In diving head first into this New Indie World, here’s what I’ve learned, so far:
- Writer a killer story. But, you knew that.
- Get your work proofed by another! Doesn’t matter how many times it’s been done before, do it AGAIN before going live. I’ve been working on The Uninvited for 12 years…lost track of how many sets of eyes have read it, and I’ve still found issues!
- Formatting is king. If you don’t want to do this yourself, hire someone, for Pete’s sake. Lynda Hilburn referred me to A Thirsty Mind’s Pam Headrick. She’s quite reasonable in her rates, and oh-so-easy to work with! I’m a newbie to The New Indie, and she was so danged gracious and helpful. I know she probably aged 5 years dealing with me that past two weeks….
- There is a growing list of digital distributors out there! I’m going with Smashwords as my lead, but may also going to go with B&N (which has a weird statement in their contract, about how authors are responsible for all the laws in all the countries in which their works are published—really, B&N, for real?)…unless I go through another, like, Digital2Digital.
- There’s never enough time in the day. You can’t do it all. Just do what you can. Find out what you’re best at and focus your efforts there.
Well, that’s all I got for now.
Related articles
- KA-BAR and The Uninvited – Not For The Squeamish (fpdorchak.wordpress.com)
- The Uninvited (fpdorchak.wordpress.com)
#5 is a big one! It’s tempting to buy into the myth of rugged individualism when it comes to self-publishing — and that “self” right at the beginning of the word doesn’t help! But a good team will make the whole endeavor much more fruitful.
Yes, it’s a team effort. Cover artist, formatter/converter, proofer/editor (next book; didn’t do a full proof on Uninvited; had Pam do the first 67 pages to see how bad things could be, and though she picked out a couple items, nothing “egregious,” in her words). And that doesn’t even count all those who helped me book content (see my Author’s Note when the book comes out)! But…it’s actually been fun.
BTW, I’m prefering “Indie” to “self-publishing.” It’s much better with the new paradigm and all. Starting fresh. Just like it better. Semantics, I know, but, hey, that’s what we writers do: pick good words (and you can quote me on that!). :-]
Good for you, Frank! 🙂 I’m doing my research, too, because I have a couple of titles I plan to self-publish soon. There’s an incredible amount to learn about the indie side of things. There are a number of levels of “edits” for a book to go through, as I learned from my traditional publishing house, so I can appreciate the work publishers go through to produce a book. I wasn’t sure if I needed a copyeditor or a proofreader, but the editor I think I’m going to go with gave me a sample edit and said what I gave her was very clean and would only need a proofread (for grammar, comma blunders, and my claim to fame: homonym abuse). Clean as it was, she still found a handful of items that needed fixing. So it will only cost me half of what a copyedit would cost. Yay!
Oh, geeeeze, yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks, and hope your efforts work out, Karen!
Yeah.
Geeeeeze.
Yes..the formatting is what really freaks me out. Of course, Zach could do that for me. You meant WRITE not “Writer a killer story. But, you knew that.” Right? Just teasing you. I have no idea how you have time to blog and write and work full time…it’s amazing.
That’s because I warp Time, Karen! I’ll teach it you ya, next time we meet. Veeery, tricky. ;-]
Where the hell’s my caffeine…?
Great job, Frank! Yeah, it’s kind of bad when you envy the unemployed because they have more time to write (bang head here!).
Great job, Frank. I’ll get you a review soon. Make sure you’re on Goodreads.
Hey, thanks, Chris, and yes, I am on Goodreads! :-]