Problems of a Self-Published Indie Author exactly as I have experienced them over the past five years.
I’ll go through this in the order I’ve learned these lessons.
Indie Author Problem Number One
Mistakes. Writing mistakes.
“But Andy!” you say. “You paid for a professional editor!”
You’re right. But I make mistakes that slip past even the editor. I was reading Zombie Turkeys after it came back from the format editor. It was perfect–except I had the wrong character name in one sentence. Zombie Turkeys had over eighty named characters. (I know–that’s too many for a 54,000 word novel. I haven’t repeated that mistake.)
I’m glad I found it on the last read through before publishing. But that doesn’t solve every problem.
My Second Indie Author Problem
What about book covers? I complicated things by asking for and paying for a full back cover illustration plus chapter icons.
I have a great illustrator, Sean “Fuzzy” Flanagan. But artists are creative types. And Fuzzy was doing his first commission with me. The covers weren’t always done when I needed them. Also, they had to be in precisely the correct format for print books.
This took time. I made mistakes. I missed schedule dates.
But wait–there’s more! Kindle (and CreateSpace) have very strict guidelines on covers. My Createspace (print) cover for Zombie Turkeys was not acceptable for Kindle. It had too much blood on it. So I had to switch the colors after I released the book. That took time away from sales while it was being changed. Here’s the Kindle cover for Zombie Turkeys.
Do you have any questions so far? Ask me. I cover the whole publishing process in my blog post here.
My Next Problem: Getting Audible AudioBook Completed
I bet you didn’t see that coming! I wanted to publish each of my books in as many formats as I could. Audiobook publishing with royalty share was easy–you put your book on Audible for audition and you select the best voice actor.
I hit a home run with my first voice actor, Phil Blechman, who’s voiced Zombie Turkeys, My Undead Mother-in-law, and Paranormal Privateers with his voice actor assistant, Raven Perez.
So what’s the problem? My Undead Mother-in-law is six hours long. I had to listen, very carefully, to every minute to make sure there were no mistakes. And there were some in almost every chapter.
You try to read for six hours without making an error, let alone acting with the right nuance. And this doesn’t count production errors like too much background noise, or voices that are too soft. Audible is very picky about its volume levels. They rejected some chapters all by themselves.
All in all, audiobook production took much longer than I expected.
The Final Problem – Changes Later On
Once you publish a book, it never changes, right? Wrong.
Each time I publish a book, I updated the books I published to show all the books I have. That way, I can possibly entice people to buy my other books.
No biggie, right? Wrong. I have to update the front matter, and the back matter, the preview of the next book. I also put in links to the other books.
This only has to go through format editing for print and ebook formats–but it still must be done.
Then there’s the time I changed a book cover because the old one wasn’t selling. But that’s a story for another time. I’ll tell you if you ask me. Hint It’s this next book:
