The pros and cons of self-publishing, places to publish, and how to decide if self-publishing is for you.
Tea and Tales
S1:E6 Indie Publishing
So actually, today I'm trying a new team. So this is a chocolate orange roibusti. I don't know, I feel about that, because I'm very fond of my roibusti. It's a very serious business over here. And so when people start like making a making stuff together, like they'll be like, no, I'm roibust and I'm like, why, why? There's nothing wrong with the original chairs, because this is the first time I'm going to taste it. I will either find it okay or hate it. So I don't hate it. Okay, I'm going to go with that. I don't hate it. We'll check back by the end of the episode, see. When it's cold, whether it has the same effect. All right, are we ready to go? We are ready. We are ready to do this. [MUSIC] Hello, everyone, and welcome to T.M. Tails. I'm now. And I am Sarah. We want to send a shout out to all the people who have been liking, commenting, sharing and subscribing, especially to Regina Marie and Ann Jones. We appreciate all of you and everything you do to help us today. We're doing our second episode on publishing, on self-publishing, indie publishing, which everyone you want to call it. And we'll probably be flipping back and forth between the two. So just know it's the same thing. OK, though I do have a question for the listeners, which they, I feel, have to clarify in any comments anywhere, especially on Apple Podcasts and give us five stars while you're at it. But so how do you spell indie and indie publishing? Is it indie with a Y, the North part, or is it indie with her IE? We've had some debate on that one. Between us, so please help us to decide which way to do it yourself. Self-publishing is usually referred to as indie or independent publishing. But this term sometimes can mean a small press printing. So if you get kind of confused, if you see that out there, that's what's going on. When indie publishing was first coined as a term, it meant small press printing. But as technology has grown and as people have been able to more easily publish themselves, it's less the small press printing. And that got pushed into traditional and more doing it for yourself. That's something that I did not know, the origin of that term. Mate just learned something new. You know, thank you. That was my fun fact of the day today. I love fun facts. I really never really thought about the origin of it. So I was just like hashtag indie authors or like hashtag indie publishing. And I'm like, like if some, for example, you meet someone and they're like, call me Friedrich and you're like, hello, Friedrich. But then Friedrich's friends calls him Freddie. Like I wouldn't have to call him Freddie because he introduced me as Friedrich. So same with like indie publishing. If someone came to me and they're like individual publishing, I'd be like sub cool. I'm vibing with that. But that's now not how I got introduced to it. I think this brings up a very good point as well is how in indie publishing, you have to come up with things for yourself, like names, like your brand name, your color schemes. You have to make all your own book covers, everything like that. So definitely give the indie publishers out there all the love you can. They are doing a lot of work on this. It is a lot of work. Yes. And for this topic, especially now and I are both going the traditional route, which means we don't know quite as much about indie publishing. So we want our indie publishing crowd out there. Definitely drop resources, drop comments, tell us your stories, what you've learned that works and what doesn't work. Because honestly, we don't know as much about it as we do about the traditional side. We would absolutely love to know that. And especially if you're like, no, that's not how we do it. And I could be like, thank you so much. Now I know, or you could be like, well, this is the editors that I got to edit my novel or this is the website that I use to create my cover. And I'm like, fantastic. Because not only, I think is it great for indie publishing, but there are so many aspects of indie publishing, like Wattpad and all those things where people do Pinterest boards, people do covers. I think a majority of these websites that and services that indie authors do use can be used for so many other things as well. Absolutely. And there's resources out there like Readsy.com where you can get in contact with people who offer all of those services, legit people who can actually help you with your copy editing or your line editing. And I'm getting looks from now. No, so, no, what I wanted to say? I did not know that if you go on Readsy, you could literally like write your draft on Readsy. I did not know that I was like, have I been living under a rock? No, just in South Africa, apparently surrounded by lions. Not really. But I was just like, I did not know that. I originally came to know Readsy because of the prompts, weekly prompts that they did do, do. And so that's how I got introduced to them. And they have so many good services. I was just like, ask me, do I use any of them though? The answer is no, I don't. I don't use very many of them either because I'm going traditional publishing. There again, but also any of those