Back in the spring of 2022, I was riding high. I’d just completed the exhilarating Professional Writing Academy/Faber Academy Writing A Novel course, alongside the first act of a literary historical novel I felt people might want to read. I was eager to get stuck into the writing and confident that self-publishing was the best way to get my art out there. It was just a case of cracking on, right?
Well, kind of. As I pushed through later drafts of my novel, I chased down all the best self-help resources on indie publishing, keen to do everything right. I hired a professional designer to create my cover and a top editor to oversee my story. I constructed a simple but serviceable website and started an Instagram account.
As publication day neared, I was ticking all the right boxes, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer scale of the multiple tasks I was juggling. Here are the eight things I wish I’d known back in October 2024, as I pressed ‘publish’ on my first novel…
1. Amazon does not love your book
It doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, your book will go nowhere without effective promotion and marketing. I thought I knew this, but I didn’t. It soon sank in, though, as post-launch euphoria faded and weeks passed without Amazon sales.
The truth is that, once all your mates have bought your book, the only way general readers are going to know about it is if you actively promote it in a way that directs readers to your sales page.
2. Book promotion is time-consuming work
Directing readers to your sales page involves multiple disciplines, including running ad campaigns and price promotions, finding reviewers and raising awareness on social media. This article is not the right place for promotion and marketing advice. There are scores of supportive resources out there to help you.
What I do want to point out here is that these crucial activities take time. So, be prepared to set aside several hours a week for promotion and marketing. In addition to this, be kind to yourself when deciding which activities to pursue. You can’t do them all, so pick the stuff you can do sustainably.
3. It’s mostly about you
You need to get your head around this one. Your novel’s mesmerising protagonist, captivating hook and killer concept are not enough to maintain sales in the long term.
You need to communicate a strong sense of you as an author, a creative persona potential readers can identify with. This is what marketing experts mean when they talk about your ‘author brand’. Readers may buy your first book because they liked the cover or the premise. They are more likely to buy your second book because they connect with you as a creator.
Start work on your author brand now. Again, there are resources out there to help you. It’s important that you own this process, so that you can control what aspects of your personality to make public.
4. One book is not enough
Experienced indie authors will tell you that writing in series is a must for self-publishing success and I was totally onboard: my first novel is the first in a series. But I underestimated how ineffective a single book is in the indie world.
The reality is that effective book promotion and marketing costs money – usually more money than you can hope to recoup from the sales of just one book. Self-publishing is a long game and, like any start-up business, there are more outgoings than incomings when you only have a small product line.
Another way to look at this is to accept that the best way to increase visibility and improve your bottom line is to… write another book!
5. Genre rules the roost
This can be a tough one to come to terms with, especially if your writing crosses genres or is more literary in style. There’s no way to dress this up. Indie publishing favours commercially oriented, genre fiction. If you write genre fiction, all well and good, but make sure everything you produce lines up. Your title, cover, blurb, author bio and ad messaging must all signal your genre clearly.
All is not lost for literary types and genre-hoppers. The above rules still apply. Clearly signal your literary chops or the novelty of your genre fusion and you will find readers, as long as they know what sort of book they’re buying. Confused marketing disappoints readers, who may leave negative reviews as a result.
6. Balancing writing with business is hard
Experts declare, rightly, that you must treat your indie writing as a business. I thought I understood this: I’d been freelance during significant periods of my career, after all.
What I now understand is that balancing creative writing with running a small business is different to the freelance journalism I’d been used to. Yes, I try to keep things shipshape from a business perspective. But creative writing needs space to flourish and you need to protect that space.
It sounds simple but it can be tricky. I make a rule for myself: I do creative work first, before tackling any business tasks. Establish your own routines and stick to them.
7. Find your well of resilience
Old literary hands say that writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint. But the same is also true of the wider self-publishing process. You’re in this for the long haul, so act accordingly, because there will be occasions when the last thing you want to do is write a social media post or re-learn how to create an ad because the tech bros have changed their algorithms again.
These are the times you need resilience – so get it from anywhere you can. I ended up drawing on resilience I’d built up many years before, as a young singer in a punk band. I couldn’t sing, of course, but writing the words and communicating them to people taught me the value of persistence in getting your art out there.
That’s what worked for me. Discover your own well of resilience and draw on it.
8. There is a happy ending
Back in late 2024, mired in pre-publication madness, I wish I’d known just how good it would feel right now, to be a practising author, well on the way to my 500th sale. I’m planning exciting research trips and cracking out my next book, an independent artist with total creative control over my output. I’ve also bonded with some wonderful fellow authors, as we’ve tackled the ups and downs of self-publishing together.
In other words, I’m an active practitioner in a thriving creative industry and I’m loving it. You can get to this point, too. Just dive in – and, pretty soon, you’ll be discovering eight things of your own that you wish you’d known before self-publishing.
Good luck!
