Three Years of Indie

Sunday was the third birthday of Lyon's Legacy, which was the first story I self-published. So this weeks marks my third anniversary of going indie. Since then, I've published several short stories, both on my own and as part of Indie Writers Monthly, and a full-length novel. My next novel will come out later this month. I'm not the most prolific of writers, but hopefully as I become more comfortable with indie publishing I can get stories out faster. A lot of it depends on how much time I can devote to writing and publishing.

I knew when I started self-publishing that it would take a while to get established, and that's certainly the case. I've experimented with different ways of promoting my books, but it's hard to find something that works consistently. It's humbling too that there are so many other indie writers out there. But at the same time self-publishing seems to have become more accepted, and the quality of the work I'm reading from other indie authors has increased. I enjoy the camaraderie we indie authors share. Most of them are friendly and helpful. And of course, it's always thrilling to get the proof copy of your latest work or see a promotion make your sales shoot up.

If you haven't read Lyon's Legacy yet, feel free to give it a try; it's permafree. Help me celebrate its third birthday. Here's to many more years of writing and self-publishing. Now if you'll excuse me, I have about a hundred pages to proofread before Saturday, so I'd better get back to Seasons' Beginnings.

Turning Indie

Original Cover From 2009

One of those things "experts" like to say and then lower-level traditionally published authors smugly point to so they can feel superior is that a lot of self-published authors published before they were ready and if they had just stuck with it longer they would be better off.  And maybe that is the case for some.  It wasn't the case for me.

I spent about 5 years trying to play the agent game.  I read a lot of good authors and perfected "the craft" as best I could and studied how to write queries and all that good stuff.  I think out of all those years I got one partial to show for it.  But still I didn't turn to self-publishing because I was frustrated by those rejections.

That happened in 2009 after I played the agent query game once more, this time with my literary novel Where You Belong.  I had spent months in 2008 feverishly writing the first draft and then more months feverishly rewriting it again, only this time in first-person.  When I finished, I knew I had something special.  I knew this was my masterpiece, my Mona Lisa or statue of David or whatever classic piece of art you want to use.

I hashed out more query letters and sent a bunch off.  And got nothing.  I mean not even a partial.  Maybe if I had got a partial or a full I'd have never self-published it because at least then I could say someone had read it and thought it wasn't any good.  But it was rejected something like 50 times (some via actual no's and others just ignoring me) without anyone reading a single bloody page!  That was when I decided to self-publish, because this one was too good to sit in "the drawer" and collect dust.

I don't regret that decision because at least this way people have gotten to read the book.  If you look it up on Amazon it has 12 reviews averaging 4 stars, so I take that as a sign I have some slight idea what I'm doing.  If I do have one regret I wish I'd have self-published another book first just so I could have gotten the bugs out before this one.  As it was, it was quite a learning experience, especially since this was 2009 and self-publishing for Kindle and Smashwords and all that was still relatively new.

A traditionally published author who recently self-published a book said he'd rather traditionally publish.  Well sure, fella, we'd all rather traditionally publish.  But this is an industry that uses a submission process where rejection is the default, evidenced by those form rejections they send out.  The odds are hugely stacked against the author because let's face it, it's a subjective process.  The human element comes into play a lot.  You might have a well-written book and a great query but if the person reading it has a hangover or a bad cold or something she might give it a glance and then reject it.  Or maybe that Wednesday when your query pops up she's decided today she wants to read stories about vampires, but then two months later after you've changed all your werewolves to vampires, she decides she really wants books about golems now.  So your book might be perfectly fine; it's just that it wasn't read by the right person at the right time.

Am I saying that everyone who gets rejected should self-publish?  No.  Sometimes all that rejection does mean you're terrible and need to either keep working at it or find a new hobby.  But sometimes you know something is too good to keep hidden and when you get to one of those then you should definitely self-publish it.

Incidentally, I stopped playing the agent game at all in 2012.  That was when I got published by two different small publishers and realized those are largely a waste of time.  The one was just a complete debacle all the way around:  they didn't provide any editing, they tossed together a crummy cover, they missed deadlines, and they've provided almost no marketing.  The other one did a much better job (except maybe with the cover) but what I realized is they're too small and new to have any marketing reach.  So the decision I reached is that I can do as good of a job as "professionals" especially after almost 5 years and my marketing is as good or better than theirs, so why give them 60% or so when I can do a comparable job and get 100%?  It's still not much either way, but those extra nickels and dimes add up in the long run.  Unless you're really lucky you probably won't make a lot of money at this, but a lot of months I get a free tank of gas from my writing income and that ain't bad.

Tales Your Grandmother Never Told You: How I Became an Indie Writer

2055 A.D. A cozy townhouse near Madison, Wisconsin. A grandmother and her granddaughter sit in the living room, which is dominated not by a TV but by a holographic display on the far well. Currently it's showing a holo set in 1980. A teen confronts a man who could be an older version of himself. Although the grandmother watches, sometimes smiling, sometimes shaking her head, the girl is bored. She wanders over to a shelf filled with paper books. The covers are varied, but they all have the same author: Sandra Ulbrich Almazan.

Girl: Grandma, how did you manage to write so many books?

SUA: I started writing a long time ago, dear, long before the turn of the century.

The girl shakes her head. She knows her grandmother is old, but anything before the year 2000 is ancient to her.

Girl: But most of these books came out after them. Did you make them all by yourself?

SUA: No, I hired people to edit and make the covers. I even had your father help me with formatting when he was old enough for that. (smiles) But I never had a publisher, either. I take that back. I was part of an anthology once, but that was it.

Girl: What's a publisher?

SUA: A publisher or publishing company was the only way to make books when I first started writing. Back then, there were no such thing as eBooks or neuroBooks. They only came in paper, like those first editions there. And you couldn't make them on your own without a lot of money. So writers had to sell their work to publishers, who made the books. Once you sold them your story, they owned it--forever.

Girl: And they didn't make books from your stories?

SUA: No, I was still learning how to write back then, and even though I had the ideas for my stories (nods at holo), the publishers wouldn't buy them. Publishers were very picky about what they bought, and though they said they published only the best work, they also wanted to make money for themselves first. That's why they kept all the rights, only supported the best-sellers, and treated authors like interchangeable widgets.

Sandra falls silent, thinking of all the rejection letters she collected from agents and publishers. She always tried to be professional, but they didn't always treat her like one.

SUA: But when I was forty, I bought my first Kindle. That was a special device people used for only one thing: reading books, electronic ones. I loved it because I could read even more with it than I already did, and I was a big reader back then. Still am, of course. And the great thing about eBooks was that anyone could make them on their own, without a publisher. I learned more about eBooks and epublishing from people who were already doing it, like Zoe Winters, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Dean Wesley Smith. I learned from them that publishing your own books gave you more control over your own work and the potential to make more money. My stories had been workshopped and professionally edited, and I'd gone over them so much I didn't know what to change anymore. That's when you know the story is ready for readers. So I became an indie writer, and I enjoyed it. I chose my editor and my cover artist, and I had control over what I wrote and what I did with it. It took longer than I thought to get my stories ready and find fans, but I was able to write full time before your dad graduated from high school.

Sandra looks over at her granddaughter, who, bored by all this history, has opened a book and started reading. 

SUA: (whispering) And we all lived happily ever after...except for climate change. But that's another story.