A to Z: Going Indie: Y is for YOLO!

 Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

 If you read my post yesterday, you already know that I just turned 55. This isn't me complaining. It's a privilege to have made it this far and I'm hopeful of having many more years yet to enjoy. But, it also means that I've crossed a sort of meridian in my life and there's for sure fewer years left than I have already lived. 

So, it's time to DO IT. Whatever it is that you've been wanting to do and haven't done. For me: that's making a go of self-publishing, taking my writing life firmly into my hands and making all the decisions, accepting all the blame and any glory that might come from it. To BE A WRITER. 

Lucy had the right of it: 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: X is for Xanthic

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Xanthic? I know…but X is hard! If this word was new to you (like it was to me), Merriam Webster tells us that it means: 

So, I'm thinking "yellow" like "you yellow bellied coward!" but I actually have no idea if this word works for the more metaphorical meaning of yellow. But, I'm going with it. 

So, what am I afraid of when it comes to going indie? 

I have two main fears: financial ruin, and that it'll take the fun out of it. 

In terms of financial ruin, I've taken a few steps to protect myself: 

• I waited until the "right" moment in my life, when I had some dollars to spare without sinking the Bryant Family ship
• I didn't invest in all of it all at once, but did a little at a time, spreading it out across months and even years.
• I incorporated as an LLC, because who knows what unknown water lie ahead, and I'd like my family's assets to be safe if I really screw something up and end up in legal or tax trouble of some sort.
• I took some business training and tax advice 

In terms of "taking the fun out of it," I'm still finding out, I think. It has added new types of work to my life (see my post on D is for Decisions for more on that), so I have to be careful to keep some sort of balance and not burn myself out. 

But, I'm not especially afraid of hard work. In fact, it's a joy to focus my efforts on something that is so personally important to me instead of just day job drudgery or dirty dishes!

There's a lot of it I REALLY enjoy, too! I'm giddy sometimes with all the little delights that have been a part of this process: new things I've learned, new connections I've made, that feeling of "I made this!", positive reception of my work, etc. 

So maybe I'm not really all that metaphorically xanthic after all (if that's even a thing). 

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By the way, today's the day! Release day! Book birthday on my actual birthday! (I'm 55 today!)

So, if you've been interested at all by Not Too Late as I've nattered on about it in these posts, do a girl a solid and go buy a copy today! It's available through Ingram, so you can order it at your favorite bookstore, request it at your library, or buy it online at a lot of different venues. 

 

 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: W is for Writing

 

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Writing is the hardest thing to do while indie publishing, at least for me so far. Every day there are so many business/publishing details to handle, that it's hard to get a good long writing session in. 

Sometimes that's frustrating, but I'm only four months into my adventure, so I'm trusting that over the long haul, some of the business part of things will get easier and I won't have to research every step any more because I'll be able to just do again what I did last time. Muscle memory. 

Here in April, my current ploy to find more time for the creative writing bit is to get up earlier. I'll be 55 this year, so even on a day when my day doesn't require that I wake early, I wake early. Usually 6:30-7:00, when my day-job workday doesn't usually start until 8:30 or 9:00. 

Since my kiddo is now old enough to get themself up and going for their day, my responsibilities are small during that time: dressing, grooming, eating, caffeinating, medicating, doing the dogs' morning routine. I'm a low fuss woman--no makeup, no fancy hair preparation, simple clothes, so the "taking care of me" bit doesn't take me very long. My husband is here, too, so sometimes he takes care of some of the dogs or helps out by making me a breakfast sandwich while he's making his now. 

I don't open my email or go to my to-do list during this morning time, but just write something. This month, that's been a lot of blog posts and interviews rather than time on the work-in-progress novel, but that's still writing and it feels good! Still, I'm looking forward to the day when I can retire, and not give so many hours to the day job. I've got better uses for those hours!

A to Z: Going Indie: V is for Vellum

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

If you're old like me, you probably saw "Vellum" and thought about that thin, translucent paper you used for school projects back in the day. 

