It might be the week-long migraine talking, but I’m actually quite pissed at the idea that indie authors are wealthy, and that’s why we can afford to do what we do.
Yeah, sure, some indie authors are independently wealthy and can funnel unlimited money into making their writing successful. You’ll find them on Twitter and Facebook groups making pretentious and mind-boggling claims like if you aren’t spending $20,000 a year on ad revenue, you’re ‘not taking your writing career seriously.’*
The rest of us, however, fucking hate those people.
Most indie authors are working on a budget the length of a shoestring. We’re doing most things ourselves or trading skills back and forth in a never-ending cycle of “I’ll edit yours if you edit mine.”
I’m lucky; I have a moderate following on Tumblr that supports my work. My Patreon allows me to set money aside each month for editing and professional cover illustrations that give my work a professional edge. And even then, I’m paying significantly reduced rates because most of the people I am working with are friends in the same boat as me, and we’re all just passing the same $200 back and forth between creative projects.
That I could fund an audiobook (something which typically costs anywhere between $2-7000) on the back of my eBook sales is miraculous, but it also took two years’ worth of sales to do.
And let’s be clear here, I have an advantage over many other indie authors because of Tumblr. Y’all are feral (affectionate) and treated the Amazon sales algorithm like a challenge. You looked at how the system was rigged, sucked air through your teeth, and went, “I can break that,” and then you did.
Most indie authors don’t have that.
Yes, it costs money to produce fiction as an indie author. Yes, some people pay a lot to get ahead of the game and claim success. Most of us, however, are scraping by on favors and the luck of knowing how and where to upload our work for maximum exposure.
This is something, incidentally, the rich fucks who hoard the top spots most likely to earn the most money will never tell you.
They’ll tell you to keep writing, follow your dreams and invest, invest, invest. Which is solid advice if you can because that’s how publishing works. The rich get richer and the poor, well, you know the rest.
*To this day, it gives me no small amount of petty glee to know that for a while, Phangs was so popular on Amazon it broke the top 100 bestsellers in paranormal romance without paying a single dime in ad revenue. People were pissed. That’s like paying for one of the best seats in the house only to have some gremlin saw the floor out from under you Bugs Bunny style.
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