Going It Alone by Nathan Lowell

There comes a time in everybody's life when they have to decide how they're going to spend it. Almost everybody goes through the "leaving the nest" process. Authors also have an opportunity to "leave the nest" these days---to abandon the comfortable traditions of the query-go-round and strike out on their own.

Some will see it as an opportunity to find an audience, while others view it as proving themselves to attract a traditional deal. There are probably as many reasons for doing it as there are writers who follow the path. Don't be misled into believing all the sky-is-falling you read. The world of indie publishing is no more homogeneous than traditional publishing.

Still, many writers find the idea of striking out on their own to be fraught with doubt and uncertainty. Taking on the mantle of publisher is sometimes viewed with trepidation and fear. The writer must be responsible for cover art and editing, for marketing and promotion.

Wait! Stop! Come back. Yes, I used the "m-word" and the "p-word"...sorry. I shouldn't have sprung them on you without warning. Few ideas carry as much negative freight as those two, but they're really not that scary.

Let's start with the easy ones---art and editing. These are subcontract jobs now. Websites exist to broker the transactions. Guru.com is one where you can find artists, editors, illustrators---almost any skill you need to hire. The process is as easy as starting a project profile and soliciting bids. The picture for this article is cover art I commissioned using Guru.com. You can find editors---often the same editors that have been laid off from the Bigs---who will work for very reasonable rates. Make sure you hire the kind of editor you want---story development editors are different from copy editors. I've had very good luck using multiple editors. My last book I used four copy editors who turned in a total of 1200 typos. In aggregate, nobody identified the same errors, although some errors appeared on each list. What I found fascinating was that while incorporating the last set of edits---an obscure punctuation error that no other editor had spotted---I found a typo in the word immediately above it in the manuscript.

Lesson: Nobody can get them all. It's just not possible. Don't make yourself crazy over it.

And while we're talking about crazy making, we need to talk about those other two ideas.

Offering marketing advice is sorta like loaning out your favorite pair of jeans---sure everybody knows what a pair of jeans is, but you can't just put on any pair you find and expect it to fit.

I'll offer some guiding principles that have worked well for me.

1. Learn the difference between niche and mass marketing. Books can be promoted both ways but mass market is expensive and requires a large upfront investment---hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it well and reach the thousands of people you need to get to to make it pay off. Niche marketing uses different strategies and can be financed with sweat-equity. Moreover, the main strategy---the 1000 True Fans---means you only need to read the first hundred people who will buy whatever you're selling. Most people can do that without breaking a sweat, assuming they have a network to tap into and a book worth reading.

2. Set a strategy and follow it. You'll be tempted to do multiple strategies---or blend them. Focus is good. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, blending approaches and models can result in reduced effect---not greater. If that sounds overly cryptic, we need to talk. Ad campaigns and social media promotion tend to be antithetical, for example. It's not magic, but you should be clear about which you're using and why.

3. Deliver. This seems like a no brainer but having been on the receiving end of this dynamic (and having failed to deliver too often myself), I'm pretty confident in saying "Failing to deliver is much worse than failing to promise." There are several corollaries to this. Don't sell what you don't have. Don't promise what you can't deliver. You get the idea. There's also the idea of excellence tied up in this. Deliver the best you can---not the fastest. Quality will win long term while speed will only get your work out faster. If it's poor/shoddy, that means it'll be around longer. Try to avoid that. Also be wary of "delivering perfection." In the first place, you'll fail. In the second place, it'll take you much too long to fail thereby robbing yourself of the lessons and the income from "the best you can." Try to avoid that, too.

4. Tools. You need some. Specifically you need a place to put your messages (at a minimum). Most people use a website. It can double as e-tail outlet, blog, extra material archive, and collection point. Blogs and comments are the oldest form of social media and they still work well. Email lists are also good---old before the Web was born, but still quite effective for reaching out to fans. Twitter/Facebook/Goodreads/G+ are all good. Some people like to be on all of them. Some pick their targets. In effect, it boils down to "buttons" or "zipper" ... you do what works for you.

That's about it for generalized advice.  I think the only thing I could add is "write several very, very good books" because the first one is just the down payment on a fan base. You're going to need more than that before marketing anything makes much sense.

When I first proposed this topic it was because I had just broken up with my publisher. I thought it would be good to talk about that breakup and my reasoning behind it. In the intervening weeks, I've come to realize that none of that matters. Even before we broke up, I was seeing other people. I started out in podcasting where the only choices involved do-it-yourself and casting the work out to see if anybody liked my voice--literally, in the case of audio podcasts. I self-published my first work a year ago in ebook and print. In the last year I've turned down two offers for multibook contracts from the Bigs because they couldn't offer me a better deal than I could do on my own. With the termination of my contracts with my publisher, I'm completely on my own once more.

That's just my story. We began this piece with the idea that everybody writes for their own reasons. What's worked for me may not work for you. What attracts me to the road-less-taken may turn you away. The point of being an independent author isn't that we all have to do the same thing. It's that the landscape of letters has been fundamentally altered by the changes in publishing and distribution technologies. What I've done isn't important except as an example of what might be possible.

What's changed---what's important---is that, for the first time in five hundred years, we each have the opportunity to go it alone.  We each can answer the question of "Will we?" for ourselves.

Nathan Lowell is a full time writer with nine novels and a handful of short stories to his credit. He frequently contributes opinion on the state of publishing and the effect of social media. Find out more about him and his work at nathanlowell.com.