In defense of my “indie” brothers and sisters

The book market has radically changed in the past few years, and I am not going to rehash all the amazing stats and how people don’t need to get a publisher anymore. That was so last week.

This has led to a flood of “indie” authors going out and publishing their own work. After all, if you don’t have a big name and are just a little guy, even if you somehow manage to snag a publisher, they will do little more than provide editing support and the hard costs of putting the book out. Really, it comes down to improving production value, and this is what I want to talk about.

In a CNN article this week on indie publishing, they did a survey of 1007 indie writers randomly and found they made, on average, $10,000 a year, with the majority (more than half) making less than $500 a year.

To get a full, professional edit of a book the size of my last novel Atopia would cost about $14,000 (about $3 a page). So, seeing as the average income of an indie author is probably less than $500 a year, only a very foolhardy soul could justify spending $10,000 or more on a professional edit. And so, we cut corners…

For Atopia, I hired two just-graduated (and unemployed) English lit majors to review mine at a cost of $1500…and I edited it at least two dozen times myself, but it is almost impossible to catch small errors in review when you write yourself, they become invisible somehow on top of that, I invested at least another few thousand in marketing. Even then, Atopia still has some mistakes in it, which bothers me, but at a certain point we need to move on to the next project.

My point in all this is that the average indie can’t afford professional-grade editing, and on average they are already losing huge amounts of money. My point is that if you are a reader who has paid $1 to $3 for an indie authored book, you need to understand that errors in editing are NOT the result of a sloppy writer, but the fact that we can’t afford a professional grade edit. End of point.

If we could afford it, we would, trust me. We hate having errors in our books A LOT MORE than you do. But an indie author can’t make it perfect, no matter how many times they edit a work themselves because the human brain tends to skip over details that you wrote yourself. So, you need an outside, third party to review it. And we can’t afford $10k+ to edit something that isn’t going to make us any money.

With Atopia, my expectation was that this was going to be a money-losing venture. I mean, I had my hopes, but I am also realistic. It took me two years of nights and weekends (and almost my relationship!) to write Atopia, FYI the average 100,000 word novel takes about one year of full-time work for an author to write and edit. Atopia was 150,000, so about 1.5 years of full-time work. And, at the end, I spent about $2000 to outside editors, and $4000 to marketing companies, all with the expectation that I wouldn’t earn a penny in return.

But, amazingly, Atopia exceeded my wildest dreams and has been in the top 5 of “Science Fiction/High Tech” on Amazon for 8 weeks, but it certainly hasn’t made me rich  Even with Atopia being a big home run (for an indie), exceeding my wildest expectations, I estimate I have earned about $8 an hour for all my efforts. Not a great way to make money, so this is very much a labor of love.

 

So, when you’re picking up a full length novel for $1 or $3, and not the $10-$15 range, I would argue that you need to set your expectation that there will be some editing mistakes and errors, and accept a certain baseline expectation as part-and-parcel of reading indie work. If it is obvious that they just weren’t careful or put in effort at all, then point this out in a review. But, be gentle. This is a labor of love, and if you find something you like for $1 or $3, give them some praise and write a review.

OK all for now, just wanted to “represent” for all my brothers and sisters out there burning the midnight oil !!

What do you think?