Going Indie.

I have noticed in the writing world that there seems to be a sort of bad label on self publishing or Indie publishing. Whether it be a print on demand type of thing or a pay for publishing. I have been in the writing world for a few years now and I thought that by now the negativity would have died down but not so much.


Now I chose to self publish and there are several reasons for that. Number one was that I could not afford to do a pay to publish. From what I understand its not a bad deal if you can afford it and if you are serious about your writing. To be honest you shouldn't be considering publishing if you are not serious about your writing. I know the dream is to sit at a computer and hammer away at a book for a few months, send it off and then vacation for half a year while the publisher gets it ready. Then they send you half a million dollars and a copy of your book and say cant wait for the next one. Well while that does happen it usually does not happen on the first book. It usually takes years to get to that point.


Back to reasons I wanted to self publish, or at least choose to self publish. When I finished my first book I had no idea what to do next but luckily I had a close network of friends and family that helped me make the right decisions. I first sent letters out to publishers but I found that the publishers I was interested in required me to have an agent. So I went about finding an agent. I looked them up and realized that it was going to be hard to find an agent because they were hammered with letters.


I did get a few responses that seemed good to me but upon further inspection they were contracts that did not seem to have my best interest at heart. So I continued my search. Like most writers I got a ton of rejection letters. Then I started doing my research on publishers and agents and I found out just how few new writers they sign on. Its not impossible but with no experience and not knowing any one in the industry it was going to be nearly impossible. So I sat down and had a long talk with my self, no its not that weird, and I had to figure out what it was I wanted from writing. Did I want to get rich? Sure but that wasn't my main reason, I would be happy if I could just make a living. The biggest thing that I wanted out of writing was to entertain people. I wanted to help readers fall in love and get lost in the world of literature.


So more research was done and I thought that self publishing would be the best for me. I keep control over my books, I get to pick the covers the prices everything to do with my books. There is a huge down side to that though and that is that its a absolute crud ton of work. This is where the whole if your not serious about this don't do this comes in. It's a lot of work and that means that it takes a lot away from your actual writing. You have to work on your website, blogs, twitter, facebook, all that kind of stuff to let readers know you are out there and that all comes after the book is ready. You have to get it to a point where it is ready to be read. There is a lot of work that goes into it but man o man is it fun work. If your heart is in it you wont have a problem with it. The key is to find the path that works best with you and there is nothing wrong with not using a traditional publishing house.