing, the best story will lose readers because the flood of little errors annoys and distracts them.
9) Publish.

Indie publishing isn’t policed in any way, which drives serious writers nuts. You can write anything you like today and put it on line tonight and order your friends to buy it. The average book sells 35 copies. Most sell two or three, especially of second books when the writer has run out of friends! Poorly written books with no editing and no input, often offered for free, have damaged the indie reputation - a lot of readers say they would never look at an indie book again. Every now and then an indie book has phenomenal success - 50 Shades is a fairly recent example – and sells in millions, but even those who bought it to be titillated sneer that the writing is appalling and it just proves all indie books are bad.

Being able to publish a book on-line at no cost created a tsunami – ten million and more books, many of which should never have seen the light of day, have hit the market and sent it reeling. There are still hundreds of books published every day, there are writing challenges like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to write fifty thousand words in less than a month (never mind the quality, feel the width) which launch hundreds of thousands more books in time for the Christmas ‘rush’.

The publishing houses hate it – obviously – and campaign all the time against it, especially because an increasing number of their best-selling authors are choosing to go indie. Why? Because publishers pay writers tiny percentages, pour most of their advertising and promoting into their top writers, and have total ownership of the books. If you are conventionally published you have little or no say over the cover, the editing, the marketing, and any opportunities that come up. Any advances paid are, usually, small, and when your books are returned unsold by bookshops, you have to repay royalties. Ouch.

Serious indie writers join associations like ALLi and work together. Publishing your own book is in no way a licence to print money (unless you write a 50 Shades) and for some who put out good stuff it still only brings in a couple of hundred pounds a month extra income. The more serious you are, the better you are at marketing and promoting, and the more books you have out there, the better you will do. Many of the writers in ALLi, however, are comfortably self-employed earning a couple of thousand pounds a month, employing assistants for research and formatting so they can concentrate on writing and marketing, and churning out a highly professional product. I’ll get there