And why its perfect for mid lifers.
The snobbery around old school ‘vanity publishing’ still exists, but independent publishing is a big deal.
Writers can now get their book out and make a good living.
There are also scams, so be aware, but why not give it a go?
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This week I’m going to discuss what exactly is indie publishing and why it is perfect for mid lifers.
First of all, my little intro.
I’ve written three stories, called 500 words on Medium. Medium’s a forum where you can blog, it covers absolutely every topic in the world but it’s where bloggers and writers, put their work. I’ve decided that I’m going to do these as regularly as possible. I would love to be able to do it every day but I can’t commit to that, but I’ve got three on there now, so go and read those, I will drop the links to those in the show notes. If you clap at the end it’s like the ‘like’ button but that clap button actually impacts how much I get paid, that’d be amazing if you get to the end, and the platform is fantastic.
I’ve also planned out my month ahead, I’ve now got the planner stuck on the wall in front of me. I just want to let you know that if you are struggling with organisation. It sounds daft doesn’t it that while we’re in lockdown and while we’re stuck at home or working from home, which a lot of us have wished for for so long, that we can’t get organised, but there are so many people in the same boat.
If you’re struggling with that. I can help you because I love getting organised and getting stuff done. And it sometimes takes someone on the outside to just maybe take a little step back and think, actually yeah I can do that then, and we could move that to there so if you’re struggling with your timetable or fitting everything in then, just let me know.
You can contact me through my website, again, I’ll put the link in the show notes.
My main task this week has been editing. I’ve written a novel, and it takes forever to edit it, you have to edit it maybe five times. That’s part of indie publishing, but I’m enjoying the process and it’s good fun. You actually forget what you’ve written, even if you’ve only written it recently you do forget so it’s quite good to go back and think, I never wrote that oh that’s quite good, oh dear that’s dreadful.
So that’s my week. And it’s currently snowing, so that’s good fun.
Right, we will come on to the main topic of what exactly is indie publishing independent publishing?
Being an independent writer an independent author, there are a few myths around it, which go back to the good old, bad old days of what was called ‘vanity publishing’ You could pay an awful lot of money for somebody else to publish your work. It got a reputation for poor quality, I don’t think that reputation was always justified but it still has that snobbery around it. The publishing houses / the big publishers especially who obviously don’t like competition. You know criticising anybody who they consider independent.
It’s very accessible I’ll come on to all the benefits of it. But basically independent publishing is getting your book, screenplay, play, whatever poetry, out into the world without having an agent. Without having to go cap in hand to a publisher and say please like my work and please pay me.
You get the work out yourself. You don’t share the profits because it’s your work and you’ve got it out there. There are a lot of scams. So, that was what I would say, first off, is be very wary of anybody who charges you an absolute arm and a leg to get your book out there. They might be brilliant and it might be well worthwhile. But you shouldn’t pay people, not first off. Just be very wary around who you’re paying and what for.
Editors cover artists, all of those which I’m going to come on to yes they deserve a good wage, but some more disreputable companies will say, give me your book cover, give me your script give
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me whatever, give me all of it, and 1000s of pounds and I’ll get it out on the internet for you.
It is all doable yourself so you can take your choice, but just be very wary of scams and make sure you do your research.
The first job to do to become an independent author and independent writer is to write your book. It’s not something that you have to submit to agents or publishers so you don’t have to write a synopsis and send it off on A4 paper with double spacing and nice fonts, suggesting what you might like to write about.
You don’t have to do that, you just write your book, just, that’s the hardest bit writing your book, and finishing it. A lot of people start books I think it’s something like 94% of society thinks they’ve got a book in them, and about 2% finish them so that is the hardest bit and you don’t really have to think about the rest till you’ve written the book.
I know you can do it.
If you can’t then get in touch with me and I’ll give you a bit of a boot and get it done.
This is so accessible, independent publishing, you write the book then edit it, which is the process I’m going through at the moment. You can do 5-10 edits and you get sick of the book because you’re reading it over and over and over. You can outsource editing, and I will be using an editor on this book, but only after I’ve got it as perfect as I can get it.
I’m going through, making sure there are no plot holes, making sure the characters make sense that they’ve got the right colour hair all the way through the book, the right colour eyes. That the timelines are right, you know, I don’t want somebody dying before they were born, things like that. So you do all of that, you get all your spelling mistakes and everything else out of the way.
The main thing that will sell a book (when you’re a newbie) is its cover. We do judge books by their covers, whether we’re supposed to or not. If you look on Amazon, you will just see 1000s and 1000s of amazing animated book covers now where the dragons and zombies jump out the covers at you. It’s amazing what they can do on a book cover now.
If you think about your trips to good old fashioned bookstores, which I love, you pick up the ones that appeal to your eye. You know, you don’t know the words until you pick the cover up so you want a great cover, and yes you can pay an absolute fortune for a book cover for some amazing artwork that’s unique on hardback, or you can design it yourself.
At the beginning if you’re an independent writer and you want to get your first book out there are some perfectly good websites where you can design a good book cover. There’s a lot of groups on social media who will help you filter out the rubbish and get it on genre. Because if you’re selling a book to an audience who like mermaids, you don’t want it with a book cover that represents zombies or horror / slash horror. You want it to suit your genre, even the fonts, if you look at books that are cosy mysteries, they’ll have a different cover now than they had 10 years ago the fashions have changed.
This is why getting a good book cover is important, but again, you can do it yourself.
Writing the blurb for the back of the book that’s the second thing people judge it on because you pick it up, look at the front turn it over, read the blurb on the back, and they are a nightmare. They are so hard to write. It’s just picking a few words that sum up the whole book without telling them the whole book. It’s not easy, and there are companies that actually, that’s all they do is write blurbs and people pay them quite a lot of money to do it properly because it is so important in the marketing process.
