How to become an independent author

So, you have this thing you’re interested in and you want to write about it, or you like to write stories, or poetry. Maybe you’ve even tried to find an agent who’ll hopefully find you a publisher, but it’s all gone wrong. Years have passed, and your dreams of sharing your ideas, your enthusiasms are in tatters. What now? Well, it’s simple, and since you’re reading this, the answer is staring you in the face: self publishing online. Become an independent author, and cut out those elusive middle men.

You still have this thing you’re interested in and hopefully the experience of trying to get a publisher hasn’t stifled your enthusiasm for it, nor scarred you too deeply in other ways. So, do your thing, write your book, then look up DIY self publishing outlets like Feedbooks, Smashwords, Wattpad, or Amazon’s Kindle Marketplace, and get yourself a blog too, like this one. It costs nothing.

These are all basically websites that allow you to upload your writing. They then host it for free, for ever. Too good to be true? I mean, what’s in it for them? There has to be something, right? Well, yes; they sell advertising. Or if you’re using a website that allows you to charge for your work, they’ll cream off a percentage. In the case of Feedbooks and Smashwords, your free books also lure readers in where they might linger long enough to explore the paid content.

Writing for free, Feedbooks, Smashwords and Wattpad are all good options. Blogging is also free of course, unless you opt for premium packages. Blogging adds exposure for you and your work, and gets your name into that all important Google box, though it can take years for a blog to gain traction. Mine’s gone gradually from nothing to about a hundred views per day in three years, so you need to be patient. But good blogging’s a skill, one every writer should be familiar with nowadays, and it’s interesting learning the ropes as you go along.

If you want to charge your readers to download your books, Amazon or Smashwords are the ones to go for. But remember, if you charge for your work, you won’t get as many downloads, and probably not enough to make a living at it anyway. I’m not saying you can’t make a living self-publishing, but you’ll need to spend a lot of time promoting your work – or you may be lucky and go viral. These are all ebooks of course. Paper’s still an option, through the likes of Lulu.com, but I think our attachments to paper are nostalgic and, as fond of paper books as I am myself, I no longer see it as a progressive medium, I write exclusively for portable devices now. That’s where most of the readers are. How so? Well, I found you didn’t I?

But self publishing isn’t proper publishing, is it, and especially not giving away free ebooks? Well, it’s a matter of opinion. In the olden days, if a writer was frustrated in his attempts to publish conventionally, he might have been tempted down the route of vanity publishing. This means he basically pays a printer to print his books and then he tries to sell them himself, or give them to friends and family. The test of success though is in how many of those books he sells to strangers. It sounds dodgy, and it is, but a surprising number of writers in previous centuries started out that way and became famous – though too often only after they had died in poverty, believing themselves to be failures. There are some parallels between vanity publishing and self-publishing in that one’s success is measured by the number sales, or if selling is not your aim, then in the number readers who download your book.

Writing is easy, conventional publishing is not. Conventional publishing is almost, but not quite, impossible and It renders you vulnerable in a world that can seem at times a very cruel and lonely place. Think of self publishing as a safer option – but only if you keep your hands in your pockets. You may not get rich, indeed, writing as an independent author you may make nothing at all, but you won’t get shafted either.

And readers will find you.

That’s the how of it, and I hope you can see it’s quite simple really. The why of it is more complex, and important, and follows next time.