The Business Of Being Indie—Part 1

Indie authors are actually independent author/publishers. And quite frankly, while many, if not most of us, are decent writers — nearly all of us are poor businessmen. In other words, we suck at the publishing part of our business.

McDonald’s

We think of the restaurant with the Golden Arches as a fast food eatery. But McDonald’s primary concern isn’t burgers and fries — it’s location. Their primary concern is real estate: buying the best location in an area. Because the best location will bring in the most traffic — and traffic translates into burgers and fries sold.

Success Stories

I like reading indie success stories. I find them to be a source of inspiration and encouragement. If they can do it, why can’t I?

And there are some very significant indie success stories. Mark Dawson, Michael Anderle, Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Craig Martelle, Diane Capri, to name a few.

But there are also success stories we don’t hear about very often, such as PF Ford, Patty Jansen, and Lindsay Buroker.

If the above mentioned authors can make significant money from their pens, why can’t I?

Roadblocks

There are, though, significant roadblocks on the road to making a living from telling stories. Let me point out two.

Ignorance. Yep, lack of knowledge. Specifically mail-order business knowledge. 

Because, whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, we indie authors are, at the heart of it all, mail-order businesses.

How do your readers get your books? By snail mail or email. Very few of us are in bookstores. So if your readers and mine get our books by mail, we are mail-order business persons.

To succeed, we need to get rid of our business ignorance and learn the ins and outs of mail-order business.

Belief in the Magic Wand. Most of us think that our business model goes something like this:

Write book —>Wave Magic Wand —>Thousands of Sales

However, we soon find out that there is no magic wand. We write our books, publish them, and ask ourselves why isn’t anyone reading my Great American Novel?

Generally speaking, people don’t read our books because they don’t know they exist. With millions of indie books published on Amazon, how are readers going to find my book? Because Amazon is a business too. They are going to drive traffic to the books that sell and will therefore make them money. The infamous Amazon algorithms see to that.

There is no Magic Wand. We have to go to work and drive traffic to where our books are. Which means we have to find the traffic, our potential readers, and get our book in front of their eyes. This takes work. There are no Magic Wands. There is just work or excuses for not working.

These two roadblocks kill off most indie authors. Because writing for a living has always been difficult, with few being successful at it. And nothing changed with the advent of ebooks.

Tune in next week to find out what work we have to do in the hope of getting eyeballs looking at our books.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading and writing!