Why be an Indie author?

1. To have your work read, and read by as many readers as possible. Self-publishing is the best way to achieve this.

2. You can publish a book that looks professional and compares well with a traditionally published book. So do it!

3. You can update, correct and add to your books very quickly.

4. You earn more of the money. 40% -70% is a lot more than trad publishers offer.

5. You can privately, and definitely behind closed doors, cock a snook at the agents and trad publishers who 'loved' your book but couldn't sell it, especially when it is selling nicely in both e-book and print forms.

Gloat privately, but just sometimes it does feel good to see that 5 star review and know some kind reader admires your writing skills and story telling ability.

The New World of the 21stC Novelist.

Now isn't that a grand title? Alas, being a 21stC novelist means hours spent doing P.R.
It goes like this.

I am still a bemused technophobe so when Simon at Readersintheknow.com drops me an email telling me about a gadget I have to have and it's a Read Excerpt widget I have visions of a little robot that crawls around books finding extracts for me. I haven't signed up yet, need the money, but this is the sort of gadget I need for readers on my website. Then I am struck by an awful thought! Is that what it is?

I could waste hours of writing time finding out. But I won't. I am waiting for some clever reader or writer to tell me. I still prefer real word of mouth for information.

Just when I thought I had recovered some writing time by not doing that bit of research into my inbox comes an email from Indiesunlimited.com. I like Indiesunlimited for its useful articles and list of resources for Indies. It is real source of information for me. This time I have to sign up for BookLikes. Apparently it is different from Goodreads, is set up like a blog, and users of Tumblr will love it. More time is wasted as I look up Tumblr, and try to work out how to use a dashboard page that functions as a timeline.

But back to Booklikes, it seems I must trot round the site liking and following other peoples’ blogs. There’s also a discussion section, but having had some nasty experiences at Goodreads, I will probably avoid those unless I know some people from my kiwi reading groups are chatting there.

It has a section for authors and authors can giveaway e-books as well as print copies. This makes it better than Goodreads. You can also list your book release dates under Events.

I shall cogitate but probably join up as the more one's books are out there, being visible, the better the chance of a sale. But all this PR research eats into my writing.

This is the new world for this 21stC novelist.

Now this is a magazine of the future.

Indie Writers rejoice. Here is one of the many new zines out to get those gadget driven readers and save the short story. It pays writers too!

‘Cracked Eye’
‘Cracked Eye’ and magazines like it are the future of magazines and the saviour of the short story. The editorial team understand that ‘busy lives force us to squeeze our relaxation and entertainment into small pockets of personal downtime’ People need a different way to read and ‘Cracked Eye’ offers it. ‘Every issue of ‘Cracked Eye’ has ‘stories, illustrations, cartoons, videos, audio-books, graphic novels and serials’ which sounds normal until you realise that all these things are ‘at your fingertips on all devices across all platforms, every month.’ Brilliant and beautifully put together. Have a look at the website and see what the team are doing. Readers can finish an entire story on a commute, view an episode of a graphic novel during coffee break, or listen to an audio-story at bedtime. This is the future.

The editors need short story submissions, 3,000 to 6,000 words for ‘Cracked Eye’. The team ‘welcome submissions from new and established authors, the only proviso is that we are seeking stories that are the best.’ Follow the editorial team’s suggestion and ‘download and read some of our current stories to get a feel for the type of material we like.’ The editors seek compellingly well written stories which entertain, excite and enthral Send a finished and well edited story as an attachment. In the body of the email include all contact details, a brief bio, any Twitter, Facebook or other platforms. Don’t forget a word count and put full name and contact email at the beginning or end of the story. No reprints or sim subs please. Use a standard publishing format, standard fonts such as Courier, Times, Georgia, Arial, or Helvetica and save the work as an MS Word or MS Compatible file.
Response time is 6 to 8 weeks. Payment ‘we pay fees to writers for stories we publish subject to contract.’


Details: ‘Cracked Eye’, website: http://crackedeye.com/writers;
email subs to: submissions@crackedeye.com;
guidelines at: https://crackedeye.com/writers

Start here, Indies, if you want to succeed in the Brave New Indie World.

