Indie publishing has come a long way, baby. Heck, even the name indie publishing is new.
In recent times, even in the last fifteen years (which is recent in the industry), self-publishing was considered to be a sideways effort to get your work into print. Self-publishers were considered poor writers who couldn’t break into traditional publishing.
And don’t even get me started on the print versus digital argument.
Those were the old days.
Now, move ahead fifteen years, and tada! Self-publishing is the most popular form of publishing for EVERYONE. Trad pub authors are moving to a hybrid model where they see a lot of their work published by their own hand. And the rest of us, the original self-published authors, we are seeing some of the best years of all for our work. Because self-publishing had SUCH a negative start in its life, in the last few years, the moniker self-publishing has been transitioned over to a new term : INDIE PUBLISHING.
Aren’t you SO glad????
Indie publishing today
Today, I thought I would break indie publishing down into its parts. Good and bad. Let’s check out the negative side first, and get it out of the way.
What’s wrong with indie publishing?
***All the costs of editing, formatting, and cover design fall squarely on your shoulders.
***There are a lot of people in the industry that can help you but there are far more scammers and you may not know the difference. A wolf in sheep’s clothing never looked better.
***You may lose heart over the fact that your book doesn’t sell well at first.
What’s right with indie publishing?
***It’s fast-you can upload a book to Amazon or other distributors and within 48 hours have it on the digital shelf.
***You get to have all the control of the book from writing to cover art. You can literally DIY a book today.
***You can keep all the MONEY. This getting 70% of the total sales of the book and now we get it monthly is just the BOMB.
There are many many wonderful books out there in the indie pub world today as well. No longer can it be said that the indie published book is a bad book.
And in my opinion, the best of the reasons to be indie publishing your work is this:
Sometimes traditional publishers will find you. When you’ve done the right things, and marketing has worked. Sometimes if you build it, they will come.
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