Clarity...

For those who follow the blog most of you know Molly, Maureen and I were at the RWA conference last week. Maureen’s post yesterday was dead on accurate. The feeling I walked away with from this year’s conference was that this was a whole new world where authors… AUTHORS… were in control.
I have a self-published book out. It isn’t making scads of money. It’s barely making any money, but I attribute that to me. I didn’t do enough marketing, haven’t joined enough indie groups, haven’t gotten enough exposure or tweaked the cover enough etc.  Because what I’ve learned is that if you want to make the self-publishing thing work for you… you have to work hard at it.
But I also talked to other folks. And listened to other folks. I attended a panel on what traditional publishing can do for you, (and yes, it was fairly empty) and I listened to what they had to say too. And that was when it hit… clarity.
The awesome awesomeness of being in control is that you get to choose. You can choose to self-publish, you can choose to stay with your traditional publisher, you can do both. On day one I had this sense that if you weren’t self-publishing you were an idiot. By day three I was reminded of what a traditional publisher can do for you and the skill set they bring to getting your story out there.
I love it. I know what I want to do. I want to be traditionally published. I like not having to worry about cover design, finding a copyeditor, tweaking my price, promotion, promotion, promotion. I like just writing my story and letting an editor fix it and tighten it.
But I also like the idea that if I want to self-publish some novellas to keep my readers attention in between book releases that I can do that as well.
Freedom. Control. Choice. Clarity.
I was scared of this brave new world of storytelling. Scared as a reader and a writer.
Not so much anymore.