Quick Tips to Indie Success

I've now read two free stories on my Kindle -- certainly, not enough to qualify me as an "expert" in the field, and I'll refrain from making too many sweeping generalizations about self-pubbed work based on the samples.  Still, I can safely say that so far, I am neither impressed nor threatened by what I've seen. 

If you're publishing indie, God bless you.  I respect the hard work and flexibility that being your own writer, publisher, publicist, and salesman requires.  Here's a few totally honest, completely not tongue-in-cheek tips for success:

1. Make sure you have a good copywriter look over you rmanuscript before you send it live to catch all of your typos, mis-placed quotation marks, duplicate words, and homophone problems. 
2. Don't publish every single story you write.  Don't publish the very first story you write.  And don't publish five minutes after you finish it. 
3. Find beta readers who won't be afraid to completely shred your work.  Listen to them.  Inplement their suggestions. 
4. Edit mercilessly.  Remove every single unnecessary word, sentence, paragraph, and scene.  Resist the urge to explain what you've just shown.  Trust that your readers will be smart enough to "get" your work.
5. Resist the urge to run around with your book, explaining yourself to your readers.  You can't (and shouldn't) try to defend yourself to every negative reviewer on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever.  Just grit your teeth, learn from what you can, and write your next book. 

Come to think of it, this is all pretty good advice for all writers, indie or not. 

On the bright side, perhaps the ease of direct publishing through Amazon will reduce the size of the slush pile at publishing houses, leaving me with an easier path through the door?

Kindle! And a Word about Indie Publishing

I'm always resistant to new technologies.  I didn't start buying CDs until they stopped putting tape decks in new cars.  I didn't buy a DVD player until the PS2 came out.  I only got my first MP3 player in August, and I still insist on buying CDs.  

I'm not really a dinosaur.  I'm just excessively frugal, and I like to resist fads until they've proven themselves worth all the hype.  I like to be the one standing there, pointing and laughing, when other people buy some dumb new gadget that turns out to be worthless.

Still, eventually the new technology sticks, and then I set out to obtain mine as cheaply as possible. 

So when my parent's asked me if I'd be interested in getting "one of those Kindle thingies" for Christmas, I said "yes" all too eagerly.  I quickly added that I only needed the basic one, and that it had recently gone on sale for $79.  Frugal, remember. 

Anyway, I got the Kindle on Sunday (we're not big on celebrating holidays on the day they're meant to happen...long story, which I will tell you all some other day) and I'm pretty much in love with it.  Naturally, the first thing I did was log on to Amazon and start surfing for freebies. 

80 books later, I thought maybe I should stop and read some of what I'd downloaded. 

Of course, I downloaded a lot of classics.  I don't quite have duplicates of all the public domain books I own, yet, but I've got a good chunk and also some stuff I didn't own.  I also learned how to sync up my Kindle account with my Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter, because I'm a social media junkie. 

I always poked through and picked up a bunch of free self-pubbed/indie books.  I'm new to reading in the indie scene and I'm still really not sold on it.  I've got a lot of friends that started reading fan-fiction early on, but I've never been a fan-fiction reader; I think that's why I'm not as fond of the indie books, they read too much like fan-fic.  I'm sure indie works great for those midlist authors who chose to go that route (the J.A. Konraths and Holly Lisles and whatnot) but I still think the vast majority of writers could seriously benefit from professional editing.  At the very least a copy-editor who will pick up all of the punctuation inconsistencies and duplicate words.  I would be absolutely ashamed as a writer to realize that my book went live for download with typos!

Anyway.  I'll check in after I've had the chance to read a few more of these before I start raining criticism down too hard on the indie authors.  In the meantime, "eeeeee Kindle!!!"

Forever industrious

I had a very productive day yesterday, although it didn't make me any money. 

I woke up much earlier than I'd intended thanks to the time change, and spent the extra time in my morning catching up with my brother.  He's a writer as well and it's always nice to talk shop.  I've been teaching him all about content writing, and he's been exploring various venues for himself.  We've both got novels going, too, so it's a bit of a race to see who finds success first. 

Afterwards, my boyfriend and I went to the local Renaissance Festival.  Our local Ren Faire is really more of an arts & crafts fair than anything, but it's a fun way to spend the day.  Lots of food, music, and ways to spend your money.  I picked up a CD of Celtic hammered dulcimer music that had put me in a very Tagestraum-ey mood, so I look forward to doing some writing with that. 

The event program had listings of all of the vendors who were there, with contact information. I think I'm going to go investigate all of the sites and see if any are in need of some content-writing to improve their SEO.  It can't hurt to cold-call some people, right?  Local businesses are the way to start with that, for sure. 

After the faire we had some money left to spend (miraculously) so we went to the local theater where they have a "dinner and a movie" special on the weekends.  If you buy $25 in food at the cafe, you get two free movie tickets.  We ended up going to 50/50, though we had absolutely no idea what it was (except that it had two actors I like and was about cancer).  It was refreshingly good.  I really love comedies "with heart" that don't get sentimental.  It was one of the most real, genuine "illness" movies I've ever seen, and legitimately laugh-out-loud funny.  Definitely worthwhile. 

Once that was over, it was nose-to-the-grindstone again.  Textbroker had slim pickings last night, so I focused on working my way through the Content Mill Master List, applying for new sites.  Diversification is key, right? 

I've got several applications out now.  I'm a bit more excited about some opportunities than others.  I'm really hoping I get in at BrightHub, for example, as I'd be writing for the console gaming channel and that's pretty much awesome. 

I also wrote up my first Examiner article and sent that in for approval, put up an article on Constant Content, and spent a few hours roleplaying on Gaia, which I haven't done in ages and which felt so good. 

Altogether, definitely one of the better "days off" I've had.