Recently I Announced My Decision To Indie Publish Two Of My Novels.

A little over a month ago, I shared my decision and why I came to this conclusion.
You can read about it here: Writing Tip: Indie Publishing—When is it Right?

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the outpouring of writer love, encouragement and support I received regarding this difficult decision. Thank you to everyone who has been there for me!

I promised to keep all of you in the loop as to my progress…to share in my victories, my trials and tribulations, so here we are again, talking about this subject.
Although April turned out to be a time of relocation for my husband and I (read here Tribulation), and I had to concentrate most of my time on that, I’ve still managed to make some progress. Here goes…

Victory: as I reported in March, I did manage to (barely) acquire the cover artist I wanted for the book covers. He was already booked for the first half of the year, but a cancellation opened up a date in July for the Tracker cover, so I lucked out!
Insight: Since this designer is so popular and busy, I’ve also already scheduled him for the book cover design for my second Fox Walker novel, Pursuit. That one is set for November—giving me plenty of time before its release date.

Victory: now that I have a book cover artist set up, and after much research, I’ve decided on a release date for the Tracker book in September or October of this year (2016). So now I have a target date to work toward.
Insight: I don’t know about you, but I work better under deadlines and this one will come rolling up pretty quickly I’m guessing!

Trial: I’m still procrastinating on sending out the endorsement requests to author friends, but I know I have to get busy and do this one, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me feel. But I’m so fortunate to have a dear author friend who has taken the time to coach me in the proper way to do this task, and so now I have guidelines and more confidence.
Insight: Having a network of writer and author friends to support you is so extremely important during this process. Make sure you spend the time to get to know your fellow writers and share experiences together—your writing community is important!

Victory: After much reading of blogs from people in the know and doing research, I’ve discovered that I don’t need to set up yet another business license for my publishing company. I can use one of my existing business licenses (I have one for my website creation business, Media Fastlanes) and will merely set up a DBA (Doing Business As) for the publishing company under that business license. Yea!

So why do I feel the need to form my own publishing company, you may ask? Good question. This is where we could get into a lengthy discussion of the differences of LLC’s versus S corps—muddy waters for sure. So I will keep this extremely basic and save that topic for another blog post.
Insight: The following is based upon my own research, reading and talking to other authors. I am not an authority on this topic, but I am merely sharing my conclusions and why I refer to myself as Indie Publishing versus Self-Publishing.

In the most basic terms:

Indie Publishing typically means once you’ve written the book you will hire outside services for the editing, the creation of the book cover, formatting of the interior, etc., and you will be running all aspects of publishing and marketing your book through your own company. This gets sticky in that there are also Independent Publishing Companies that publish books. For this particular post I’m referring to individual writers who will be hiring professionals, in their respective fields, to help in the creation of the final product.

Self-publishers, on the other hand, will sometimes do all the cover design and formatting work themselves. If they do hire services to publish the book, they let the services take the publishing credit, so to speak.

Self-Publishing Example: Let’s say you’ve create the book cover and formatted your books, but are hiring BookBaby or CreateSpace to publish your book. Typically these kinds of service will also supply the ISBN as part of the deal. In other words you don’t have to purchase the ISBN—which is costly—and why some authors go this route. It saves you money and time. BUT it also means that in the front of your book it will say that it was published by that service, such as: Published by CreateSpace.

Indie Publishing Example: It’s simply my personal preference that my books show a publishing company as the publisher. So to do that I will want to purchase my own ISBN’s for all my books under my publishing company name—hence I need a company. The advantage is that even if I use a service like CreateSpace for the POD (Print on Demand) books, I will supply my own ISBN and the book will show my publishing company as the publisher versus the service. Hint: You can purchase ISBN numbers in a block for a better price break and use them over the course of years for all the ebooks and print books you publish. For me the extra cost is worth it. This is my personal preference and you certainly don’t have to take this avenue. But I think it’s important to understand the ramifications of your decisions as you go through this adventure. And I’m not sure many authors understand this one.

That’s a wrap for this month. Hopefully I’ll have much more to report next time. Please feel free to ask questions and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll look until I find one.

Are You Considering Indie Publishing? Did You Find This Helpful?