Self-Publishing 101: 3 Traits of Successful Indie Authors

When I published my first ebook, there were already lots of indie authors doing well, as evinced by their rankings at Amazon and their I’m-selling-XXXX-books-a-month posts in various self-publishing forums. I was a little worried that I was coming to the party late, and that the increasing number of ebooks in the Kindle store (and elsewhere) would make it hard to stand out. I was determined to do so anyway, though, and set myself the goal of selling 1,000 ebooks a month by the end of my first year (yes, I made it).

The thousand-ebooks-a-month-goal seemed to be a popular one at the time and something of an indicator of success (though now I suppose you’re not anybody until you’ve sold at least 50,000 ebooks total). Granted, there lots of other ways to measure success (I get my biggest warm, fuzzy grins from seeing readers interacting with each other and chatting about my characters on Facebook, Twitter, and the fan forum), but numbers are quantifiable. So, I put this list together based on my own experiences and from observations of other successful indie authors, some of them far more successful than I (at least in terms of sales numbers… I know nobody has cooler fans ).

1. Successful indie authors don’t wait for others to pick them; they pick themselves.

The world has changed. The slush pile is out. The route to Big 6 publication and a large advance (if you crave such things) now goes like this:

Get your work out there
Establish a fan base
Get noticed and bask in offers of representation

It’s happened to me (I turned my offer down in favor of staying indie), and it’s happening left and right to a lot of self-published authors out there. Hitting bestseller lists at Amazon isn’t the only way to “get noticed” either:

Jordan Stratford attracted agent and Big 6 notice after rocking Kickstarter with a $90,000 campaign.
Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, and Tee Morris were all picked up by publishers after building up fan bases by giving away serialized podcast (audio) versions of their books.
Sylvain Reynard just got a 7-figure deal after establishing a rabid reader base on a fan-fiction site.

These people put their money (time) where their mouths were and picked themselves instead of waiting to be plucked from some agent’s slush pile. Now they’re reaping the rewards.

2. Successful indie authors don’t envy or belittle the success of others; they learn from it.

I have to remind myself of this all the time. It’s so easy to read the sample chapters of a book by an author who’s made it big and sneer at the person’s work. You think, “My writing is so much better than this. I guess she just got lucky. Or she got in at the right time. Or she sold her books dirt cheap. Or she writes for the undiscerning masses. Or she’s in a more popular genre than I am.”

This is useless thinking that won’t help us. It may even hurt us. Not many people luck into success. Those who have found it did something right (probably a lot of somethings right) to get there. And there are lessons to be learned from studying their roads to success.

3: Successful indie authors don’t talk about writing; they write.

As we’ve discussed before, most successful indie authors have multiple books out across multiple series. Self-promotion is good, and “building a platform” is good, but nothing will help your career more than getting more books out there. Momentum builds with each new release in a series, and each new series (or stand-alone novel) is a doorway through which people can find and enter your world.

Finishing a book is an accomplishment, but it’s the beginning of the journey, not the end, and successful authors write lots of books.

What are your thoughts? Are there any traits you’d add to this list?

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Indie Writing and Traditional Storytelling with Alan Dean