When I started having to become a 'business person writer' and help to sell our Writer's Choice books I found the most useful collection of information, practical, doable, and easy to use at Book Marketing Tools, website: http://bookmarketingtools.com
Sign up for their free email newsletter and recieve helpful information like the following which is from their last email newsletter to me. They are a real boon to the Indies. Thank you, Shawn and R.J.

• eBook Submission Tool - If you have run a free promotion, you probably know how long it takes to submit your books to the free ebook sites on the web. Hours, right? Not anymore, our eBook Submission Tool allows you to submit to 30+ free ebook sites in just minutes by giving you just one form to fill out, and pre-filling the rest of the forms. Awesome, right?
• Reading Deals Book Promos - Last summer we launched ReadingDeals.com to help authors promote their free and bargain books. We have continued to grow and grow our list of readers who want to hear about your free and bargain book promotions! We have free (not guaranteed) and low-cost (guaranteed) promotion options available for authors like you.
• Ultimate Author Checklist - We sent this to you when you first joined our mailing list, but maybe you forgot about it. We walk you through step-by-step for setting up your book marketing engine, including the passive steps that you just need to set up once, and the on-going promotional things you should be doing.
• Reading Deals Book Reviews - One of the biggest struggles we know people have is getting reviews for their books. With our connections to readers through Reading Deals, we created a review club that you can take advantage of. Upload your book to our system, and readers can organically choose your book to read and then leave a review for. Readers get free books, you get real, genuine reviews from readers. The best part is, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg like other review services that are outside of the budget of most indie authors!
• The Author Hangout Podcast - Our podcast contains over 13 hours of interviews filled with book marketing tips, ideas, tools, best practices, and more. If you haven't listened to The Author Hangout yet, you should definitely get started today. We have interviews with over 25 guests!
• Getting Reviews for Your Book Guide - We recently created a new guide that walks you through the steps to help you get more reviews. We explore a lot of free and low-cost options that you can use to get more reviews for your books, which helps give social proof which will convert more people browsing your book page into buyers.
• Book Marketing Tools Blog - Our blog has over 75 posts, interviews, guest posts, and guides filled with great book marketing, writing, and publishing tips and ideas to help you.

Our goal is to equip authors like you with the tools, education, and community to help you to sell more books. The above list is our group of tools and resources to help you! Be sure to use these to your advantage to sell more books, build your list of readers, and become a bestselling author!

-Shawn & R.J. from Book Marketing Tools
http://bookmarketingtools.com

Hah! Read this Indies and cheer.

Author Earnings.com is doing a great job in dispelling the myths put out by the traditionalists about e-book earnings. If you haven't met them before go and read all their reports. They will cheer up any Indie author. The road to making us respectable as 'Real Writers' with good books is made shorter with people like these to present facts and back them up.

Here is a short extract. Please go to their website and read the rest.



The January 2015 Report
This time around, we measured the size of the invisible "shadow industry" of ebooks without ISBNs... and discovered why all the official (ISBN-based) ebook market-size reports from Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are so wildly wrong.
Back in February, our first report analyzed the top 7,000 e-books in three bestselling genres [link]. Then we followed up with a look at all 54,000 ranked bestselling e-books on Amazon in a single day snapshot [link]. We then turned our attention to Barnes & Noble [link]. In May, we returned to Amazon to run another quarterly report on 85,000 of the bestselling books across all genres to see what it could tell us [link], and took a deeper dive into how newer authors were faring compared to their longer-tenured peers [link]. In July, we took our deepest dive yet, and looked at the effect of DRM and of genre across 120,000 titles [link].
In October, we went back to the data well again and this time, examined the effect Kindle Unlimited [link].

Now, at the start of 2015, we return once again to the Amazon bestseller lists with another all-genres grab of 120,000 titles, and take a look at longer term trends.

And we took a look at which of those 120,000 titles had registered ISBNs and which didn't, answering two long-standing questions about the ebook market:

How to time your book promos to create the perfect campaign

How to time your book promos to create the perfect campaign
Readers in the Know - www.readersintheknow.com - is proving a very helpful site for Indies.

