When I thought of becoming a writer, I imagined spending hours writing a book and many more editing and polishing it until it matched my standards. What I didn’t foresee was how many collateral things I would have to learn.
If you become a self-published power machine, you must do it all yourself until you earn enough money to hire PA or outsource your work. There are certain things you can’t scrooge. An excellent cover will sell your book, and sound editing gives you a review focusing on the story rather than grammar and language mistakes.
Illustrations – well, you can use an AI, but I don’t feel comfortable earning money by using even fragments of someone else work, even if it is compiled in something utterly different from my imagination. So I commission them from the artist.
Then there is everything else. Marketing is a bane of every indie author because when you have a head full of stories, you rarely have a head to do numbers, graphs, and trends. There come social media that will sell your book like no other IF you hit the right spot or get noticed by the right influencer.
Duelling with printing companies, releasing newsletters, networking with other authors, and doing many things you need to do to succeed but don’t have time or skills to do. You name it, and whatever it is, it is included in the indie package deal.
My yesterday’s achievement – learning HTML coding because I needed to update the EPUB files. It took me a whole day, but my eBooks are now updated with new info and look even better than on the release day.
And when I was pouring the eye drops in my red from staring at the screen eyes, I thought that there may be many excellent indie authors out there who simply don’t have the time, energy, or skills to do all those collateral things, and they little gem of the book is laying forgotten in the corner gathering dust just because of it.