Smitten by Books

By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Amanda Hocking. We may share the same first name, but that’s about where the similarity ends. Well, other than the fact that we both self-publish books for teens. (I wish that wasn’t where the similarity ended. I’d take even a fraction of her sales!)

I never set out to self-publish. At this time last year, the idea wasn’t even on my radar screen. Some of my author friends had taken J.A. Konrath’s advice and started putting their unpublished manuscripts up on Smashwords and Kindle, but those were the ones who already had a backlist and dedicated readership who knew them. Surely nobody would buy a debut self-published book from a complete unknown.

Then Barnes & Noble created PubIt. More authors rushed into self-publishing, but still I resisted. I was convinced that self-publishing was only a good deal for previously published authors who wanted to put up their backlist (such as all the abandoned Dorchester authors who’d gotten their rights reverted). Any debut author who went this route was seriously deluding herself.

You see, I was still working under the mindset from a few years ago, when the average self-published author was lucky to sell 100 copies over the lifetime of the work. In my narrow worldview, self-published authors were hacks who shelled out hundreds and possibly thousands for the privilege of calling themselves “authors.” They had boxes of their books in the trunk of their car, and would hang around in the Wal-Mart parking lot trying to hawk them to unsuspecting passersby. Or the person standing behind them in the line at the grocery store. Or the desk clerk at the gym. Or anyone with two brain cells, really.

No, I would never go this route. After all, we’d all heard Yog’s Law that money should flow towards the author, not the other way around. And wasn’t self-publishing just a glorified form of vanity publishing? You’ll never find a readership, and will never make any money.

Except that isn’t necessarily the case anymore. At some point in the last year or so, the Kindle revolution made self-publishing a legitimate career option. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

In my defense, I have a 16-month-old, so from roughly December 2009 to December 2010 I was living in one big sleep-deprived haze. So I feel like I get a pass for not quite getting it until this year.

Once my non-writing friends started talking about Amanda Hocking and direct publishing on Kindle, I realized that maybe there was something to all this fuss. And maybe I needed to examine it a little closer. And I liked what I saw.

It occurred to me that I had several manuscripts just languishing on my hard drive. Now granted a few of them shall never see the light of day. And for good reason. But others were actually pretty darn good. I just hadn’t managed to find the right editor on the right day.

I’ll be releasing my debut novel, CODENAME: DANCER, in just six short days from now. Well, actually that’s not quite true. I’ve officially set April 21 as the release date, but in reality, it might be live as early as this weekend. I just received the final files from my freelance formatter (shout out to the talented L.K. Campbell!), and I’ll be uploading them today. In fact, depending on when you read this, the book could already be up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Crazy, huh?

I’ve been called a pioneer to self-publish Codename, for which I had been named a finalist in RWA’s Golden Heart Awards. I guess people think that all GH finalists are showered with contracts after Nationals. (Pssst…that’s a lovely rumor, but it just isn’t true.)

This book had gotten excellent feedback on the NY submission rounds. Editors at several houses raved about the voice, the characters, the premise…and it made it to final acquisitions meetings at a couple of houses, but ultimately they passed.

Despite editors who loved it, marketing didn’t know where to place it. The Young Adult imprints all said it was Middle Grade, and the MG imprints all said it was YA. In reality, it’s both. And neither. And that was completely intentional. There’s a large segment of kids out there who are ready for something more substantial than what you find in a Middle Grade book, but aren’t quite ready for the more mature emotional themes of older YA. I’d actually written Codename with these girls in mind, but it ultimately made it a very hard sell.

New York called it “niche,” but that’s the beauty of indie publishing. Doing it on my own, I can afford to take risks. Sure, I invested in a freelance editor, a cover artist, and a freelance formatter, so it certainly wasn’t free, but I’ve always spent money (organization fees, chapter fees, conferences, workshops, postage, etc.) on my pursuit of publication. This is merely another cost of the journey. The manuscript wasn’t doing anything for me while wasting space on my hard drive, so I decided to roll the dice and see if I could find it a readership on my own. Get it out there in the world and let readers decide whether it has any merit.

Granted this means I’ll also sink or swim on my own, too, but I’ve always been a risk taker.

I think if you have a niche book, indie-publishing is perfect for you. Or anything out-of-the-box. I do love NY, and I hope to have a traditional contract one day, but sometimes the definitions are a little too rigid. And I can understand their reluctance to take a chance, because that’s their risk on the line if a book doesn’t sell out its advance.

But I don’t think you should simply bang out a book and put it up on Kindle. Ultimately it’s your professional reputation at risk, so just like a traditionally-published book, you must put forward the absolute best product possible. And that’s the problem. The best thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. The worst thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it.

I hope I don’t sound elitist, but unfortunately, there are a lot of self-published books out there that never should have been published. It’s not that they’re not good books, or their authors aren’t good writers — they’re just not ready. But there are also a lot of really excellent self-published books, and the revolution of the last year has shown that it’s a viable career choice.

So I guess my advice is that if you’ve gotten excellent feedback on your manuscript (and not from your mom!) and you think that NY is not quite right for it for whatever reason, then indie-publishing might be for you. But please do yourself a favor and give it as close to a traditionally-published experience as is possible.

Invest in a professional cover. Hire an editor (or at least utilize multiple critique partners and beta readers…as well as a qualified proofreader). Teach yourself formatting or hire a freelancer. Set a “launch date” and build up buzz ahead of time by giving away copies in contests and undergoing a blog tour. Send it to published authors in your genre for a cover quote. And send it to reviewers. Call on your networks. Were you in a sorority in college? Ask them to feature your book in their alumni magazine. Is there a particular hobby or activity featured in your book? Contact the various magazines or organizations for that activity and ask if they would help you promote. You never know unless you ask!

But remember that for every Amanda Hocking, there are hundreds or even thousands of indies who will struggle. And it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Even the indies who have hit the NY Times list in the recent months started off selling just a handful of copies.

Comment and enter to win an advance digital copy of CODENAME: DANCER!

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As a little girl, Amanda Brice dreamed of being either a ballerina or the author of a mystery series featuring a cool crime-solving chick named Nancy Flew, but her father urged her to “do something practical,” so she went to law school and spent her days writing briefs and pleadings instead of fiction.

But dance and writing have remained a part of her life. Amanda was a member of the ballroom dance team at Duke University, and continues this interest by her obsession with Dancing with the Stars, so it was only natural for her to set a teen mystery series at a dance school.

Amanda is the Vice President of Washington Romance Writers, and is a two-time finalist for Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart® Award. She blogs every other Wednesday with the Fictionistas and every other Friday with Killer Fiction. She is also a popular conference presenter, speaking on basic copyright and trademark law for writers.

In her spare time, Amanda enjoys dancing, reading, cooking, traveling, and obsessing over whether Duke will beat Carolina in basketball. Go Devils!