A to Z: Going Indie: H is for Hobby to Career

 

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. 

One reason I've gone indie in my writing life is that I'm looking to up my game--to move from a sometimes-profitable hobby to a full-blown career. 

I've been working with small publishers for a decade now, and I have seen some good income and career building opportunities during this time, but—what was it Carrie Fisher said? Instant gratification takes too long? — yeah, I'm impatient. 

See, I'm full of ideas. Bursting actually. And trad publishing is sloooooooooow. The distance between "I finished my book!" and "Readers can get my book!" can be one to five years, depending on the circumstances, and whether you already have a publisher relationship or if you're in the submission trenches.  

Part of the power going indie gives me is control over my timelines. I can go as fast as I can go! So, that gives me a better chance of getting more of my imaginary friends out there in the world where you can meet them. 

I'm also in charge of marketing, pricing, distribution choices, etc. And I get the data from everything I try faster. 

So, going indie is definitely putting more work on my plate, but the payoffs are already worth it.  

A to Z: Going Indie: G is for GenX

 

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. 

GenX is the famously invisible generation between Boomers and Millennials. We were born between 1965 and 1980 and currently most of us are in our 50s. The women among us are going through menopause. Sometimes we get called the "sandwich generation" too because our parents are old enough to need our care while our children (mostly GenZ) are still young enough to need our support, too, leaving us squished in the middle.

Just kidding! I don't actually hate any of you. 

 

I identify strongly with my generation, enjoying all the memes and jokes about our invisibility, resourcefulness, and independence and when I started thinking about writing romances, I love the idea of writing them for readers my age. I know a lot of people in their 40s and 50s finding love for the first time, or finding it again, and the challenges and obstacles are very different than they were when we were 20. 

In a similar vein to my Menopausal Superheroes series, which gave superpowers to fully adult women with partners, careers, and mortgages to worry about alongside dealing with their new abilities, my heroines in these GenX romances all find love while they're "going through something."  

 

• In Not Too Late, Amanda comes back to her hometown of Bellevue, Kentucky to care for her mother after a hip surgery. Who knew she'd find a second chance romance with a boy she'd known in high school while she's there! And Chris has changed A LOT since she knew him as Turbo, a skinny pimply track star. 
• Abby, the songwriter for the all-girl 80s punk band Acid Reign, was really only looking for a one-night stand to distract her from the fact that her best friend is losing her fight with cancer. But Gavin and her heart had other ideas. If only he wasn't a politician…
• Becca wasn't looking for love. This single mom had enough on her mind, with her now-grown daughter leaving for a new life in NYC, leaving her with an empty nest. David, widowed five years now, didn't really believe love would find him again. Luckily a rescue dog with muddy paws brought them together despite all their reservations, Ready or Not. 

Love finds you when it does, you know? And sometimes you're not twenty and you're already dealing with elder care, losing a friend, or facing empty nest.  

 

A to Z: Going Indie: Fact vs. Fiction

 

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've been taking my writing life seriously and really being a writer for about 12 years now. And one of the questions that continues to throw me is when readers ask if something in a book is "real." Generally they mean, is that factual? Did that actually happen? In particular to *you* the author? 

First off, um, nosy! LOL. Especially in my romance work, is it really any of your business? 

But secondly, the answer is often "Yes, but no." 

Your life and experiences are definitely fodder for your fiction, but most of us are not simply recreating our lives with the serial numbers scratched off and calling it fiction. The way I look at it is the emotional truth of a moment often pulls from my life: I've been in love, been afraid, tried new things, had to deal with unexpected dangers, faced losses, etc. But, the details don't. 

My characters are different people than I am (even if *some* of who and what they are pulls from me and people I know), so they make different choices than I would have. Plus, a lot of my work is speculative fiction, so obviously, I, a middle-aged woman limited by real-world physics, have never flown with just the power of my own body, deflected bullets, or wielded fire, even though my Menopausal Superheroes absolutely have!

 

So for Not Too Late, the first of my GenX romances (the one that officially releases on April 28! Pre-order now!), here are a few "facts" that made it into my fiction: 

• Bellevue, KY is a real place and is in fact where I grew up. The Bellevue in the book is 90% accurate to how Bellevue is in the real world (at least in my POV)
• Like Amanda, the main character, I left for college and never really came back other than for visits
• Like Amanda, I love roller skating and it was a big part of my youth
• Bellevue really has changed a lot since I lived there and does have a Thai restaurant now, which I'm very impressed by
• Bellevue also has stayed the same with my favorite candy/ice cream shop (Schneider's) and sub shop (Fessler's) still rocking the Avenue
• My fella is also a fella that I met in my youth and re-met when I was older…so Amanda and I have that second chance vibe in common. My husband is also three years younger than me, just like Chris and Amanda. 

