Different Standards Apply: Indie Life & ROW80

It's hump day, and my first time posting as part of Indie Life .

What is Indie Life?
How: Sign up on the Linky at the bottom of this page
When: Post on the second Wednesday of the month (starting 1/9/2013)
What: Write anything indie related: something that will inspire or help a fellow indie; something that celebrates a release or a milestone; something that talks about the ups and downs, joys and heartaches of Being Indie.
Grab: The banner to include in your posts!

First, I am so proud to be an indie author. There are so many advantages to independent publishing: control, speed, quality, and community to name just a few.

People's perceptions of indie publishing have greatly improved in the last few years, especially with some big indie names making it to the New York Times bestseller lists. 

Still, I find many readers hold indie books to a higher standard. For instance, if an indie book has a few grammatical or punctuation errors, reviewers will often take them to task for poor editing. But, I find a few mistakes in most traditionally published books and reviewers rarely make note of them.

Lesson: Have your book professionally edited. 

Indie book covers are expected to have a wow factor these days, and at the very least should look professional. Yet, I find more and more traditionally published books are low-key--think the Beautiful Creatures series, the Hunger Games series, and the Twilight series before those.

Lesson: Do some research on your genre and book covers and take the time to produce a quality, and eye-catching, cover.

These are just the first two examples that popped into my brain. As indies, we have to put out a high quality product o build reader confidence. Since we don't have a publishing house behind us, we need to be behind each other... constantly building readers' trust in the indie industry.

One of the best parts of being an indie is the amazing writing community out there. Build your network and support other indies. You should never feel alone. Again, the more we do to support each other, the more we build faith in indie authors and their products.

And if you need further proof that indies rock, please check out the Indie-Credible event going on all month long. Visit my post for dates and author visits. Oh, and to see indies actually rocking out, check out the Indie-Credible video  here .


Check out other Indie Life posts here .

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Wednesdays are also A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) check-in days.

My goal for the rest of the round is to stick to a writing first schedule. I hope to have this so firmly in place that I can set a daily word count goal for Round 4 which starts October 7. I'm also focusing on research. Finally caught up with my sponsor duties. Planning to visit and comment on at least 15 blogs before the next check-in and to visit twice that many Indie Life blogs from today.