Stop, Drop, and Micro-publish! by Christina Katz

There is no point pretending that traditional publishing isn’t awesome. I’ve done it three times and it has been beyond inspiring every time. Understandably many aspiring authors are still heading in the direction of the tried and true for perfectly sensible reasons. The cachet, editing, and distribution that a major publishing house can bring to your book’s table are pretty hard to dismiss.

Traditional publishing was good enough for Amanda Hocking, it’s good enough for me, and if you are like most writers, you would like to try it some time. And yet, let us not forget that all writers are publishers now. Perhaps there is no longer much point in waiting until you have a huge backlist of tomes written before you dazzle the literati in NYC. Maybe you would be better off finding some good writing momentum, running your best work through some preliminary readers, and either starting to send it out for publication or starting publishing it yourself.

Have you considered this option? I sure hope so. I am going to be saying all year that “Indie” publishing as we have come to know it (meaning we’re not with THEM, we’re INDIE) is over. There is no point digging an invisible abyss between traditional publishing and your efforts and filling it with irrational pride. The folks in traditional publishing and the folks who do indie publishing successfully, jump through pretty much all the same hoops.

Doesn’t it make a lot more sense to try and do everything publishing-wise you can in your lifetime? Sure, you have a whole lifetime to develop your author skills, but maybe you’d like to attempt some reasonable publishing goals sooner rather than later. Having worked with several micro-publishers this past year, I have noticed that personal empowerment earned via micro-publishing is powerful. It’s like a gateway drug to authorhood. I can practically feel the gleam in my students’ eyes as they start jonesing to micro-publish again, and again, and again.

They’ve got the bug, and they must, they will publish again. So long as you can engage in the process of micro-publishing with your full focus on your readers rather than wasting an iota of energy on who you are flipping off over in the traditional publishing camp (those are your future peeps, remember!), you can make huge strides in your writing career this year, simply by committing to micro-publishing something short and significant within your repertoire before this year concludes.

Why? Well, here’s a few reasons I have observed from my students who caught the micro-publishing fever in 2011:

1. You get to experience the beginning, middle and end of the publishing process. You set a goal, you trudge step-by-step towards it, and you finish the project and launch it. That’s a huge self-esteem booster right there. Even if your book or ebook flops, your learning curve goes straight up.

2. You break the habit of focusing on your manuscript as “dearly beloved WIP” and instead as something for the ___________________ (fill in the benefit of your pen) of others. First-time authors often don’t make this realization until they have several books or ebooks under their belts. No, your work is not your baby. If you treat it too preciously, it’s mega-annoying for everyone else and you will drive potential readers away. Maybe it’s easier to understand this after you have completed a book, regardless of the length of the project. Conduct an experiment and see for yourself.

3. You can micro-publish from works you either already have in-process or that you could pull together more quickly than something you start from scratch. Traditional authors are doing this like crazy right now: taking their old good-for-nothing backlists or a bunch of quality stuff they have lying around on their old hard drives and turning them into popular ebooks. These are not necessarily overnight success stories. Believe me, these authors either invested time and energy in these works before or more recently. Likely, they did both. If you want the reader to get quality out of what you write, you have to invest the quality from the get-go.

I would not advise an unknown or even an up-and-coming writer to dump the contents of his or her old hard drives into a “collection” to sell. But, I do know that I can work with writers who already have writing, publishing, and platform momentum and, acting as developmental editor, help them pull together ebooks that become career game-changers for them. Many of these ebooks sell and even pull in MONEY.

Chew on that, my aspiring author friends. If you can invest a little bit of time and money now, rather than investing nothing but wishful thinking while hoping to get discovered later, you can exponentially increase your chances for publishing success in the future.

4. Another huge benefit of micro-publishing, and probably the biggest benefit, is that you get the practice of interacting with and learning from real-live readers. Not hypothetical readers, not readers you hope to dazzle some day, but your real-time, right-now readers. I can’t really communicate how much this will transform the way you think. But if I had to single out a major advantage that published authors have over unpublished authors in our new gig economy, I’d say it’s those pre-established, well-grooved author-reader relationships that gives them the biggest edge. Not to mention all those years hunched over the keyboard cranking out book their readers adore. Don’t turn your nose up at this prospect. Obscurity is so much worse.

As aspiring novelists or memoirists or screenwriters or poets, you need to know who your readers are. You want to ask your readers questions as soon as possible. You want to offer your readers works of quality and value that will create an exchange of trust (and hopefully, eventually, email addresses).

Why should you wait goodness-knows how-many years for the approval of an agent and a publishing house (and eventually the media and booksellers), when you can go straight to the source now?

You should not wait. You should go straight to the source. You should stop what you are doing right now and decide what your small, manageable, micro-publishing project is going to be in 2012.