The Weird Indie Author Grindset
Adventures in the modern world of self-publishing
As a writer who’s been at this game a very long time, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when I made the decision to go full indie author for my latest novel Strangers’ Gate. Self-publishing wasn’t the original plan, as I was committed to doing things the traditional way (lengthy agent search, lucky break, praying for a book contract, no matter how meagre) that doing it all myself seemed like the avenue of last resort. Or perhaps the shadowy, overgrown foot path you find at the end of the avenue of last resort.
To provide a bit of perspective, the last time I had a real shot at trad publishing Bill Clinton was president, and I was a fresh-faced transplant from Florida to New York City, by way of Atlanta. I was drawn to Manhattan because I’d recently scored a literary agent for my first novel, which had been written as part of my senior thesis at New College of Florida (yes, that New College — but I'll save that story for a different post).
Anyway, long story short, I’d secured an agent through the traditional route of sending out manuscripts (through the mail!) and following up relentlessly until somebody finally said yes. I actually had legitimate interest from two agents, and — being 24, and having no idea how to research the agencies in that pre-internet age — I made my decision based entirely on personality. I mean, I don’t think I even asked what other clients they represented! One of the two was brash, loud, and made a raft of promises about multi-book deals and Hollywood money, and the other one was warm and supportive and just seemed like a genuinely good guy. So I went with him.
Did I make a mistake? I’ll never know. But my agent was indeed a wonderful man, and did everything he could for my novel. Unfortunately his agency was tiny (just a two-person shop, really), and my manuscript — while well-plotted and cinematic — was amateurish and needed a ton of work, so it never sold. And once my agent exited the business due to health concerns a few month later, I realized it was time to move on.
That move ended up being into rock journalism — a haphazard sideway lurch that soon subsumed my life. I’ve got all sorts of stories to tell about that, as well, and most definitely will in future posts. But suffice it to say that my fiction writing was somewhat constrained for the next decade. I did complete one more novel that I absolutely loved, but even as I was shopping it around I realized that it was far too much of a downer to sell.
I eventually burnt out on music journalism, and seeing which way the industry was heading (not up) I decided to return to school and get an MFA in Creative Writing, which is just as useless as everyone says it is (fun two years, tho!). My main writing in the years following was a political column I wrote for a southern alt-weekly (long story), but I did manage to get 80,000 words into an epistolary historical novel written in Shakespearean english (classic MFA overreach) before finally running out of steam. Then I got married, had a kid, got divorced, and proceeded to contentedly co-parent my wonderful son for the following decade while playing in a band and making a decent living as a designer at various boring financial firms.
The point of all this throat-clearing is to emphasize that I’m old, and have been away from the publishing game for a very long time. I never stopped writing (I was still plugging away on the historical novel and wrote a handful of short stories), but I’d given up on trying to break out, and was mostly writing to vent the pressure from inside my overstuffed cranium.
Then, at the tail end of the pandemic, I had a delicious idea for a near-future political thriller involving a CRISPR-based genetic virus that stops testosterone production in men, and I was off to the races. I began writing it on my birthday two years ago, and was finished a little over a year later.
To say that the subsequent agent search was dispiriting doesn’t begin to describe it. Not only is the process now replete with soulless, high-tech ways to reject manuscripts with a minimum of human interaction (I’m looking at you, QueryTracker), but I soon realized that what I thought was a fun, high-concept twist on the pandemic genre wasn’t landing at all. Too political, perhaps, or too delicate a subject to trust to an unproven writer, or maybe not as original as I'd hoped. Who knows? The result was the same regardless the cause: little interest, and certainly no offers of representation.
But I wasn’t willing to give up on this one. I was a working journalist for 25 years, including a stint as a managing editor, so I knew that the prose wasn’t the problem. Whether or not the concept resonated, the book itself was solid, and had a likable protagonist wrapped up in a killer plot. More importantly, I knew that there was no way I was going to write a better book anytime soon, so it just made sense to make the leap into the indie publishing industry.
