To indie or not to indie

Some of you might know me in writing servers, I’m apart of several. I’m an embarrassingly high level in a few and something that comes up often is whether or not to try querying or “just go indie”. Rather than blow up the chat and increase my participation level and get tagged by that awful level bot, I’m going to put my thoughts here:

Author, you’re going to hear the phrase, “Just go indie” as if it will solve all your problems. Well, it won’t. So I need you to sit with yourself and have a good think. I need you to ask yourself, “What is my goal as an author?”

What is your goal as an author?

If you answered, “Try to market when I don’t know how because I’m so afraid of negative feedback I’d rather throw my work into the abyss and stare at KDP in hopes that something will happen and love the fact that it never does,” then by all means self-publish.

Self-Publishing can be highly successful. I’m not saying it can’t be, however, you need to wear many hats. You need to be an expert in your genre, you need to be PR, Marketing, you need to understand how ads work on multiple platforms, you need a team. I have three editors, a cover artist, and I STILL find typos.

And when I say you need to know your genre, I don’t mean you *think* your book falls into that category, you need to know it does. If you’re self-publishing simply because you’re afraid of trad publishing, you’re not going to find a safe harbor in indie. Indie readers know their genre and expect your book to fall in that genre and they’re not afraid to tell you where you went wrong.

So when is self-pub a great idea? You want to write something specific. You’re someone who loves RPG-lit or shifter romance. Your ADHD ass has hyper fixated on a genre and you can quit. If that sounds like you, go, go my little steam engine!

Another Self-pub opportunist is someone who has been traditionally published and has an audience, prolific writers with a backlist that won’t quit (me) and knows it doesn’t belong in a traditional setting.

My advice in general is that if you’re running away from an aspect of traditional publishing, you have no business in indie-publishing either. You simply want to move forward. And I’ve been there, I’m not judging, but I also don’t want you to make the same mistakes as me, cause I think I’ve made them all?

• Published something and had regrets – Yup
• Schmagent – Yup
• Ignored pro advice – Yup
• Signed with small pub with a monumental red flag flying proudly – Yup
• Pissed off industry pros on the internet – Yup

Look babe, I’ve been there, and I really want you to take your next steps with intention and confidence.

That being said, Traditional publishing is struggling hard right now.

Agents are busier than ever and are struggling to keep up. Most of them still work fulltime jobs and it’s harder than ever to get things sold as publishing is in a huge lurch. The expectations are higher than ever.

Editors are bottlenecked and can really only accept 1-4 titles a year. Agents are changing tactics from sending full manuscripts to just sending editors a pitch to see if they’re interested. Overworked and underpaid, everyone is doing their best but the burnout is real.

And that’s not even looking at the ethical aspects of traditional publishing. It is, in it’s nature a discriminating business. Publishing presses consider all sorts of things, like not having too many minority titles in one year, they look at marketability of the author themselves. All sorts of things that are just… Icky. So you have to ask yourself, are you someone who wants to change the system from within, or are you someone who would rather not make them money? Both answers are valid.

There’s also the financial aspect to consider.

It cost me zero dollars to get an agent. It will cost me zero dollars to get traditionally published.

My indie publishing is a deep well of money. I spend about fifteen-hundred per title I release and I take a loss every time I do a promotion. Now, I do have a long term strategy in this, it’s a gamble that may or may not pay off, but for now, it’s a total loss.

So, I ask, is it something you can afford?

The biggest factor for me was the writing itself. Traditional publishing means working with my agent, with an editor, a publishing house. I’m a few edits in with my agent and my story is tighter and stronger. I can’t wait for an editor to get their hands on it because the end product will be something I’m incapable of doing all by myself, and that’s just something you can’t get from indie.

Yes, you learn and become a better writer as an indie author because you work with hired editors, but its not the same as working with people who need your book to be its best.

So take it from someone who’s done it all with my bare ass in the breeze, there is no wrong path but the one that won’t take you to your goal. Before you send that query or self-publish, ask yourself what your goal is.

What do you want your career to look like? Will this take you there?

Also, I should note: Just because you unpublish something doesn’t mean it disappears from your KDP screen. So it will be there, forever, just haunting you. It’s a butthole you’ll never unsee.