But again, don’t be intimidated, it can be done yourself with advice from other people if you want it or need it. And some blurbs to be honest, nowadays when you pick them up, some of the blurbs are virtually non existent and they’re all just credits to other people and quotes about the book so once you get established, you don’t have to worry about that.
Then you’ve got to put the book out. That’s it. And you don’t have to buy 500 copies of the hardback or 100 paperbacks and have them sat on your living room floor. You can do, but that’s not good for the planet.
You can do what’s called POD – print on demand. It’s what Amazon does. If you buy a paperback book from Amazon, other suppliers are available, but if you buy a print book from Amazon, they haven’t got a big box full of them sat there. They will print the book on demand. It’s really good for the environment because obviously you’ve not got loads of books going to landfill, or being trashed.
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And you can order maybe a dozen copies and sign them, and send those to specific people, or your favourite fans or you could have a competition to give it away.
But the print on demand option is something that has really brought power to authors. They don’t have to invest in a huge amount of paper, basically that can be then wasted. And the E book, obviously a lot of people read electronically now so that’s even cheaper and audio.
Audio is still quite expensive quite difficult to access, but I’m actually thinking of doing voice training to do audio for my own book. I may not do it, because there are various catches to it, but that is again another way of getting your book out there, and I can imagine it being really good if you’re a poet, doing your own audio might be really rewarding. So don’t be intimidated by that.
So my subtitle of the podcast – why it’s perfect for mid lifers.
I want to go through that because I think it is really important that it’s accessible. You don’t have to go cap in hand to anyone else. You can do this and you can do it in your own time, at your own pace, on your own, you can do it in a community as well, a writing group or whatever, but it’s accessible.
I think quite a few of us at midlife get fed up of being told what to do at work, or being answerable to bosses, where you might be struggling at work or you may even be under threat of redundancy or whatever you might have got that lack of control. The fact that you’ve got control over your book writing process and the publishing process can be really empowering. Because it is accessible to everybody, and it can be free, it can cost you a lot of money if you’re not careful, but you can do it free so it makes it accessible.
If you have got bills to pay, you know, if you’ve gone through, maybe a broken relationship and you’re struggling financially (at the moment a lot of people are struggling financially anyway). It just makes it a lot more accessible and a lot more under your control.
You don’t have to feel that you’re answerable to anybody else.
It’s also immediate, you can get immediate returns on it.
It can take you years to write your first book, a lot of writers look back and they might write a book a month now but the first book took them 10 years, so it can take a long time, but it can be immediate.
If you’ve really got a passion about a story and you want to get it out there you can get it out in a few weeks. Whereas if you go through an agent or a publishing house you might be waiting two years before you see your book on the bookshelf. And that’s something about trends as well.
If you see a local trend or a global trend in books and you want to write a story about it, to relate to something else that’s happening in the world, like the pandemic for example. Who knows where we’ll be in two years?
That’s another thing that actually helps you with your thought process. It’s educational as well. You have to learn new things and push the boundaries and get past your embarrassment and get your voice out there. All of that is really, again, empowering for middle lifers.
Obviously you’re independent, you’re an independent writer, an independent publisher so independence, again, is something that mid lifers sometimes really want but can’t quite achieve in various ways. So that’s another thing that you can do.
I think that’s explained everything but if you have any questions please reach out let me know because I’m happy to answer them.
I’m really passionate about this, about getting people to write and not feeling that the rejections by a publishing house can stop you writing. I see lots of people, I mean lots of writing groups on social media, on Twitter and various other places, and so many writers are almost at a breaking point because they’ve been turned down that many times by publishers.
You shouldn’t be answerable to somebody else for your living. If you want to make money at books, you can make money. There are some independent writers now who you wouldn’t know they were independent writers, if you didn’t know what the terminology was you wouldn’t even think to look.
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They might run their own publishing name so you wouldn’t even notice that they’re an independent author, and there are millionaires out there.
There are people who are struggling, or there are people making a serious amount of money. There are lots of writers making good money who you’ll have never heard of, but they might have four or five different pen names writing all different sorts of books. Don’t think that it’s some secret society and you’re not gonna be able to do it, or that it’s the vanity publishing which has the old myths around it.
The book recommendation:
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder Snyder,
I’ll put the link in the show notes.
This is a really good book for people starting to write. It’s got lots of tips in, it says on the cover that it’s about screenwriting but it applies to any sort of writing. I definitely recommend that to start your writer’s journey you get advice from the experts.
My call to action.
Why not join my Facebook group, if you’re not already in it, Midlife Isn’t A Crisis.
If you’re on Facebook that is, I would like you to go into the group, and drop the post in there.
Tell me what’s stopping you writing your book and getting it out in the world.
Okay, so it’s not too big a call to action.
If you can’t get on Facebook or you don’t like it, I’ll put my website link and you can contact me through the website.
I’d love you to drop me a DM, and just let me know what you’re struggling with because if I get a few that people are struggling all the same, then I’ll write a blog post on it or get a podcast episode out on it. But if it’s just you I might DM you back, or I might reply to you with some resources, you might find some resources on my website that are useful for you. I’m really passionate about getting everybody writing.
Thank you for joining me. And just a quick reminder before I go. I’m on Patreon, you can sponsor me through Patreon and support my work, get free books. Also last week, I did my first monthly exclusive podcast episode and it ties in with this one: ‘How I started a writing habit and how you come too’. Go over to Patreon, I’ll drop the link in the show notes, and you can go and listen to that as well.
Alright, so thanks for joining me go and write.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai