Launching Your Indie Publishing Career in 5 (not always so) Simple Steps

Launching Your Indie Publishing Career in 5 Steps

I’ve been in the Indie publishing game for nearly five years now and I’ve consumed a vast amount of information on the topic. There are very few books, podcasts, interviews, and/or blog posts on the topic of indie publishing as a craft, industry, and way of life that I have not studied exhaustively.

Now I’d like to share a bit of what I’ve learned to help some of you out there who might be contemplating making the jump.

Indie publishing can seem daunting. Not only do you have to write a book, you have to source a team of professionals to surround yourself with. You need a bulletproof editor, a cover artist with mad chops, and beta readers you trust with your heart.

Not only that, but you’re now expected to do all your own marketing and distribution, which can be considered full-time positions in their own right.

Don’t forget you’ll also need to continually educate yourself on trends in the industry so that you can pivot and adapt as things (inevitably) change.

If reading the preceding paragraphs has filled your gut with a ball of molten tension, good. It should. Don’t delude yourself into thinking Indie publishing is the easier route.

It’s not.

Being an Indie author means wearing many hats. But then, the upside is that you retain full creative control. Not to mention financially you stand to gain substantially more than you likely would with a traditional publisher lest you somehow struck it massively big straight out the gate.

If you’ve read the words of warning above, and you still feel ready to take the plunge, then read on as I outline Launching Your Indie Publishing Career in 5 Steps.

1) Publish Frequently

There is no magic number to how often you should publish, though studies of indie authors consistently making six figures a year show that, on average, it took until they had around six books out before they started finding traction.

That’s a good launching off point and one you need to tack to your wall.

If seeing that number freaks you out, then now might be a good time to reconsider this career path. Sure, you could strike it big with one or two books.

It’s happened.

But as an Indie author, your greatest enemy is obscurity. And the best way to combat that obscurity is by leaving the path littered with as many bread crumbs as you can spare.

When should you publish?

There are competing theories on when you should publish your first book. Should it go live the moment it’s ready? Or should you wait until you have a couple other works in the bag and then release them all in quick succession.

The answer is: It depends.

If you are capable of writing and publishing high quality works in a short amount of time, then you can probably get by publishing that first book as soon as it’s ready.

Then again, if it takes you six months or more to complete a story, then you’d be better served waiting until you have a few more logs to throw on the fire.

The reason is that you want to capitalize on the number of people getting turned onto your stuff. It’s hard finding new readers, and you want to maximize how much you can get from each new lead by having lots of stuff to offer them. This makes your return on marketing investments vastly more lucrative, not to mention time effective.

So, if I were you, starting out today, I’d wait to publish until you have 3-4 books ready to go and then start releasing them within a month of each other.

Why one month?

To take advantage of Amazon’s New Release algorithm which will do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to promoting your books. By consistently publishing stories within a month of each other, you can reap huge visibility rewards from Amazon and the other online distributors.

2) Mailing List

Besides writing the next book (which is really the only way to guarantee success in this world of digital publishing) the best thing you can do for your publishing career is starting a Mailing List today.

Not tomorrow.

Today.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any fans yet. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t published a single thing yet.

Go create a mailing list right now.

You can do this through MailChimp (which is what I use), Aweber, or any number of other services. The point is that you go and do it now.

Your mailing list is your world. These are people who have agreed to let you email them about new releases and content. Treat them like the kings and queens they are.

Engage with them often in genuine, relationship building ways. You are there to add value to their life. Remember that.

If all your emails are about your next promotion, or begging for money, then you are going to quickly exhaust your fans interest.

Be sparing in how often you try to sell them things, but do not hesitate to add value to their lives.

Slowly adding souls to your list is of the utmost importance, and I know when you’re first starting out it can be absolutely daunting. Where are you supposed to find people interested in joining your list when you haven’t even written a book?

Maybe you have written a book, but you still don’t know where to find people?

Try these:

• Put links at the back of your books
• Facebook advertising (this is an entire post on its own, which we’ll tackle later)
• A link on your website
• LibraryThing and NoiseTrade (we’ll talk about these in a future article as well)

3) Website

You need your own website.

You need to own the domain.

Period.

I use Bluehost, but there are plenty of domain providers out there on the cheap. Go buy a domain today. Consider it an investment in your future. Try and get a domain with your name in it such as www.anthonyvicino.com.

If that’s not possible, get creative, but not toooooo creative. As a general rule, a .com is preferable to .gov, .net, .gatorskin, .whatever.

Now that you own your own domain, you need to decide which platform you’ll run on it. I prefer WordPress as it currently runs something like 30% of all websites out there, but I’ve also used SquareSpace and Wix in the past.

Overall, I really enjoyed the ease of use associated with SquareSpace and Wix (it’s super easy to make a snazzy website), but I found the list of customizable options fairly limited.

Also, by running through WordPress, you tend to have access to strong SEO and internal link sharing. All that is to say, your website is more discoverable through WordPress.

Honestly though, if you’re just starting out, it doesn’t much matter. Just find a platform and get your site up and running.

No, you don’t need to pay a professional thousands of dollars to design your site. Just make do the best you can while adhering to the general rule of keeping things simple.

Avoid clutter.

When you’re just starting out, all your site really needs is:

• a way for people to sign up for your mailing list
• links to where people can buy your stories
• an about YOU page

Do you need a blog?

This question gets tossed out quite a bit. The quick and dirty answer is: No. You don’t.

A blog can be an incredibly useful way of extending your reach to the world, but it can also be an enormous time suck.

You need to weigh the pros and cons of starting your own blog, and be really honest with yourself as to whether or not you have enough time to commit to creating consistent content.

If you can’t guarantee at least one blog post per week, I’d say you’re spinning your wheels and wasting time. Your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

If you can commit to one post per week, then it’s important you are very intentional and focused about what you post. Carve a niche around your blog and then stick within it.

Resist the urge to write on any and every topic under the sun on your blog.

4) Social Media

To launch a successful Indie career, you’re going to have to build a solid base of supporters. Sure, there are some rare birds out there who have managed to strike pay-dirt without some sort of online presence, but I’m more convinced with each passing day that the time for technophobic authors hermiting themselves away are gone.

The exceptions here being people like Neal Stephenson who had already established himself as one of the preeminent voices of the science fiction/fantasy genre well before such a thing as social media even cropped up.

Effective social media usage revolves around engagement. Tack that singular world to the inside of your eyelid and whenever you are about to post something to your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, ask yourself this, “Is this engaging?”

By that, I mean, are people moved to respond, like, share, whoop for joy, or cry out in heresy?

If you answer that question with a no, then do yourself a favor and don’t post it.

The difficulty comes in accurately assessing what qualifies as engaging, though. That barometer will be different for everybody, depending on a whole host of factors well beyond the scope of this short article.

A good north star, however, is to always be asking yourself, “Would I respond to this if it came across my news feed?”

Blatant advertisements eliciting you to buy, buy, buy would fall into this category. We’ve quickly become desensitized to people trying to sell us things on social media.

If that’s your primary method for utilizing Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or Snapchat… you’re doing it wrong.

So how do you do it right?

By being an engaging human that other people want to know, or at least be entertained by. At the end of the day, that’s sort of what we do as writers. We entertain. Or educate.

Approach your social media platforms with this in mind. If you aren’t entertaining or educating in the very special snowflake way that only you can do, then people have no reason to follow or engage with you.

Overall I’m not a huge fan of social media, but I’d be an idiot not to recognize it’s ability to connect me with the greater world at large. You can engage with fans and other writers/creative types in ways never before possible.

Leverage the strengths of these platforms to their maximum effect and you’ll be well on your way towards building your base.

And again, the secret sauce is engagement.

5) Get Reviews

Earlier we talked about the greatest problem facing Indie authors is obscurity. Now we’ve covered different methods for getting ourselves out in the world, but there is one caveat of social proof we’ve yet to discuss.

Reviews.

It is hard to overestimate the power of reviews. New readers look to them when making buying decisions. Amazon looks to them when making promotion decisions. You look to them when trying to decide your self-worth.

Okay, that last one is made in jest, but only just a little. Once you’ve been in the game for any length of time, you’ll understand.

Reviews are hard to get. Like….really, really hard.

In general you can maybe expect to get 1 review for every 100 books sold. That’s not a stellar conversion rate. Compound that with the fact that as a new author you are very unlikely to sell the sheer quantity of books necessary to garner a decent number of reviews, and it’s not hard to see why most Indie careers fizzle like a Mentos in lemonade.

Spoiler Alert: Mentos in lemonade does nothing.

First, how many reviews qualifies as a ‘decent number’?

There is no hard and fast rule, but when you are first starting out your goal is to get to 20 reviews on Amazon as quickly as possible.

I say Amazon here because like it or not, they are the big hitter in the market. They will, unless you are some weird outlier, account for over 60% of your sales. So this is where you should focus your initial efforts.

Once you’ve hit 20 reviews, your next target is 50. Then 100.

If your story hits 100 reviews, you’re sitting pretty.

So where do reviews come?

The review stork, of course.

No, if only that were true this game would be so much simpler. Instead, you’ve got to go out there and woo people one at a time. It’s a long, arduous process, but you absolutely must grind it out if you have any hope of launching a successful Indie career.

Here are some different ways you can elicit reviews:

• Leave a note with a link at the back of your book encouraging readers to leave a review
• When you are just starting out, hit up friends and family to leave an honest review
• Hit up your email list and social media platforms
• Email hundreds of book review blogs asking if you can send them a copy in exchange for an honest review (DO NOT mass spam book review blogs. They can tell when you are firehosing a form email to the world. Make your email individualized and relevant to what they do on their blog. If you ignore this advice, I can all but guarantee the vast majority of reviewers will ignore you)
• Find top-Amazon reviewers and ask if they would be interested in reviewing your story
• Librarything, Goodreads, and NetGalley are all great platforms for leveraging reviews

The road is long and goes ever on…

Beyond all the myriad ever changing tactics, to launch a successful Indie career, the most important things you need to have are resilience, perseverance, commitment.

You’re probably not going to knock it out of the park on your first try. Or even your second, third, fourth, fifth and so on…

The key is to keep dusting yourself off and stepping back up to the plate, because the only way to guarantee you’ll ever get a hit, is to keep swinging bat.

It’s a long, hard path, but I believe in you. Hit me up in the comments below if you’d like to fight me on that!

---

[box] Did you like the article? Smash that like button below, leave a comment, or share with a friend on Facebook. As an author wallowing in obscurity, your support means the world.[/box]