An interesting phenomenon is starting to happen. Self-publishing is starting to look attractive, not just to those who have never had a NY publisher before, but to those who have. There are an increasing number of midlist authors with established careers who are either breaking away from traditional publishing altogether, or hedging their bets by [...]
I may have talked about this before, but it is really important for indie authors to unplug and decompress. The funny irony is that, while there were many reasons I chose to self-publish, one of them was that I didn’t want the pressure of working under someone else’s deadline. And yet, it’s hard to imagine [...]
A few weeks ago I went on about how I really don’t like book trailers (except for a few which have almost converted me to them). So it might come as a surprise that I actually made a video for the purposes of entertainment, but also obviously to market myself and my ideas. But this [...]
When I digitally self-published my first novella, people were thinking that “maybe” ebooks would take off. But no one was sure yet. This lack of certainty kept anything from getting too cut throat. I plopped the thing up on Kindle and Smashwords and didn’t have to think about it. Now, it’s getting a little more [...]
Do you read indie? My question isn’t really: “Have you read an indie author?” My question is more: “Do you go out of your way to read indie?” In movies and music, there is a subset of consumer who, tired of the mass consumer crap put out by major movie studios and record labels, go [...]
This is an area that I’ve run up against recently and something that many other indies I know have talked to me about or blogged about as well. While many of us are selling in multiple online venues, the vast majority of us are making most of our sales on Amazon. Especially in the Kindle [...]
So, you’re on Twitter and Facebook and you keep getting all these constant marketing messages from indie authors (and sometimes traditionally published authors). It’s highly annoying. You friended someone on Facebook because you thought they were interesting or Facebook suggested them to you. But they’re an indie author and now you’re getting promo messages in [...]
And so it begins. One of the arguments for indie music and film and against indie authorship is that very often big Hollywood studios and big record companies seem to like to cheat artists out of money. It’s like a fun hobby. Most people are fairly aware by now of how abusive many record companies [...]