Should You Go Indie?

Should you go indie, or is the traditional route to publishing the right way for you? How do you make that decision? How do you know for sure it’s right?

Amber posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have been the BIGGEST advocate for traditional publishing, mainly because I thought indie publishing was for writers who either have huge followings/audience or who know in their guts that their work is not high-quality enough to be traditionally published. But I think I’m changing my mind…and considering independently publishing my debut novel. My main hesitation is that I don’t have a huge following (email subscribers/social media/real-life contacts). I have been doing my best to grow my social media followers and have recently written a story that I am serially posting on Wattpad. (I want to accumulate as many email subscribers/Wattpad fans as possible regardless of if I go indie or traditional).

My change of heart has come after querying over 300 agents for three different manuscripts over the course of the last 2-3 years and barely getting anything more than form rejections…the kind where I can tell the agent didn’t fully read my query or get to the sample pages or synopsis. From the query letter to the synopsis to the genre…I just feel like I’ve done months and months of revising, off and on, an still nothing gets me responses from agents. I’ve worked with beta readers, critique partners and hired multiple editors and a couple industry insiders, including a former agent. I get the same response: my book is very well-written, the premise is very interesting, I should just publish it myself since I’m not getting anything from the agents I query. I’ve been extremely stubborn and resistant because I do believe that I could have major success as an author and I don’t want to cheat myself out of anything. But I’m finding that having an agent represent me just might be out of the cards for my particular book/writing style. (By the way, I write thriller/suspense and contemporary romance.) I’ve also been realizing that since nowadays publishers really rely on authors to promote themselves/their books, I might as well publish my book myself and take a higher percentage of the profits since either way I will be doing the promotion myself. Besides distribution (because of my lack of audience) I’ve starting to become convinced that indie publishing is for me. Actually, I think I’ve always sort of known indie publishing would fit my books, but not ME. That’s the main battle I have daily.

A lot of people I come across have the mindset of “just put it out there.” I’m the most impatient person I’ve ever met, but just putting it out there is not my style. I want my book out last year, but if I’m going to do it then I’m going to do it right. So I guess my question to you is how do I know if going the indie route is the right decision?

Randy sez: These are great questions, Amber. I think many of my blog readers will be asking the same questions. Just to make sure everyone’s up to speed on basic definitions, here’s a blog post I wrote awhile back on what we mean by the terms “indie authoring” and “traditional publishing.” (I hope there are no people left on the planet who confuse either of these with “vanity publishing.”)

Making Traditional Publishing Work

I was raised on traditional publishing. I started writing my first novel in the spring of 1988, and finally got a novel published in the spring of 2000. During all that time, traditional publishing was the only game in town, for all practical purposes. Even back then, some entrepreneurial writers were self-publishing their work, but I never considered self-publishing because it just seemed like too much work.

And so I did what you’ve been doing, Amber, which was to write hard, go to critique groups, query agents, and generally work the system, hoping for a break. I also went to writing conferences, and that’s where my break finally came. Amber, you don’t say if you’ve been pitching your work to editors or agents at writing conferences. If you’re trying to make it in traditional publishing, conferences are the way to go.

Yes, conferences are expensive. No, you probably won’t break in right away. Definitely conferences can sometimes be incredibly discouraging, if you go in with the wrong mindset. But conferences are also the place things happen. Most of the published novelists I know got their first break at a conference—usually not their first. And of my twenty closest friends, probably eighteen are novelists, and I met every one of them at a conference.

That’s why I’ve taught at many conferences over the years. Because they connect writers with publishers better than anything else.

Conferences are not cheap. Between the conference fees, travel expenses, food, and housing, you’re looking at a thousand dollars or more for a large multi-day conference. But if you want to go the traditional publishing route, then going to good writing conferences will dramatically boost your odds of getting published.

That’s the path I chose and it worked for me.

Why Some Authors Go Indie

But ultimately I found that traditional publishing really wasn’t working for me. There are some good reasons for that. I write about themes that are mostly of interest to Christian readers. But the traditional publishing Christian industry doesn’t really do well with the kind of books I write. It took me a few years to see clearly that this was a problem.

The solution was to quit writing for that industry and go indie. And that’s been working out very well for me. My first traditionally published novel, Transgression, only sold about 6,000 copies in its trad-pubbed edition. I re-released it in May of 2014 as an indie e-book and made it permanently free on all the major retailers. As of this morning, I’ve now given away 157,632 copies. Books 2 and 3 in that “City of God” series are selling well and earning much better than they did in their first editions as trad-pubbed novels.

So the indie way has been good to me.

Amber, you’re correct when you say that most traditional publishers will expect you to do most of the marketing for your books. And you’re also correct that trad-pubbed authors earn only a fraction of the net revenue for each book sold. Indie authors earn it all. That’s a huge advantage in favor of the indie, and it’s the reason so many indies are earning tens of thousands of dollars per year. At a retail price of $2.99, the indie gets right around $2 per copy, which means that an indie only needs to move about 5,000 copies in a year to earn $10k. And that’s very doable. It’s much harder to earn $100k per year, and it’s very difficult to earn $1 million per year.

Should You Go Indie?

The core question you’ve asked is how to decide whether to go indie. That depends on you and what you want in life. Here are the main diagnostic questions to ask yourself:

1. How much do you want the validation of being traditionally published? Some writers don’t feel like they’re “real authors” until they’ve been trad-pubbed, and this includes some successful indie friends of mine.
2. How entrepreneurial are you? As an indie, you and you alone are responsible for making the book happen. The indie way requires you to do four things that your trad-pubbed cousin doesn’t have to do:
   • Hire a freelance high-level editor to do a “macro edit” of your book. (No author can do this for herself, because you don’t know what you don’t know.)
   • Hire a graphic designer to create a professional cover for your book. (Very few authors have the graphic design skills PLUS the marketing savvy to create a good cover.)
   • Hire any copyediting, line-editing, and proofreading services you might need for your book. (Many authors can do some or all of these tasks for themselves. You know if this applies to you.)
   • Format the book into an e-book. (Almost all authors do this themselves, and it’s an easy task with the right tools, but you can also hire somebody if you need to.)
3. How much of a self-starter are you? Some writers must have a deadline imposed by a big corporation in order to motivate them to write their book. If that’s you, then the indie way is not for you, because nobody makes you do anything.
4. How many books can you write in a year? Only a few trad-pubbed writers can publish more than a couple of novels per year, because their publishers don’t want them “competing with themselves”. (Cynics have argued that the trad-publishers actually don’t want the writer competing with the publisher’s other authors.) As an indie, you can write a book every week if you want to, and it’s not uncommon for indies to publish five or six books per year, or more. If you’re hyper-productive, you might want to go indie.
5. Which way just feels best to you? Your instincts are often right.

Make A Decision And Run With It

I don’t believe there’s any one right answer. The indie way works well for me. The trad way works extremely well for some of my friends. I have other friends who take the hybrid route, publishing with both traditional publishers and as indie authors. It’s possible to succeed all three ways. Please be aware that the odds of great success are against you, no matter which route you take. There are just over a hundred authors of any stripe who earn more than a million dollars per year.

What’s not possible is to be certain that you’re making the right decision. Life is the art of making decisions with incomplete information. Learn all you can about your options. Make the best decision you know how. Pursue your chosen path with all your strength. Then do a reality check every year or two, and give yourself the freedom to change your direction.

Good luck, Amber!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.