Not long ago Simon ran articles on a sales campaign and then analysed it to show what succeeded. Very helpful.

Now here's another useful article for Indies. Last week Simon presented a list of good book promo sites as determined by the campaign.

Go and read them if you want to be part of the successful Brave New World of Indies! Any knowledge about what succeeds in a sales campaign is vital to the new Indie writer.

A Good Start for the Indie publisher/author in the New Year

Oh cheers.

Here is encouragement for Indie novelists. The new world many be tough but look at these figures garnered from British sources.


'Self-publishing and Ebooks on the rise
What the 2013 figures do show is that self-publishing in both ebook and paper book formats is really taking off. Paperback sales through Lulu rose 38% and CreateSpace sales were up a massive 161%. This is bound to send shivers of fear through the boardrooms of the publishing industry. Half of all book sales (both traditional and self-published) in the UK are now through Amazon.'

I call that definite encouragement for us Indies.

'Rumours that ebook sales are flat-lining are untrue. Obviously they aren’t soaring at the goldrush rates that happened in the beginning, but they’re now climbing at more realistic levels. According to Nielsen, ebook sales across the industry were up 20% overall in 2013 and readers spent more than £300m buying at least 80m ebooks. This accounted for more than a quarter of all book purchases. One in five of these sales (12% of all sales) was an ‘Indie’ book. Early figures from the first three months of 2014 show that the moment when ebook sales will overtake paper book sales is very close and the percentage of ‘Indie’ books is also rising fast, particularly in the USA. In the UK Tesco have just launched their own ebook platform Blinkbox Books with a reading tablet called the Hudl (who thought that one up?). It’s too early to tell where this will go, or whether this is a significant opportunity for Indies, though they’ve apparently sold 500,000 Hudls so far.'


Come on Indies. leap into the new market and put your books out with Blinkbox.

'Ebook Fiction up from £4m to £200m
The Bookseller also released some interesting publisher statistics that give a bit more information about what is really happening within the genre divisions. In 2013 paper book sales of fiction were down from £561m to £400m, but ebook sales of fiction are up from only £4m to a whopping £200m in the same period. Non-fiction suffered less, with only a minor shift from paper to ebook, but children’s paper book sales dropped £35m without any compensation in digital sales – bad news for children’s authors. But many children are reading on i-pads – particularly i-pad minis. My 4 year old grand-daughter reads a lot on her i-pad mini and loves interactive books. Her mother (a publishing professional with one of the Big 5) reads on the i-pad when it’s not otherwise engaged. Authors need to think about Apple much more seriously as a market for books. It may well become bigger than Kindle.'

This is great news. A good start to the New Year and great that Apple will be giving Amazon a run for its money. We need them to be in competition.

'What does it all mean?
The future for ebooks is bright. This doesn’t mean that they’ll replace paperbooks entirely, but there will be more of an even balance between E and paper sales. It also means that there will be more opportunities for Indies, but we’re going to have to be more pro-active in marketing ourselves against increasing opposition from the traditional publishing sector. The problem of visibility also increases as there are more and more authors clamouring to sell themselves in the self-published arena. We’re probably going to be forced to buy in marketing as well as editorial services if we want to be seen, but there are lots of refugees from the Big 5 offering their experience freelance.'

Note the Marketing call Indies. We have to do a good job for ourselves. Get that support group going and growing.

'The rosy dawn of self-publishing is over – it’s now a serious business and we are in competition with traditional industry professionals who won’t necessarily play fair. They see themselves as the legitimate land-owners and ourselves as the barbarian hordes. Naturally, they want to protect their commercial interests from the self-published invaders. We will have to think about how we organise ourselves to cope with a probable book war in the near future. The Hachette/Amazon conflict, recently settled, is only the beginning. But history is on our side – the mighty Roman Empire fell to the Barbarians eventually!'


It seems to me, oh new world novelists, that we have a golden opportunity here to stop worrying about advances, royalties and the nasty tricks of traditional publishers. Let's start the New Year with confidence, there is evidence that we are going to survive as novelists. Indies of course!