But in this case, I'm talking about software. In particular, software for book layout. (Fair warning: Vellum is a Mac-only software, so you'll have to find another tool is you're a PC user). 

Book layout is something I was kind of stressed about when I thought about Going Indie. It's important to get right, and I assumed it would be difficult. After all, most software I've used related to graphic arts has been complicated and unintuitive (for me at least).  

But Vellum? It was a breeze. 

Now, I'm not trying to be fancy yet. Maybe in the future I'll learn to do things like add custom art as section dividers and all of that. I'm just using the basic settings and options the book itself provides, but it really was as easy as importing my Word file, then playing around with menus until I found a look I liked. 

A few style options from Vellum

Then I went through the document, making sure the import hadn't screwed anything up, like chapter divisions or spacing, fixing the odd little things I found. 

For Acid Reign, I began each chapter with song lyrics from an imaginary song by the imaginary band I created for Abby, so I had to decide how that should look. It took a little finagling, but I settled on putting the lyrics in italics and right justified, with the song attribution in regular text, then adding a little three-star border to indicate where the actual chapter starts. That was as complicated as my layout for these three books got, and it only took me an hour or so to figure out then set up for each chapter. 

 

Page 1 of Acid Reign

Then I use the "Generate" button to create whatever kinds of files I need (in this case, .epub for ebooks and .pdf for print), then uploaded those to my printer/distributor (I went with Ingram for both, then uploaded the ebooks separately to Amazon so I could claim them for ACX and audiobook production). Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom! It was so easy. 

The paper books and ebooks both seem to be working well. It all looks right on the page, indistinguishable really from books that came from big publishers with their our layout specialists. I was pleased that I could manage this bit myself and not have to hire the work. 

A to Z: Going Indie: U is for Unfinished

  
Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Last time, I talked about time management and my struggles on that front with taking on Indie publishing alongside everything else I do. One thing I'm having to come to peace with is letting things stay unfinished longer than is my liking. 

My work-in-progress is a Gothic romance called The Architect and the Heir. My goal is to finish writing the book by summer, so I can get it to an editor and perhaps bring it out this fall/winter. And I've made progress…it's just slower than I'd like. 

Draft cover for the Gothic

 

That's kind of ironic since one of the appeals of going indie for me was being in charge of my own timelines, being able to get more work out there faster. But then I remind myself that I'm already bringing out three books in 2026. That's a lot! I'm a greedy girl, though. I want it all!

But for now, this novel remains unfinished while I work on bringing my other three novels out into the world and into the hands of readers. Unfinished isn't a permanent state. 

 

  

A to Z: Going Indie: T is for Time Management

 
Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

I need more than 24 hours a day. 

Maybe this would be a good time to find a vampire to bite me so I could stop needing sleep? Is that how this works? 

Because there is simply not enough time, y'all. 

For context, I have a full time day job and my caregiving responsibilities include two rescue dogs, a disabled newly adult child, and the beginning of elder care. That means that I fit MY WHOLE WRITING LIFE into 2-4 hours a day. That's the most time I can beg, borrow, and steal from all the rest. 

Luckily, I have ADD. I mean that--it's actually good in some ways. It's useful in that it lets me make connections quickly and because when I focus, boy howdy do I focus. A tornado could remove the house around me and I wouldn't look up. 

But you probably didn't pop by my blog to hear me kvetch about not having enough time. So, here's a few thoughts on "making" and managing your time to support an indie writing life.  

1. Decide what you're NOT going to do. Currently, you use your waking hours for a variety of things. So to find hours you'll devote to this, there will have to be things you stop doing. For me, that was cutting most television and videogame time and finding a new day job that actually stays within the working hours most of the time. 

I started by doing a time study, where I literally logged what I did for what hours of the day and then looked for holes I could exploit. I also had a BIG TALK with my family about the time I'd need, because it really requires their cooperation and support. We've also had to renegotiate as a household several times as circumstances and needs of all the household members have shifted and changed. 

2. Prioritize. There are A LOT of decisions that end up in your hands when you go indie (see my post of D is for Decisions for more on that). It's easy to fall into a game of whack-a-mole where you run around trying to do all of it at once and you miss things. I've had to be really intentional with my time to make sure I don't spend my limited hours on the wrong things and end up feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. 

