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.
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!
