Sometimes, you just have to take notes while the experts talk.
Here is our list of tips, tricks, and observations from indie authors just like you! Some of them have made it big. Some haven’t. But they—and we—all have one thing in common. We all agree that indie publishing is the future, and the best way to get there faster is by sharing what we know!
On indie publishing:
“Write for the right reasons – ie yourself.”
“Be confident in your work, but be careful not to put a book out into the world until you are sure that it is your very best work and professional in all respects (writing, editing, cover design, formatting, etc.). As with anything, you get only one chance to make a first impression, and every reader deserves a quality product.”
“Anyone who says it’s easy to self-publish a book is either lying or doing a shitty job.”
“Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.”
“At heart, self-publishing is kind of like a bake sale. The end product does not need to resemble the one that comes from a commercial bakery, but it must taste good. No-one wants the lumpy under baked oatmeal cookies with spinach and alfalfa flavored chips.”
“You are a start-up … The next great business is you.”
“The free charts on Amazon are constantly trawled by people with voracious reading appetites. Getting read is an obvious way to sell more copies via word of mouth.”
“The best self promotion is your next book. And the book after that and after that …”
“Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card.”
On indie versus traditional publishing:
“The good news about self-publishing is you get to do everything yourself. The bad news about self publishing is you get to do everything yourself.”
“For a long time now, self-publishing has been dismissed as an act of vanity – mainly by frightened executives in publishing houses, who hold up terrible examples of self-published works and say ‘See? This is why we exist.’”
“Authors today need a publisher as much as they need a tapeworm in their guts.”
“Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren’t. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it’s harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.”
“I’m outselling a bunch of famous, name-brand authors. I couldn’t touch their sales in print.”
“Traditional publishers aim to publish hundreds of thousands of copies of a few books, self-publishing companies make money by publishing 100 copies of hundreds of thousands of books.”
Authors, do you have any other favorite quotations about the indie publishing industry?
Indie Publishing is one of the best things if you want to get a book into the world. But, it is not as easy as some might think, it takes tons of work. Everything needs to fit, writing, editing, cover and the likes.
“A day doesn’t define who you are, but rather it decides who you will become.”
— J. E. Dyer