Indie Author

Being and indie author has a lot of advantages. I've managed to publish nine books so I can now appreciate the good bits and the no so good bits.

The good
I work when I feel like it, I write what I want to write and I control what I publish. When compared with my previous occupation of being a manufacturing manager in a factory it is absolute bliss. I don't have to get up at some ungodly hour, suffer endless traffic jams and stress.

The key to being an indie author is in not setting  unobtainable goals. Of course we all dream of being best selling authors, making lots of money and having our scribblings turned into films, but it would be foolish of anybody to expect it.

The reality is that I probably work longer hours now than I did in the factory, but I get to choose the hours.

The bad
Being an indie author is one thing, but being a successful indie author is something else. The sad thing is that it is getting more difficult to find sales because there are so many books out there, and, even worse, there are literally thousands of free books on the market.

Trying to get a reader to stump up their hard earned cash on an indie author's book is difficult when they have so much choice. The facts are that most indie authors are spending more time promoting their books than they are on writing new ones. The average day for many indie authors consists of round of forum post, blogs and tweets.

I've been there and done that and can honestly say that it doesn't make much difference if you tweet or not. Indie authors are very busy twittering away to other authors who don't even bother reading the tweets never mind buying a tweeter's book.

I now believe that the only way forward is to spend 90 percent of  ones time writing and only 10 percent on promoting. After all, Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble are the people who have the tools to sell books. Perhaps we should let them get on with it and concentrate on writing.

In my next post I will go into more detail about some of the pitfalls of an indie publisher. Things like proofreading, which is a real pain in the neck. My spelling isn't so good and my grammar isn't perfect (what, you've already noticed) so I have to use somebody else to do that. They don't do this blog though, so if you find any mistakes on here you will know that proof reading my work isn't easy and the earn their corn.