Last month I wrote about The Business Of Being Indie. And it’s important to emphasize that word business, because we indie authors are in fact publishers — and publishers are in the business of selling books.
For most of us, the significant roadblock to success as an indie author is our ignorance of business. Specifically, our ignorance of how mail-order businesses work.
Because, whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, we indie authors are, at the heart of it all, mail-order businesses.
How do your readers get your books? By snail mail or email. Very few of us indies are in bookstores. So if your readers and mine get our books by mail, we are mail-order businesspersons.
To succeed, we need to get rid of our business ignorance and learn the ins and outs of mail-order business.
Belief in the Magic Wand.
Most of us think that our business model goes something like this:
Write book + Wave Magic Wand = Thousands of Sales
However, we soon find out there is no magic wand. We write our books, publish them, and ask ourselves why isn’t anyone buying and reading my Great American Novel?
Generally speaking, people don’t read our books because they don’t know they exist.
With millions of books in Amazon’s database, and thousands of books being added every day, how are readers going to find your book and mine? It’s a near impossibility.
Because Amazon is a business too. They are going to drive traffic to the books that sell and make them money. The infamous Amazon algorithms see to that. Our job is to sell enough books to get Amazon’s attention so they will work for us.
There is no Magic Wand. We have to go to work and drive traffic to where our books are. Which means we have to find the traffic, our potential readers, and get our book in front of their eyes. This takes work. There are no Magic Wands. There is just work or excuses for not working.
Not realizing how much work it actually takes to become a successful independent author-publisher, most indie authors are unprepared for what to do next after their book appears on Amazon, or any other vendor.
Writing for a living has always been difficult, with few being successful at it. And nothing changed with the advent of ebooks.
In fact, one could say things have gotten more difficult. Because instead of just trying to convince one editor to buy your story, you now have to convince hundreds and thousands of readers to buy your story.
The Mailing List
I started looking into self-publishing in 2014. One thing that I’ve noticed over the past six years is that, generally speaking, there is only one path to success as an indie author — assuming of course that the wannabe author actually knows how to write. That path is the creation of a mailing list that contains your readers and fans.
Yes, there are outliers. Those individuals who break the rules and become successful and wealthy while doing so. But the vast majority of successful indie authors have become successful because they’ve captured their readers and fans on a mailing list and use that mailing list to catapult themselves into the top selling ranks on Amazon.
So my advice, after six years of observation and study, is this: spend time, and maybe money, learning mail-order business practices.
Australian fantasy and science fiction author Patty Jansen has an excellent book series on how to build a mailing list. Her books are an excellent place for you to start your business education.
The link to Amazon for Patty Jansen’s The Three-Year, No-Bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction.
There are also expensive courses, costing hundreds of dollars, that you can take. But I’m not convinced that the money spent will give you anything more than what Jansen will give you for a fraction of the cost.
In our books there may be magic unicorns and magic wands, or a genie who will grant the hero three wishes. But in the real world, we have to work for a living.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy working!
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