The hard part for me is not letting myself do the thing I'm most excited about if there's something else that really should be handled first. Right now, for example, I'm chomping at the bit to get my audiobook reviewed and uploaded, but I have a few things I have to handle first. I'm trying to hold that more "fun" work out there as a carrot to myself to drag this donkey through the stuff I don't enjoy as much. 

3.  Be realistic. There really are only the 24 hours a day. And even though you want to do it all and do it all now (at least I did), remember it's a marathon not a sprint. You'll burn yourself out if you don't set realistic expectations. 

I almost learned that the hard way in February, March, and early April when I said "yes" to too many things and ended up with author events of various sorts ten weekends in a row. 11/10 do not recommend.  

4. There's ebb and flow: To everything there is a season, right? Because I'm in a book launch phase, I'm spending a lot of time and energy on promotional and sales related activities. Because this is only my fourth month of building processes, I'm still figuring out HOW I do things. 

The fallout of that is that I've stopped making progress on my Work-in-Progress for the time being. It's hard for me to set that aside and accept that I can't work on it right now, but that's what I'm doing because I can't make good progress on the new book with all the other balls I'm juggling right now. But I'm keeping a careful eye on things to make sure I don't let that state of affairs go on too long. 

Sometimes the hard part about this is saying no to myself. I soften the blow by saying things like "not yet" or "now's not the time, but later will be," but I do definitely have to keep my excitement under tight rein sometimes for my own protection. Everything, everywhere, all at once, might be thrilling, but it's not sustainable, and I want to do this for the rest of my life. 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: S is for Self-publishing Stigma

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Self-publishing isn't a new thing. I mean, Charles Dickens did it, back in 1843 with A Christmas Carol which is arguably his best known book. 

But success stories in self-publishing have been kind of unusual. While there are Cinderella stories in the 70s-90s like What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles and Bone by Jeff Smith (later republished by Scholastic), mostly self-publishing became associated with vanity. 

In fact, an entire industry of "vanity publishers" began to grow up to bilk would-be writers out of their dollars to produce books with no distribution system behind them and little chance of any measure of success. 

Then, in 2007, Amazon introduced an amazing new device: The Kindle. Producing an ebook is waaaaaaaayyy cheaper than producing a paper book, and readers loved the ease of access that ebooks provide, so it was a hit all around. There were some major successes: Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, Hugh Howey’s Wool, and William P. Young’s The Shack to name a few. 

That was the beginning of a new era, where individuals could get access to printing and distribution and get their books out there in the world without having to play along with the Big 5 publishing game. 

It didn't mean that self-publishing was considered the same as traditional publishing though. And there is and was quite a variety of quality of work in all those self-published books. 

I remember sharing a table with a man who had started self-publishing in his retirement at one of my first author events and being shocked to see how error-ridden and careless his books were. He admitted that he published his first drafts! To me that was like saying you go outside in just your underwear. 

It's that way in a lot of the arts. Professionalism and high standards for quality come from within, and plenty of folks are willing to "throw something together" but not to truly invest in it with time, energy, and, yes,  money to make it the best it could be. So, that caused the stigma that still comes up from time to time in 2026--where someone assumes that a book is self-published because it's not good enough to have been picked up by a traditional publisher. 

When really, there are a LOT of reasons to go indie, including plain old business sense and a desire to take risks in your work that traditional publishing houses just aren't comfortable with.  

That stigma? It's less and less all the time. 

At one of my recent events, someone came up to my table and said, "So, are you self-published?" I braced myself for impact and offered my short spiel about being hybrid, with some of my books produced by publishers and some of them being books I published myself. I honestly expected something more like interrogation and a demand to prove myself by establishing my credentials. 

I needn't have worried. Turned out, they just wanted to talk shop for bit and learn about what systems I used to make my books. Like many readers, they have aspirations to publish their own books someday. "These look great!" they said, walking away with one of the romances. I just hope they leave a review!