{"id":442,"date":"2011-08-15T11:42:29","date_gmt":"2011-08-15T11:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/index.php\/2011\/08\/15\/indie02\/"},"modified":"2011-08-15T11:42:29","modified_gmt":"2011-08-15T11:42:29","slug":"indie02","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/indie02\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I went Indie – Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"indie\"Why I went Indie is a rather interesting tale. In the first part of this essay, I discussed Technology <\/i>(Part I can be found HERE<\/a>). Technology and the rapidly changing world of publishing and product (in this case my book The Prodigal\u2019s Foole<\/i>) delivery is just one reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this section, I\u2019ll discuss both the self-publishing industry and the social media impact on being a writer in the modern era. Both subjects seem diverse on the surface, but you\u2019ll shortly see they dovetail together nicely.<\/span><\/p>\n

Self Publishing has been around for a long time as an option for a writer to get their wares out to the reading public. There\u2019s stories about authors traveling around with copies of their books in the trunks of their cars\u2014Tom Clancy is one (it wasn\u2019t until Ronald Reagan got a copy of Hunt for Red October<\/i> and mentioned it to a reporter that Clancy\u2019s books took off). Milton was the first to defend \u201cself-publisher\u201d rights (Areopagitica<\/i> 1644). Some other famous self-published authors (and this is by no means an all-inclusive list):<\/span><\/p>\n

William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Gray, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, you get the idea. Self-publishing is NOT a new concept.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is<\/i> new are the multitude of options available to self-publish. Starting with the desktop publishing software available to the PC market (1985 is considered a pinnacle year with the introduction of MacPublisher<\/i> and Pagemaker<\/i>) and now with online Print on Demand<\/i> services such as CreateSpace<\/i> from Amazon or LuLu<\/i> (there are dozens of others) there are even easier ways to \u201cget your book out there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, there are so many authors now that are bypassing the large and small imprints and going straight to POD, that the POD companies are beginning to have problems of their own. I won\u2019t dwell on that here, but Tracy L. Darity wrote a great blog post recently about the \u201cPOD Bubble\u201d which can be found HERE<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Self-publishing does have a series of downsides\u2014one is that a large percentage of the work self-published isn\u2019t very good. From story problems through to grammatical errors, many, many of these books are just awful. If you do end up going this route yourself, get and editor. Get beta readers. Make sure what you put your name on is a quality product<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other issue is marketing. See? I told you we\u2019d get to social media.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with Twitter. I joined this micro-blogging site nearly three years ago. My first tweet was: \u201cThis seems like a waste of time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Three years on, 4000+ tweets and 2000 followers later, I\u2019ve proven that first impression very wrong. I\u2019ve \u201cmet\u201d fellow writers, editors and publishers via Twitter. All (sans one) of my beta readers were found on Twitter. I found my own Indie publisher, Pfoxchase (and the lovely creative director Diane Nelson) via this medium. I recently met a dozen or so writers I\u2019ve interacted with online at ReaderCON. It\u2019s all about the networking. Because if you are going to self-publish or go with with a small press, a lot of the marketing for your work is going to be done by you online.<\/span><\/p>\n

Facebook is another tool for your marketing toolkit. I have a writer\u2019s page (You can \u201clike\u201d it and follow me via Facebook\u2026there\u2019s a button to the left of this article) and a page of my book series.<\/span><\/p>\n

LinkedIn is yet another professional tool which I wrote about in detail in a guest blog post on Kait Nolan\u2019s site found HERE<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are plenty of author sites too. Authonomy<\/i> is a site where you can get peer feedback on a work in progress. Goodreads<\/i> is another site I use frequently.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hell, I\u2019m even on Google+ now.<\/span><\/p>\n

My point is, you need to let people know you\u2019re out there. All these tools and many others will help you. But be warned, just like the \u201cNigerian Diplomant who want to give me five million dollars,\u201d there are scammers out there as well. Do your research and be smart about who you \u201cfriend\u201d and who you interact with.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the reasons I went Indie isn\u2019t because I couldn\u2019t self-publish. It\u2019s because I chose to partner with a group of writers who not only offer support and feedback, but help with the whole marketing aspect as well. It\u2019s not like the big presses who have entire marketing departments to help with brochures, radio spots and have massive advertising budgets.<\/span><\/p>\n

But there is a personal touch that you can\u2019t get with a large corporation.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ll discuss Indie Presses in detail in Part III, coming soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Peace<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why I went Indie is a rather interesting tale. In the first part of this essay, I discussed Technology (Part I can be found HERE). Technology and the rapidly changing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c40-myblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rbwood.com\/dir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}