Ch 7.4 Four Ways to Think Long Term in Indie Publishing

You
check your sales every morning and your rankings every evening. You tweet,
facebook, and pinterest, and worry about whether you should purchase an ad to
promote your novel or do another blog tour or perhaps sacrifice a goat to the
Amazon Rankings Gods to get one of their coveted “email” promotions.

It’s
enough to drive an indie author crazy.

In the
heady rush that is the indie revolution, and especially when you’re putting out
your first self-published novel, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of
indie publishing. After all, you have to wear all the hats (either doing it
yourself or contracting it out): cover designer, editor, proofreader,
formatter, marketer, publicist, and somewhere in the depths … author.

There
are some who say they want to traditionally publish so that they can
concentrate on their writing, but the truth is that indie published authors
should be doing exactly that: focusing on writing their novels like it’s the
dream job that it is.

I do a
lot of marketing and social media, but mostly because I enjoy it, and even so,
I’ve been cutting back. It’s tempting to spend all your time marketing: there’s
immediate positive feedback on the internet, and things like blog tours and
cover reveals really do spur sales (sometimes, not always). It’s hard to resist
the allure of promotion, even when writing is your first true love and the
reason why you got in this game in the first place.

I
encourage indie writers to take a longer view of what they want to get out of
indie publishing than just how to boost sales today (or even tomorrow). The
beauty of self-publishing is that everything is in your control. Ok, sales
aren’t in your control, but how you spend your time most certainly is. You can
market as much, or as little, as you wish. You can publish as frequently, or as
infrequently, as works for you. Here are four ways you can take a longer view,
be more successful, and ultimately happier as an indie published author:

1 – Make a Five Year Plan
Before
I published my first indie novel (Open Minds), I made a marketing plan (see Make a Marketing Plan), partly
to see if self-publishing was a viable path for me. I set out 5 year, 1 year,
and 6 month goals. Some were targets (“Make enough money from writing in 5
years to replace a part-time job in engineering”), but most were action items
(“Publish the first novel and write two more in 12 months”). Part of my plan
was to see how viable the plan was – could I write 2 novels a year? Turns out
that’s not entirely out of the ballpark. Having a 5 year plan keeps me focused on the novels I
have yet to write, not just the novels I have for sale.

2 – Focus on
Quality and Quantity
The Taleist survey found that
successful self-published authors spend 24% more time per word than their less
successful self-published peers, and they write 31% more words per
day. What this adds up to is more time writing (and less promotion). The best
way to double sales? Publish another book. But it’s important to
remember that your work is forever, and that’s a very long time. As
authors, we should always be pushing our craft forward. Your best novel
should always be ahead of you, something you’re constantly striving
for. Focusing on writing a quality novel that you love and improving your
craft to make your novel the best it can be will help your sales.
Quality does count, and if you want your novels to sell more, one
place to start is by writing a better book. At the same time, endlessly
fiddling with your novel isn’t the answer either. Getting the next book written and published (see Making the Donuts) will increase your footprint in the digital world, which in
turn, will increase sales (see Abundance vs. Scarcity).

3 – Feed Your Creativity
If you
choose to market (and it’s a choice, there’s no requirement), make sure you’re
doing it creatively. Do a book launch that celebrates your genre or spawn a Random Acts of Kindness Day. Make
up twitter chats with your characters for a book blog tour, or create a Pinterest Board for your characters. Most of all,
have fun with it! If it’s not fun, get creative and make it enjoyable for you
and your friends/readers. Or don’t do it. You have to be willing to stretch
yourself, but if you’re not having fun, chances are your readers aren’t either.
Plus, all this creative exercise has the added benefit of keeping your writing
muscles limber. And it makes your marketing time serve double duty as a
creativity booster (also see Give Yourself a Creative Retreat).

4 – Be Patient
See #1
– You’re working toward a Five Year Plan. You may get lucky and be an
overnight, runaway success, but you can’t plan on that. What you can plan on is
writing a reasonable (for you) number of books (whatever that number is) over
the next five years, building up your backlist and establishing yourself in one
or more genres. Maybe you want to write both YA and MG with a possible
dalliance in adult novels. Maybe you want to play around with short
stories, or write a serial (see All About Serials…). Maybe you want to cross genres. The
beautiful thing about indie publishing is that you can literally publish
anything you wish. Building a fanbase around a series of connected works makes
good marketing sense, but diversifying your portfolio of works also has the
benefit of tapping into different markets that may be more (or less)
successful. You won’t know until you try. Write what you love, write it a
lot, and be patient for your writing career to mature. It is far easier to be a
success with many titles under your belt, than just one. At the same time, grow
and stretch yourself as a writer. You have a long career ahead of you – craft
it purposefully and you will be happier in the end.

Taking
a longer view of indie publishing buffers you from the vagaries of today’s
sales or tomorrow’s promotion. It allows you to enjoy your writing and bring
your creativity to bear on what marketing you choose to do. Interestingly, it
can make your writing career both more enjoyable and more rewarding, as you get
titles out quickly and more successfully, because you are spending more time
focused on your craft.

If
you’re anything like me, that’s why you got in the game in the first place.