Note the term ‘independent author’, an industry catch-all for those who use self-publishing to see their work appear in print or as an eBook download.
When I first set out to be an author thirty years ago, there were no eBooks. The only way into print was by navigating near-impregnable barriers set up by industry sentinels protecting publishers from being overrun by hordes of wannabes like me.
Back then, a small number of publishers listed in the hallowed Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook accepted printed pitches from unknowns. Postal approaches were typically limited to an introductory letter, a one-page summary and a short extract from the manuscript.
Publishers’ mailboxes groaned under the weight of A4 envelopes that landed on the desks of lowly-paid interns. There, painstakingly crafted letters and summaries and sample chapters were mostly consigned to obscurity on the slush pile.
Other publishers made access even more difficult by dealing only with literary agents. This turned agents into gatekeepers tasked with filtering out dross unworthy of even interns’ attention.
In the late 2000s, as an editor for a vanity publisher, I suffered far too many manuscripts from people convinced they had a book in them. Vanity publishers exist to publish the unpublishable as a means of generating income from the gullible. My shameful task was to fillet and polish manuscripts until they approached a state worthy of publication that very few ever achieved.
An exception was by an Irish alcoholic who attended a remote temple in Thailand, where patients (or victims?) were treated with daily infusions of herbal concoctions that caused them to vomit uncontrollably. It has since been heavily revised and re-published as Dead Drunk, by Paul Garrigan – who turned out to be that rarity: someone who actually did have a book in him.
Critical scrutiny
Almost overnight in 2008, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) made it possible for anyone to become an independent author. Not so long after that new dawn, in 2013 I self-published Bangkok Cowboy, a crime novel a little ahead of the LGBTQ-friendly curve, featuring as it did an imposing transgender female who was half of the Mason & Dixie private eye duo.
I found myself in a world where only one person could influence Bangkok Cowboy’s success: me. I polished the manuscript to within an inch of its life and spent a mind-numbing amount of time on social media generating awareness of an unknown book by an author nobody had ever heard of. Most self-published titles sell a hundred copies or fewer, which suggests Bangkok Cowboy outperformed the market, selling over six thousand downloads.
Since then, KDP has only made self-publishing easier. It remains a tiresome process of box-ticking taken on by an ever-growing number of aspiring authors, the ones who self-publish four thousand new books every day.
One downside to all this is how the absence of critical scrutiny at literary agencies or publishers means enforcement of quality standards is virtually non-existent.
Yet while the majority of self-published works are at best weak, a small minority of independent authors succeed beyond most writers’ dreams. E.L. James, she of Fifty Shades fame, went on to sell a hundred million books. Crime writer JM Dalgliesh sold more than two million self-published books before being signed up by mainstream publishers. And look out for American author, the late Scott Pratt, whose ‘independently-authored’ thrillers featuring Tennessee lawyer Joe Dillard read like John Grisham meets Jack Reacher, and have sold more than seven million copies.
If you are really determined, the only option is to write the book, take obsessive heed of online guides on how to edit and proof-read the manuscript, and resist using a friend’s cover design that looks like it was cut from a breakfast cereal box.
Perhaps then you can bask in unexpected attention from movie insiders who lavish praise on your work and only request modest sums of money to prepare scripts and storyboards for producers to take it to the big screen. Sadly, news outlets nowadays are peppered with tales of new authors being separated from their savings in this way by scammers.
Writer, beware.
Just don’t, whatever you do, give up on those dreams.
Ron McMillan’s first two books were released in the UK by Sandstone Press, and he has since taken four new books to market via the self-publishing route. All six titles remain available on Amazon. The second in his Call Me Rab crime series set in the 1990s and featuring Scotland’s only Sikh police detective is due out soon, and a third Bangkok-set Mason & Dixie crime thriller will be released later this year.