We talked about Bob in the previous example who might end up going trad pub since he’s not that interested in building a career. But let’s talk about Sue next.
Sue’s a little different from Bob. She’s a housewife, takes care of her kids and loves writing; but isn’t sure if she wants to become a full-time author. It’d be nice, but it’s really tough she knows. On the other hand, she has some time to do writing when the kids are at school and if she earned some pin money, that’d be great.
Sue looks into trad publishing. She’d have to get an agent unless she went with a small press who take unsolicited works. Since she writes romance, she also does more research and finds out that a lot of the market has moved online to ebooks.
More research shows that there are a ton of forums, reader groups and people willing to talk about new author works. What surprises even more is how many great premade covers for cheap that she finds.
She even finds a small writing group that meet during the day. It’s perfect for her to get out of the house, meet new people and trade writing tips and editing.
She doesn’t have a huge budget, but she figures she can swing a premade cover and proofreading every few months from her personal savings. Add in the editing help from her new friends at the writing group, and while it won’t be perfect, it’ll be better than nothing.
Knowing all that, Sue decides to go indie publishing.
Product wise, she has that worked out in terms of editing, proofreading and cover. It won’t be the best, but she’ll be fine. She also wants to write the small town romances she loves to read – and maybe put a little authenticity to it since she actually lives in a small town.
She doesn’t think she’ll have the money to do audiobooks, so she resolves to throw it up for royalty share and see if she can get any nibbles that way. Otherwise, paperback sounds fun to have but she doesn’t have the budget for it.
Writing wise, she knows she can confidently release once every six months, maybe once every three months. So she’ll plan for that. It isn’t going to be every month, so she’s going to have to do promos around that.
Thinking about promotions, beyond joining the various social groups, she wants to build an author brand and showcase her own hometown. So she intends to launch a small instagram / youtube channel at the same time, just to show people around and talk of her life and how it affects her writing. She figures she can do it while taking the kids out for a walk on the weekends.
As for distribution, she is not sure. Going wide has some appeal to get international markets, who might be interested in small town life in the US from her other social media channels, but KU means she only needs to worry about one area. For now, she’s putting a pin in that, but figures she could launch with KU to start, and if she doesn’t do well, take the book wide after exclusivity is over.
Pricing wise, she knows she’ll need to start cheap as a new writer. She’s also not confident her writing is that good yet – her writing group says its fine, but rough – so she’ll price at $2.99 for now. Once she does better, she’ll up the price.
She also bookmarks the idea of a permafree book and a short story introduction, both for the future. If she has time or comes up with an idea, she might try to send out short stories to various magazines as another promotional method.
The biggest goal is to release cheap and as often as possible. If she can get books out cheaply, with minimal cost, she figures she can slowly build up her audience. Sue’s in no rush, her kids are in school for a decade plus more and her husband has a great job. She can afford to take her time up, build her craft and hopefully, audience.
She’ll revise her ideas once she has more books out and knows how her sales have been.
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