Tuesday, August 9, 2016

This Is Not News


Authors Need Publishers Less than Ever - Read the article first.

Read it? Good. To the average indie author, book distribution isn’t our main
problem. Far from it.

Between Amazon, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, CreateSpace (for paperbacks-
free), Ingram Spark (for ebooks and paperbacks - not free), and Authors Republic
(audiobooks), with other recommended (or not recommended) services, many
discussed to death and then some by KBoards (the renowned Kindle Boards)
members in the Writers’ Café, you can get all the distribution available for your
books, no matter what, and all you have to do is be careful not to overlap your
distribution nodes.

Most of these distribution services are free, but a few do charge for processing
your words and possible inclusion fees. Ingram Spark has a $49.00 processing fee
for each book, but depending on additional *services, *additional fees may apply.

You can buy content editors, line editors, have covers done, formatting done, and
whatever else you need, and that might cost around $1,500 USD or less per book,
depending. A little more than that is okay, but not a lot more. Scams are
everywhere for authors. They lurk behind every bush. You can pay a lot more, but
it still doesn’t guarantee your book will do better than other indie books.

Mainstream publishers (the Big 5) suck for the newbies, unless you’re considered
prolific and exceptional, both at the same time. Six to ten books written per year,
with a large measure of competence is what they want. There is no real reason to
turn down a contract with advance for a first novel (if you even get lucky enough
to be offered a contract), shitty as that contract may be. Not really. Some authors have
built very lucrative self-publishing careers by starting out as a mainstream
published authors, heavily marketing themselves and their mainstream published
book(s) with their own time, on their own dime. That title as a mainstream
published author can and does open doors closed to indie authors.

When you do move into an indie author career, you can take your fan base with
you, and if you keep them happy, you can make enough money to live on and then
some (or so I’ve noticed). Which reminds me, I need to get my new personal
newsletter up and running.

None of this is new news within writing circles.

Our main problem as freshly minted indie authors is DISCOVERABILITY! 

Period!

There’s nothing after that! If people don’t know you exist, and you have books for
them to buy, download and read, you might as well shove your thumb up your ass
and spin circles in your chair.

There are so many threads on the KBoards, the Writers' Café, writers helping
writers understand the process of a launch, and the marketing needed to keep your
indie career moving forward, that it would be deemed foolish not to learn from
those that came before.

Marketing can be done for free, and it can cost. Marketing can cost a lot,
depending on what you want to spend each month. There are strategies to learn,
and learn from, and yes you can expect failure.

And to drive that point in just a little deeper, my next post will delve into another
(2) online tidbits I found concerning social media, and my new yet experienced
(read more years than I care to count) thoughts on that.

No comments:

Post a Comment