I’ve just come across this term: “Indie Author” and I think I might be one, which is very exciting because it sounds so “hip”, so “wikid”, so “anarchic”, so “sticking it to the man”, and I’ve never been any of those things before so well done me! Except of course “Indie Author” is just a label and utterly meaningless. What I am is simply someone who likes to write, and will explore any means of disseminating my work. The natural endgame of all writing is not necessarily publication, but I think for most of us it is, so others can read what we’ve written. So, if you like to write you’re going to have an interest in publication. But publication, as you’ll soon find out, is a tricky business. Editors might not want to print your stuff. It’s a mystery. It might be that it’s crap – but you’ll never know because they won’t tell you. It might be because they don’t publish that sort of thing. Whatever the reason, if you try to figure it out you’ll only end up tied in knots, with years and years lost when you could have been doing something else, like,… well,… just writing.
So, you stick your short story up on Feedbooks, you publish your well travelled novels on Lulu. And they get read. Maybe that makes me an Indie Author, I don’t know, but if Random House offered me a generous advance for, say, “Push Hands”, tomorrow, trust me, I wouldn’t be an Indie Author for very long.
I am what I am, and what I am I do not know, and in the words of the blessed John Clare: what I am none cares or knows.
Sure, I know that.
Self publishing online? Why not? Publish and be damned – just don’t expect to make anything out of it. But that’s okay, because you’re not that sort of writer, right?
I read a very sniffy piece today about self publishing online. It suggested that not all those ebooks out there amounted to very much and that a great many might indeed be very badly written, and not even worth a free download. It was the biggest statement of the obvious I’ve heard in a long while. If anyone can publish anything, then of course there’ll be a lot of rubbish out there. But the public are actually quite smart when it comes to judging a piece of writing. You don’t need to be a literary critic to decide if you basically liked something or not. It might be corny, clichéd, of no recognisable genre, a mish-mash of styles that the educated guardian of “taste” would demonize on the spot, but I think people just like to read, and if a story touches them it doesn’t matter if it has literary merit or not, so long as it is reasonably well written. The theme of the story might have been done to death a thousand times by better authors than you, but Joe-public might never have heard of them, and on that one day they were simply fated to download your story – so you can forget about the rest. I’ve read a lot of stuff on Feedbooks, and some of it is very cringeworthy indeed, but some of it was well written and entertaining, and some of it made me think. Is that not the whole point?
A writer posting a badly written piece isn’t going to do himself any favours. Sloppy grammar, poor spelling and eccentric punctuation will all reflect badly upon him, and the next time his name crops up, the ebook-downloading Joe-public’s going to think twice. Quality control in the indie ebook market is built-in and self-regulating. Joe public might forgive an author once if they paid nothing, but if there was a price to download, that author can expect a lot of instant and universally negative feedback, which means they’re dead in the water. Mud sticks. You have to take special care as an indie author because there’s no pernickerty editor at the back of you cleaning up your grammatical howlers. Your only defence is to respect the intelligence of your mysterious reader. You also have to be sincere. If you mean well in what you write, I think that will come across, then you might be forgiven the odd typo, but don’t push your luck.
Are you an Indie Author? My advice? Don’t think about it for too long. Better ask yourself instead what did I write today? What were my impressions? What did I feel?
Maybe John Clare is right, what we are none cares or knows. But that doesn’t mean the view of the world from the inside of your head doesn’t matter.
And that’s reason enough to write.
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I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest -that I loved the best –
Are strange -nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, –
The grass below -above the vaulted sky.
John Clare 1793-1864
The Rivendale Review 
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