The Reality of the Indie Author
Posted by Zoe Winters on July 5th, 2010So, 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 your in-box that you didn’t consent to receiving.
They’ve also sent you a message asking you to “like” them or become their fan. Maybe they’re on Twitter and they’ve mentioned their book five times in the past two hours. It’s getting annoying. You quickly unfriend or unfollow.
There is a bit of a desperation in the water for any author who isn’t safely protected at the top of the New York Times list. This is especially true of indie authors because we don’t get the kind of distribution in brick and mortar bookstores that traditionally published authors do.
Sure, bookstores are in their death throes in many places. And lots of sales are moving online. But national bookstore distribution is still not something to totally sneeze at, at this moment in time.
A fellow indie author commented on my blog that things seemed “precarious” and she felt like she could stop selling at any moment. I know that feeling intimately. It’s especially true when you start to build a little bit of visibility and start to do a little better than you expected a little sooner than you expected. You suddenly live in a pressure cooker and everybody has an opinion about you. Good or bad. True or untrue.
And you can’t run all over the Internet defending yourself because if you do, it’s unprofessional and you start to alienate the people who previously liked you. It feels like lose-lose any way you slice it.
Marketing is a big landmine for the indie author. Indies don’t have a publicist (unless they’re just independently financially well-off). They don’t have someone to take them aside and say: “You know, Facebook is not an opt-in newsletter. Maybe it would be best if you just used your updates on Facebook and commented on other people’s updates to market, instead of spamming your whole friends list with promotional emails.”
I think many authors don’t understand fully that 90% of the people on their FB friends list are not their actual “friends” in the true and generally accepted definition of that word.
There is no one but the indie author and maybe a few close friends, to worry about one’s “image” and how to create it or change it.
Dynamos like Scott Sigler tell people to get their work out there, build and interface with audience, and then take that to a publisher. But my experience interacting with indies is that most don’t know how to do that, and there are definitely days when I don’t know how to do that either. Indies are left to sink or swim on their own in the cesspool that is the Internet.
Barriers dropping to make self-publishing more financially viable, is great for indies who have to operate on a shoestring (which is most of us). But on the other side of things it means that nearly everybody and their grandmother, and maybe their grandmother’s chihuahua is doing it, too. It creates a massive amount of noise when everybody is on the Internet constantly trying to sell something to someone.
Reading is one of the least popular forms of entertainment and yet, everybody wants to be an author, especially of fiction. Everybody wants to write; nobody wants to read. And they are all crowding onto the Internet, starting Twitter, Facebook and GoodReads accounts, thinking they’re going to take the world by storm.
And that’s where you, dear reader, come in. And this is where your area of the universe has likely been disturbed, and where mine has been disturbed as well. In your time interacting and engaging with writers online, you may unfriend and unfollow a great many people who can’t seem to grasp the boundaries of social media netiquette.
But remember that most of the time, they just don’t know what else to do. Indies don’t have a marketing instruction manual and most writers are introverts to begin with. Not everybody is Scott Sigler. Actually, I think nobody is Scott Sigler but Scott Sigler. This is both factually true and metaphorically true.
This doesn’t make the inundation of borderline spam and annoying interaction okay. But the problem is going to get worse, and I’m not sure it will ever get better. Indies may jump and shout about the awesome freedom inherent in being an indie. But at the end of the day, it’s one of the hardest roads an author can walk, voluntarily or involuntarily. Just be glad it isn’t you.
Zoe Winters is an indie author of quirky paranormal romance and a passionate advocate of the indie author movement. Visit her at: http://www.zoewinters.org to try free samples of her fiction.
Tags: book publishing, competition, competitve book industry, indie authorship, indie books, indie culture
Nice post, Zoe. Just a reminder that the “social” part of social media is important. Anti-social behavior is not in our best interest as Indie Authors. And also its a marathon, not a sprint. The goal of an Indie is to build a readership for their body of work, 1, 5, 10 readers at a time – weathering the storm at every turn. Ah the life, right?
hehe, yep! Thanks for commenting, William!
I don’t have a problem with promoting my book on Facebook or on Twitter.
Compared to the constant barrage of application and game updates and nonsensical virtual gifts, promotional material is not annoying at all.
There are people on Facebook who go berserk when anyone promotes anything, and those people will unfriend you. You know what? Awesome. That opens up the friend cap space to friend someone else.
I find that as long as you refrain from excessive message board spam, people are a lot more tolerant of online promotion than you might think they are, Zoe. People don’t like BOTS, but if you show up somewhere and actually talk to people, if you also promote your book[s] nobody minds.
Maybe I’m a special case, because my stuff is so hypertargeted that there’s almost no line any more between conversation and promotion once I find the right site – but I think this is probably a general phenomenon. Indie authors, like everyone else, have an exaggerated sense of how negatively people will react to them. People are terrified to go into sales because they think the people they call on will try to kill them or something – and it’s just not true.
Thomas, I don’t unfriend anyone unless they send me promotional messages too often. But I ALWAYS delete the messages.
I just find them very rude. Why does anyone have the right to clutter up my inbox with an unsolicited mass email when I didn’t opt in to their newsletter? If they want to take the time to write me a personal message, that’s different. Though you may still not write in my genre and everybody on facebook isn’t your customer/reader.
I think the news feed updates and wall updates are really the best place to promo your stuff. Otherwise I feel like it’s intrusive.
I think we’re talking about two different things. I’m not saying don’t promo on Twitter and Facebook. That’s probably why you’re there. I’m saying… on Twitter, don’t do constant blatant noncommunicative self-promo, and on Facebook don’t send me random promotional email messages. That crap goes to my inbox and clutters it up.
And I just delete it all as spam, because ultimately it is.