services. Yeah, but also I'm very safe in my way. It's like, if I started writing novels on a notepad, the chances are I'm still going to write it on a notepad till the day I die with a pin in my hand. You mentioned their weekly prompts. They still do their weekly prompts. And I do them sometimes if the prompt strikes a story in my head, but you can upload those stories that you write on their prompt on the Readsy website. You have your own little author area where you can upload that short story. That is one way of self publishing. So even as a traditional published author, I guess they'll write these short stories for Readsy and self publish them on the Readsy website where anybody can read them. Girl, I did not know. I did not know that. Are you telling me I'm cheating on traditional publishing? Oh, yeah, we are. My bad. I didn't mean it. Still love you, tradition, imagine. Oh, my goodness. Imagine you started like shortening traditional publishing, like subtradish, like it's an actual person. Yeah, but there are a lot of other places you can do that as well, where you can post just anything that you write. Of course, your own personal blogs, your own website are ways to self publish something, your social media, newsletters, things like that. You can self publish short pieces, but there's also places like what pad or archive of your own where you can put up a little bit longer stories. There's webtoons that specializes in what the name says, webtoons that you can have published and fanfic.net and a lot of other fan fiction places. If you write fan fiction, that's a whole genre that does not go into the traditional publishing ever, but there's plenty of places self publish your fan fiction. That you say this in a sense that there are so many different places you can self publish because I think a lot of people think if you are an indie author, the only place that you can self publish is basically going through Amazon and then doing it through there. So I think this actually is a broader spectrum, a broader platform that in all honesty, I didn't think it. Think of it as self publishing when I post my short stories. I'm just like, oh, they're fun short stories. There you go. Yay. There has been authors that came from what that because they posted their stories, their whole entire novels on what that and people loved it so much. And I'm like, I guess I can publish this. So it's a form of almost want to say also growing your followers in a sense or your readers growing that platform. And if you do decide to go into traditional publishing with a full length novel, you can use that platform in your author bio, say, hey, by the way, Jen, this is my debut novel, but I have this many X number of readers on what path. And that is a platform that can get you into the traditional arena if you're trying to reach into that arena. So a lot of traditionally published authors will post on one or the other. First, some, I think some that go traditional publishing and then also put short stories out on these other places. I think a lot of people who want to publish will ask if I want to do self publishing, like, how do I go about it? And as you have said, we aren't experts in that arena, which is why in future episodes, we will have indie authors on who can tell us how to do it or you can comment on how to do it from what I've seen and heard from other people. There are a lot of Facebook groups you can join that help you with self publishing and give you advice. I know a friend of mine who did that specifically because she was like, I don't know how to self publish, but I want to do that. And I think you just have to kind of decide how far you want to take it, what you want to do with it, because naturally, of course, you have to finish on novel, but that's probably where it's your number one. And then you kind of have to decide, of course, naturally, you have beta readers and alpha readers to read your novel and to help you to be like, OK, this is a plot poll. This character is not deep enough and things like that. And then you kind of are at a crossroads, I almost want to say, where you decide, OK, do I think after editing my novel 10 times and having five people read it, that I feel it is good enough to want to self publish it or you could be like, you know what, it's good, but I want it to be the best that it can be. So I decide or I want to hire an editor to read it for me and to help me with it. But then you kind of have to also decide there's so many factors. Oh, my gosh, I'm quite out of breath. So many factors. There are so many elements of editors because you get a developmental editor, you get a line editor, you get a proofreader, you get a copy editor. Do I want someone to help me develop my story? So you have, like, everything fits well together. Do I want someone to go through every single line or do I just want a proofreader who's like, comma, comma, comma, no, information mark, comma, comma, uh, question mark. So I think then you kind of have to decide what you want to do. I know a lot of editors do give package deals where they're like, build all of these for this amount of money. At the end of the day, if you do self publish, there is going to be money involved. And if you are like, you know what, I can only spend $2,000 on my editing and