The Indie Guide

Okay, so I am getting emails every week about this. A lot of people are trying to buy the indie guide I wrote on Amazon or elsewhere and are finding they can’t get it. I’m sorry to have to say that I’ve unpublished the book. The reasons are several.

1. It is way out of date. I mean really out of date. There is stuff particularly with formatting that is pretty much obsolete at this point with the KF8 software upgrade for Kindle. At this point I’m not even going to be doing my own ebook formatting. Tom is doing it now because he’s a programmer and frankly, it’s getting to the point where you really need to know how to do a little coding for ebook formatting. It’s not like it used to be.

I’m sure there are also a lot of other things out of date. A lot of my previous ideas/advice about marketing I consider somewhat obsolete now. I don’t even use those models anymore. It’s gotten a lot more competitive out there. Gold rush is pretty much over so a new mentality is needed. There are some things I feel work, but again, this is getting cutthroat and I can’t share every strategy I’m trying anymore. It’s just not good business to do so.

2. I don’t want to be an “indie guru”. There was a time when I did. I wanted to be the go-to person for indie advice. I wanted to be able to say “neener neener, I was right about this stuff and I did it first.” (I didn’t really do it first, but I was really early, while most people were still saying ebooks were never going to take off. 2008, bitches!)

But really that is so stupid and ego filled. And it’s just not what I want to be about. I want my focus to be on my fiction. There is no benefit in it for me except for some shallow ego-filled bragging rights (if I really had pushed the indie thing and stayed in that scene), all at the expense of my fiction and the actual business I want to run. I just can’t care about the peanut gallery right now.

I can’t feel pressure to do this or that for “image”. Right now many of my sales rankings are nowhere near where they used to be. There are reasons for that and I’m addressing them, but really, those are my business issues and things to deal with and when you do the “indie rah rah” thing, there are people who will sit on and track your rankings, many of them so when they drop they can say: “HA! See? She’s not hot stuff.” Well you know what? I do not care if I’m “hot stuff”, because I’m running a business here, and whatever is going on is my business and I don’t want to be scrutinized on the level that any “guru” would be. I just want to quietly go about my business. I should have always quietly gone about my business, but I didn’t.

I didn’t know how to keep my damn mouth shut about anything and I’m still having to deal with that on some level. But I can’t erase any of that, I can only move forward.

I want you to follow me because you like and read my fiction. It’s not that I don’t like other people, it’s just that I do not want every second of every day to be about work. This is why I use the cold turkey app during the week most weeks and am not available for email, most social media, or blogs. I want my time to belong to ME. I want my writing time to remain sacred. I want to get in and get out with my work and have a personal life. And no, I haven’t written a Zoe book in awhile. I’ve had other projects going on, but I will get to that soon. The next book I’m writing will be Pretverse.

3. There are way more knowledgeable people than me to take advice from. Dean Wesley Smith and his wife Kristine Katheryn Rusch come to mind. But there is also Michael Stackpole, Joe Konrath, and I’m sure many others. I’ve been out of the loop. I mostly read Dean’s blog and pretty much ignore 90% of everything else.

At this point, with few exceptions, I’m pretty much following the Dean Wesley Smith playbook because I think he really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to publishing and writing. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I don’t agree with everything anybody says. I agree with enough that I consider the advice from both him and his wife to be stuff that you really can’t go wrong with.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I truly truly appreciate that many have found the indie guide helpful. I appreciate that word of mouth for it continues to be so strong, and I’m sorry it’s not available anymore but it’s just not up-to-date, and I have neither the time nor the desire to bring it up to date for all the reasons I mentioned.

In truth, I never should have written and published it, but the indie rah rah thing was a phase I went through, not realizing there would come a point where I just really wanted to focus on my fiction career/various pen names and NOT the business blah blah and shop talk.

Thank you for understanding!