I was stuck on a hamster wheel.
I am off that wheel as an indie author.
I will be successful.
After four years of waffling and wondering 'what if,' I finally made the decision to go indie. I self-released my first novella, Kept, in November of 2008. So many people think self-publishers 'failed' at traditional publishing. But that's like saying I failed at becoming an ice skater. Or a prima ballerina. Those weren't really life goals I was going for.
This isn't to say that I never had a dream of being NY pubbed. I did. But then I learned more about it. The more I learned, the less appealing it became. I can't say I really made much of an effort. I think if I had, I'd be talking about my “first sale” right now. But I'm instead talking about how much I love being indie.
NY was unappealing but not just because of long odds. Indies eat long odds for breakfast. I'm not scared of that. It was because there was so much outside my control in the traditional system of publishing. Things which could stand in my way of success.
If I'm going to fail, I'm going to do it based on my choices, not based on a stupid title or cover someone in the marketing department okay'd. Originally the idea was to release a free/low cost novella in order to build platform so I wouldn't be screwed later with a trad publisher and little time to sell on shelves.
As I got into it I loved it so much that now I'm not interested in a NY publisher. I like what I'm doing.
My dreams transformed from being about being “accepted” by a “real publisher” to succeeding as an indie and building my own readership. My emotional state went from depressed and anxious to excited and happy... energized by what I'm doing and the possibilities.
I'm especially excited by the opportunities starting to open up in ebooks. Kept has sold almost 6,000 copies on Kindle, 1,000 of which happened this month. (So the build has been slow but I'm just starting to see some real fruit from my efforts.) Kept has reached as high as 209 in the overall Kindle store and Claimed, the second novella, has reached 444. (Out of 500,000 books.)
So far the biggest obstacle has been the naysaying and stigma. However, anything worth doing is going to be controversial to someone. And the more I start to succeed, the less I care what people who would rather let their words rot away in a drawer think about me. It often strikes me as either vanity or fear of rejection from “real readers.”
Who cares if I have a “real publisher?” I have real readers. And the readers are the only thing that matters. Commercial publishing has obscured and twisted the original goal of publication to begin with. To be read. To be heard. And hopefully to make money from it so you can afford to keep doing it.
A new challenge I'm facing is having to get cover art for my novella anthology, Blood Lust, redesigned because of a mistake on my part. But it's a learning experience. I'll get the redesign and carry on. I'm also in the process of preparing a podcast of Blood Lust and will soon be doing rewrites for the next book.
If you're interested in checking me out, Kept, Claimed, and Mated (The novellas in Blood Lust) are all available in ebook on Smashwords.com and Amazon Kindle for 99 cents. Though Kept can also be picked up free from my site in PDF: http://zoewinters.wordpress.com/kept/
I don't consider myself to have reached the pinnacle by any stretch, but I have started to do well enough that I'm looking less and less like a crazy person for what I've been saying about indie authorship for the past year and a half now. And crazy can only get you so far.
Zoe Winters