my cover and my publishing and all those things. Then you kind of have to prioritise and be like, OK, you know what? I can use Canva and I can create my own cover. So I don't need to pay someone to do that. But I would like to have someone to proofread my novel. So I will spend the most of my money on someone to proofread my novel. Or you could be like, you know what? No, I asked English in high school. I got a B. I'm fantastic. I don't need an editor, but you know what? I did fail in art, so I might want someone to design my cover. And then, of course, the tiny, tiny thing, like, OK, are you going to pay someone to do the blurb on your novel, or are you just going to do it by yourself? And depending on who you know, what you know, that can kind of give you an indication of which direction you do want to take. You have to determine your skill set plus your capital to equal how well self publishing is going to work for you. And there are options out there for building income that you can put into your self publishing. Some of these websites will give you a kickback if so many readers will read your story, or if you do publish on Amazon, you have to know how to mark it. And that book has to be polished enough that people will share it with their friends to start bringing in the income. And then you have to what's next, what's next? No matter what you're writing or how you're publishing, you have to be thinking about what's next, what am I going to do to keep this ball, keep this ball rolling, keep people coming back. And also I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine because she was thinking of publishing and she was like, I don't know what to do. Like, I want to publish a book. That's that's as far as I got. And I was like, fantastic. So I think it just kind of depends on what you want to do, where you want to go. And I think one important thing to make people know is that if you just want to write a one novel and it mostly will be nonfiction where people are just like, I want to tell my story, agents tend to not want to partner with authors who only intend to write one novel. They want to be committed to an author who has a vision of publishing novels, because at the end of the day, agents do get paid for the amount of work they put in and they don't want to put all this work in to an author who only is going to publish them one novel. So then I would be like, OK, if you just decide that you want to publish one novel, then do self publishing. You will know for certain that it's going to get out there. How many people will read it might be a different story, but that is definitely something to look at. If you're not worried about the money aspect, if you just want to have something out there that people can access, self publishing could be the way that you do that. If you're not worried about hitting a bestseller list or doing any of that stuff with your writing, then don't worry about it. Go with self publishing route and you can use other resources that don't cost as much money, especially if you have talents you can put into the marketing or into the cover or anything like that. Or friends who are willing to help who are just going to be like, you know what? I'm buying into your vision. I'm an artist and I'm happy to just do this for you because this isn't about the money. It's about the story. If you don't care about whether I also need to make a livelihood off of this, self publishing could be there out for you. Yes. And I also want to say that don't think because you decide that you want to self publish that there isn't a chance for you to go traditional. In our next episode, we're going to have Nisha Jay Tooley on. Very excited for that. She is both an indie and traditional author. So then we're going to learn a lot more about both of these publishing ways. I'm very excited for that episode and to see Nisha on our podcast. And I've seen a lot of authors who started out self publishing, getting an agent and then traditional publishing like Sarah Adams. The only roadblock is if you did self publish a book, you can't pitch that to an agent to get the agent. It has to be a new novel that's never been published. You want to be honest with yourself, honest about what you are capable of doing financially and skill wise, honest with what you want to do with your writing. And then pick what fits, what works for you. There is no wrong answer. Only a wrong matchup. Oh, that was deep. That was deep. That was the end of the episode. We want to keep the episodes short and sweet here on T entails podcast. We want to get your pens back on the paper and your fingers back on the keyboards. If you want to join this lovely community that we are creating here, please join us on Facebook and Instagram at the entails podcast and on Twitter slash eggs at podcast details. And please don't forget to share with your friends, tell your neighbor about this lovely podcast that we're doing and go annoy your husband or your wife or your daughter or your dog or your cat or your squirrel and tell them about this thing over and over and over again until now forced to listen to it. Great job to the other authors that you know in your writing groups. Let them know to come and listen and chip in their two cents. See you all next time. Bye. [Music]