Saturday, March 7, 2015

Indie Publishing, What We Really Should Be Called

A month or so ago I came across a blog/article that discussed how Indie Authors should not be called Authors but something else since they had not been 'accepted' by a major publishing house, having not gone through the process of publishing in printed word. I read many of the comments and found that a lot of people felt similar to myself that author wanted to create a class of those who were published by major publishing houses and then those that were lesser. Seemed to be pretty elitist and petty to me.

But it has got me thinking lately about Indie Publishing and its relationship to major publishing house. Now I am more of an aspiring Indie Author than anything as I am still working on my first novel series (The Way of the Horse) and it has turned out to be a lot of fun BUT a lot of work as well. In this endeavor I have learned a lot about myself and the process. But as I approach the final stages of editing and have actually started looking at publishing it, I have found that there is a lot MORE to learn about Indie Publishing. In doing the research to learn this 'more,' I have come across some of these disparaging commentators who seem a bit jealous at what they perceive as the ease with which anyone can now be published online.

This struck a cord with me and I have found some similarities with Indie Publishing and another industry, Business. Business is an interesting group. They also have those that have 'grown' up in the 'order' of going to college to get a Business degree and then moving on to bigger and better things, joining companies and growing and moving them to new heights. There are also those within those ranks that are both trained and untrained, that forge ahead and create businesses based on ideas. These people grow their business by doing everything from product development to marketing to financing until their business is up and running. They see it as a challenge to run into issues and find solutions to those issues. They are called Entrepreneurs.

Now some of these Entrepreneurs come from within 'their' respective business ranks but there are others who do not and those are often the ones that create the greatest ripples in the pond. They are not tied down to the rigid thinking coming from education, but from hard knocks and experience. They don't play by the rules because they know how to look at the rules and understand where those rules have come from and how they are supposed to work. They are not tied to these ideals and therefore innovation comes to the forefront.

Indie Publishing has some very interesting similarities to Entrepreneurship. They consist of people who have a desire to write and share something with everyone but have not been allowed through the gates of Traditional Publishing to do so. The internet has torn down the walls that supposedly protected the public from lesser ideas and inferior works (in their minds), making it possible for those that have the desire to find the public that wants to hear their ideas and think or react on them.

But in that same similarity is a nugget of gold for those of us that aspire to Indie Publishing. Just as a Entrepreneur must work all aspects of their business, the Indie Publisher does to. We must get the ideas down on paper (or in the mobile device nowadays), then we must edit them (or contract with someone to do so), then we must design the book cover (or again, contract it out), then we must find a place to publish it, then market the work and so on and so forth. We must know the entire business model of publishing just to have a decent chance of getting it out to the right public. We monitor every step of the process including quality control and public response.

Therefore, I conclude that the Indie Publisher understands more of the business of publishing after having published several books than a traditional author would. They are well aware of their audience and learn how to reach out to them, finding new and innovative ways to contact and draw the audience to their works. They learn how to react when issues come up that need resolutions. We are Entrepreneurs in every sense of the word and I would go so far to name us, Entrepren-authors.