Am I an Indie Author?

About seven years ago I discovered the Smashwords web site, through my kinsman Graham Downs (kinsman is such a nice word, but I think strictly speaking one should say “affine”, since he’s my wife’s cousin). He had published a short story there called A Petition to Magic.

I found the Smashwords site interesting. I’d written a children’s novel a few years back, and approached several literary agents asking if they would have a look at it. I can’t say I even got a rejection slip, because none of them wanted to look at it. I thought of the possibility of begging some publishers to allow it to sit in their slush pile, but back then they wanted hard copy, and the overseas postage was getting prohibitively expensive, and one had to send them enough postage to return it. They wouldn’t entertain the idea of tossing it in the bin because the cost of printing a clean copy was less than half the return postage. No, they had to send it back. So I dropped the idea of trying to get it published and it just sat on my hard disk.

By 2013, however, quite a lot of my friends had Kindles and other e-book readers, Smashwords offered a way to publish an e-book with minimal capital outlay. Format the electronic manuscript according to their template and styles, upload it, and they produce it and distribute it in several different e-book formats. They take a percentage of every book sold. So in December 2014 Of Wheels and Witches was published by Smashwords. I still keep hoping that a child of the target age group (9-12) will write a review.

And then I suddenly discovered that “indie authors” were a thing, and I had apparently become one of them.

I wasn’t sure that that’s what I wanted to be.

Indie authors are those who self-publish their books instead of going through a traditional publisher, and with facilities like those at Smashwords self-publishing has never been easier, at least for e-books,.

I had, however, already had one and a third books published by Unisa Press, which was a traditional academic publisher like most other university presses. The first book was Black Charismatic Anglicans which had a print run of 250 and is now sold out. The second was African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, which had Lilian Dube and Tabona Shoko as co-authors.As far as I know it is still in print.

So I’m not a pure “indie author”.

So why did I decide to publish my latest novel, The Year of the Dragon through Smashwords instead of looking for an agent?

I suppose the main reason is that I’m getting old. Querying agents and publishers and waiting for replies is time-consuming and I’d probably be dead before a received an actual rejection, never mind an acceptance. Publishing through Smashwords is relatively quick and easy. Instead of sending one query you upload one completed MS, and the work is done.

Well, not quite.

In self-publishing the work comes after submitting the MS rather than before. Traditional publishers usually handle things like publicity, sending out review copies and nagging the reviewers for reviews, and sending copies of the reviews to the authors.

Well, not quite that either. I never saw a single review of African Initiatives in Healing Ministry and to this day I don’t even know if any review copies were actually sent, or to whom. But at any rate that is what traditional publishers are supposed to do.

Another reason for not bothering with traditional publishers is that I was thinking of getting my doctoral thesis on Orthodox Mission Methods published. Various people had told me that they wanted copies either for themselves or their students. So I sent the MS to an academic publisher, and they said they would accept it, provided I could get three readers’ reports. One reader replied positively, thought it could be published. Another didn’t reply. The third said he would be going to a meeting the following week of a different publisher he was associated with, and could he present it to them for publication? I said OK, and ten years later I’m still waiting for a reply, to hear whether the second publisher was interested, or whether he thought it was good enough for the first publisher.

The first publisher nagged me for the readers’ reports for a year or two and gave up, but no amount of pleading could get the readers to respond. Much easier to send it to somewhere like Smashwords. The only problem there is that Smashwords doesn’t do stuff like footnotes and indexes, which are needed for an academic text.

And now, ten years on, my thesis is well out of date. Much of the research is more like 25 years out of date. Would anyone like to offer me a research grant to update it?

A lot of the original research was done with a scholarship of R10000 from Unisa, awarded because of my Masters’ dissertation. But 25 years on it would cost at least ten times as much, and R100000 would barely cover the cost of updating the research. And for that price you could probably set up the academic equivalent of Smashwords.

So I’m an Indie Author, sort of, and Indie Authors are a thing, sort of. But what a thing!

Indie Authors help each other with publicity and things like that, and then you discover what other Indie Authors are up to. And one of the things they are up to, I soon discovered, was male torsos. About one in ten self-published books seems to have a male torso on the cover. Newspapers  may have bums and boobs on page 5, but Indie Authors have torsos on the cover.

Do all the books with male torsos belong to the same genre? There used to be a genre called “bodice rippers”, but these have no bodices to rip.

But that’s OK, because you can have the ripped without the bodices. As one dictionary defines it, “ripped” means “Having an extremely defined physique; toned: ripped, bulging muscles”.

For more on the male torso phenomenon, see here Urban fantasy, mediocrity, and the male torso | Notes from underground and here Graham Downs: Judging a Book by Its Cover: Urban Fantasy.

So what do Indie Authors do, apart from male torsos?

And do I really want to be one?

As a reader, I don’t care whether a book is published by a conventional publisher or independently. It’s the content, not the method of publication that counts. And as an author, I’m most concerned that my books reach the kind of people who might want to read them. And my hope is that they find them useful, informative, or entertaining, or all of those things.

So no, I’m not an “Indie Author”, I’m just an author, but I do recognise that independently published books rely, far more than conventionally published ones, on word of mouth (or Tweet, or Facebook shares etc) to reach the people who might want to read them, and so will try to help promote the ones I think are worth a read. And I hope others will do the same for mine.