And I do mean industry. In the wake of the success of Andy Weir's The Martian (which he self-published) and Project Hail Mary (which he most assuredly did not) — along with fellow self-published success stories like Freida McFadden and E.L. James — it feels like the sector is hotter than it’s ever been (hell, Simon & Schuster just relaunched Pocket Books specifically to publish indie and hybrid authors).
Which to a crusty old dude like me is hilarious, given that my generation’s view of self-published authors was probably best exemplified by the R.E.M. song “Life And How To Live It”, which tells the story of an eccentric Athens, GA resident who divided his house in half so that he could have two distinct abodes, and left behind a huge pile of boxes containing the self-published book that gave the song its name.
But the days of “self-published” and "vanity press" being used as pejoratives are long gone. In fact, it’s such a thriving ecosystem that content about navigating the indie publishing space often seems more prevalent than the books themselves. This content — which is all over YouTube, Reddit, and Substack, to name just a few — runs the gamut from solid advice from industry veterans, to useful tips from cheerful indie authors, to obvious scams designed to fleece gullible writers (too many to list).
But as I gradually submersed myself in the indie publishing ecosystem, I couldn’t help but notice something that I found more than a little depressing. It didn’t surprise me to discover that self-publishing advice tends to be split into two categories: one for people intent on gaming the system to earn maximum revenue, and another for authors who truly care about their work, and want to maximize the chances of it being discovered.
The first category is filled with advice about how to optimize Amazon ads and specifically tailor your content to be indistinguishable from other books that are already selling. The second category devotes more time to the work itself, and at least gives lip service to the idea of writing as an artistic endeavor, but with very few exceptions it still promotes a specific set of rules that — taken together — functionally excludes literary fiction, and blithely dismisses any author who isn’t willing or able to treat their writing life as a full-time job.
If you’re curious, the rules are: 1) Pick a genre niche (e.g., “Billionaire Romance”) and stick with it, no matter what, 2) Build an online following, amassing at least 1,000 followers for your email newsletter before publishing your first book, 3) Carefully study what’s currently popular (both in content and cover design) and emulate it as much as possible, and 4) Commit yourself to writing at least 3-4 titles a year, in addition to churning out blog and newsletter content on a regular basis.
There’s also a ton of more specific advice (Give away a “reader magnet”! Build an “ARC team”!) but what it really boils down to is to treat the writing itself as a commodity to be packaged and sold at the highest rate and volume possible, while also acting as your own marketing and promotions team.
It’s all quite exhausting, to be honest, and almost certainly impossible for anyone who has a demanding day job (as I do). But at the same time the community's energy is undeniably infectious, and the ratio of sincere, well-meaning individuals to scammers is higher than most online money-making enterprises. And yet, as someone who grew up loving difficult-yet-rewarding fiction like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it’s more than a little dispiriting to see the very idea of laboring over a novel for years dismissed as a foolish and impractical endeavor.
Still, considering where I am in my creative life, the current indie publishing paradigm is a remarkably good fit. I’m older and wiser now, and more inclined to write slightly off-kilter genre fiction than philosophically dense character studies. Plus I have several novels already written, and a couple tantalizingly close to completion, so releasing a few titles a year for the next couple of years isn’t a daunting prospect.
Most importantly, it doesn’t matter all that much to me if my books are wildly popular, or generate scads of money. After a lifetime of striving to become a published novelist, I’ve finally realized that the writing itself is the reward. It’s always wonderful when someone tells me they’ve enjoyed something I’ve written — and I’m still fully committed to getting my work in front of as many eyeballs as possible — but it’s the act of crafting compelling stories that ultimately provides the real feeling of accomplishment.
So here’s to the kooks and crazies who still believe in the written word and the well-told tale, even as the online commentariate insists that we’re living in a post-literate world, and that the complex literary novel is dead. Do it because you love it and believe in it, and you’ll be rewarded with a sense of satisfaction that no amount of newsletter subscribers or 5-star reviews could ever bring.
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