What Are Your Questions About Indie Publishing?

Hi everyone. Well I am a really stupid person sometimes.

It occurred to me after talking with Kathryn Goldman in my latest interview on the Crime Cafe—she’s an intellectual property attorney—that the reason there are these things called hybrid self-publishing or whatever you want to call them companies is that so many people are self-publishing now, the whole field is attracting people who know nothing about the publishing industry. Wow. Yeah, Debbi. Gee, it just never occurred to me until right now. And so I just want to say when I’m talking to you, I am speaking to you as an indie author, speaking to those who also are indie authors or know, I suppose, enough to be dangerous. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like there are certain levels of knowledge people have, and you want to be talking to people at a level that they’ll understand. So I can only say I hope I’ve been understood.

And, if you’re a person who literally knows nothing about publishing, don’t feel bad about that. Maybe I should be talking more to you. That’s the funny thing. I just never quite know what level I should be speaking at, but I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that you have been doing some writing, some indie author type writing, or have at least thought about it, have done writing of some sort and thought about publishing a book and I will go from there. You know, I want to assume a level of intelligence here. So having said that, I just want to thank the six people who responded to my survey about what your needs are.

And the first of the biggest challenges is of course, cost-related. Advertising. Marketing. Promotion. Somebody brought up Amazon ISBNs, which I didn’t quite understand until I think what they were talking about was maybe KDP Print, which I’ve never used.

I have to tell you I’ve never been a KDP Print person ever, and I will not be. I’m with Ingram. That’s all there is to it. Ask me about anything else, I’m not going to be able to help you. [Blogger’s note: At least when it comes to print books, although I’m thinking of using D2D Print, also.] I can help you with Ingram, but that’s about it. So what am I here to tell you? Yeah.

I wanted to tell you that it was very helpful to get that survey from those six people, because I know now that these six people have no clue—and I have to tell you, I’m getting more of a clue as time goes by—as to what analytics to look at and why they matter.

And third I wanted to, yeah. Third is the ways of generating revenue other than selling books through retailers. There seemed to be intense interest in that. I am also intensely interested in that, believe me, and I will share more as that becomes available to my own brain and I’m trying.

And the other thing is, and the other thing was what? Oh, Oh! I had great news this week. Just this past weekend actually. My first Erica Jensen novel got a review, a lovely review in Publishers Weekly. So I was just thrilled about that. Good news always seems to happen on a weekend. And then I want to shout it to the world. And, but, you know, it’s the weekend, give me a break. Right? And there’s a whole book that, you know, I can talk about that. Well, when I do my book reviews, I’ll talk about that.

Anyway, having said that I’m really sorry. I wasn’t able to send everybody a free copy [of my short story] as I promised, because I didn’t get all of your email addresses, so I’m just gonna put in the link at the bottom of this video, you know, where you can download a free copy. And, as far as I’m concerned, the whole world could download a free copy. Go for it! Right. Okay. Oh, I’m losing it. Anyway, it’s been an interesting time and so I’m going to continue to try to provide valuable information and not waste your time. That’s all I had to say. I took a long enough time saying it. Didn’t I? Sorry. Talk to you later.

Any questions? 🙂