Today I am excited to have one of my favorite authors over here on my blog. I asked her to write about Indie publishing and her journey from her first book to where she is now!
Hey everyone! Thank you Shannon for having me on your site! So you asked me to talk about my experience as an Indie author, I guess sort of how it started and how I made it to this point. Well, a year after I wrote Prince of Wolves (POW), I finally decided to self-publish it. I was terrified, but I have always wanted to be a writer so I figured no one was going to make it happen for me, so I’d have to do it myself. Once I uploaded it and it went live I told everyone I knew, and even people I didn’t know (they thought I was crazy..the verdict is still out on that one). I basically shouted it from the roof tops that I had written a novel and it was for sale as an ebook. I put it on Facebook, I emailed everyone and I begged them to tell others. I mean let’s face it peeps, you are your own advocate. No one is going to love your books like you, just like your children and no one is going to push them like you especially if you don’t have a publisher. My next step was to talk to some other new indie authors and ask questions. The first thing I asked was how do you publicize your book? How can I get people who don’t know my books exists to hear about it? Bloggers! Was the resounding reply. I literally sat down and in one day emailed over 100 bloggers. I told them who I was, what my book was about and then begged them to give it a try. I offered it to them for free and told them all I wanted was an honest review. That’s how it starts for an Indie author. Bloggers, word of mouth, and telling anyone who will listen about your book. I spend nearly as much time, sometimes more, on social media working, and by that I mean conversing with readers, advertising my books in some way, setting up tours, etc, as I do writing.
What it all boils down to is loving what you do and believing in what you do. I love to write, and sometimes what I write is crap and I delete it and other times it’s pretty good. But the only person who can decide if I’m going to be successful at this is me. If you want to write, and you are serious about it, it’s a passion and you want to make a living doing it then you have to be your biggest fan, your biggest PR person, your biggest critic, your biggest supporter, your biggest everything. You have to be willing to listen to Beta readers who are honest and sometimes that sucks, but it’s good for you to hear. You have to be willing to accept that you will not make everyone happy no matter how hard you try to put everything in the books that the readers tell you they want, it’s not possible.
I love what I do and I praise God every day for blessing me, and thank the people who have taken a chance on my books. My number one rule as an author, indie or otherwise, is to never believe you have arrived because they moment you look around and think, hey I’ve made it, is the moment that you believe that you can’t learn anything new and in writing there is always something new to learn.
Thank you so much for listening to me ramble and thank you every one from the bottom of my heart for reading my books. Because of the amazing bloggers, readers, authors family and friends who have shared my books with others I am able to do what I love, but it started with me making the choice to upload the book and then tell the world.