So, I got to use a lot of my feelings and experiences, but Not Too Late is not just a retelling of my own life through a fictional lens. Writing is weird alchemy that way. 

A to Z: Going Indie: E is for Experience

 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. 

When you decide to go Indie, it's easy to fall into feeling like you don't know anything. It can make the whole thing so daunting that it's paralyzing!

But the truth is that we all have experiences that can feed a creative life and skills that transfer when it comes to publishing. And I keep reminding myself that I've learned many other things over the years. This is just more new things to learn. 

So, non-publishing experience that has helped me in going indie: 

1. Graphic design: as a teacher, girl-scout cookie mom, book club leader, and so many other things, I've needed to advertise. So, I've learned to make a perfectly passable flyer, postcard, webpage, etc.  Honestly, I even think it's kind of fun. 

2. Repurposing: as a public school teacher for many years, I never had extra money, so as I've needed storage and various pieces of gear, I've gone shopping in my own house for the things I need. Turns out I already had photography lighting shoved into a closet from that year my now-grown daughter was a teenager who wanted to be a photographer. Turns out the wagon I bought for soccer practice also works great for hauling books. I guess being a packrat in some ways isn't all bad! 

3. Planning birthday parties: I'm a mom, so I've planned a few birthday parties over the years. From simple at-home parties, to venue parties, to full on destination parties. Turns out those event planning skills transfer very well to author events. And authors are easier to wrangle than children! 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: D is for Decisions

 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. 

 Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. 

I knew, but I didn't know, you know? 

Going in, I anticipated that going indie would put a lot more decisions in my hands that had previously been decided by my publisher: 
 

• editions to be created: paperback? hardback? audiobook? 
• release date: as fast or as slow as I'm capable of and want
• editor selection: who do I want to work with and can afford? 
• cover art: who do I want to work with and can afford? what should my cover look like? 
• layout/formatting decisions: more here than I expected: size, type of paper, font, drop caps, header style, section breaks (I'm using Vellum and going pretty basic so far)
• blurb language: I usually did write this myself, but now I have the final say
• price: this part is cool--especially if I want to discount to participate in a promotion. It's totally up to me!
• printing and distribution options: going wide? focusing on Amazon? using Ingram? Trying out other printers? 
• review copies and distribution: who gets an early peek? Do we do NetGalley or other paid services? 
• corrections/revisions to the text: getting those fixed is one my timeline now
• imprint/branding 
• author pages: website, Amazon, Goodreads, BookBub, etc.  

There is a bit of decision fatigue…and it is difficult to balance time for handling all these decisions alongside actually writing and creating new work.  

Mostly, I've been pretty excited to decide on all these things. Of course, that means there's no one but myself to blame for the decisions that turn out to be bad ones, but then I get all the credit for good ones, too.  

 

A to Z: C is for Covers

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. 

Before going indie, since my novels were published by a small press, my opinion about the covers was solicited and if I objected strongly I had a good shot at persuading John (the head honcho) to make changes or go a different way, but in the end, he was the publisher, and the decision lay with him. 

I feel lucky that I ended up with covers I quite like for The Menopausal Superhero series: 

Still, one of the things I was really looking forward to about going indie was having full control over the covers. It was both exciting, and a little daunting. I don't consider myself much of a graphic artist, but I do have opinions. So, I wasn't going to try to do my own covers. At my skill level, that would have been a great way to end up with something amateurish and off-putting. 

Instead, I hired an artist. I met Hannah (or Spoon, as most people call her) of Spoonwood Visuals at a convention. She had the table across from mine, so I had a lot of time to look at her art and chit-chat with her, and I really liked both what I saw and what I heard. I bought a journal book from her with this art on it: 

 

I really liked how she used color, and I've got a thing for Luna moths :-) So, I asked if she ever did book covers and it turned out she does! So, over the past few months, we've talked themes and ideas and she did the covers for all three Gen X romances: 

 

 

She really did a great job turning my vague concepts into vibrant covers that really represent the books. And check out her artistry on the wraps: 

 

 I love how the heart on the back of Not Too Late comes across and becomes the letter L on the cassette tape on the front. And those Trapper-Keeper-esque details really ground it in the 80s nostalgia that is so much a part of this story!

 

 

Acid Reign is a completely different look with that collage-art style that mirrors so many punk album covers of the 80s and 90s, when Abby Storm, my main character, was rocking the world. The big lipstick kiss on the back is perfect! 

 

 

That cutie on the cover, knocking over the microphone and leaving muddy pawprints everywhere is Roscoe. He's the real hero of Ready or Not and I love the way he's running off the cover, so his head is on the back, disrupting the back-of-book blurb text. 

Working directly with an artist was WONDERFUL and I'm so pleased with what Hannah created for my books. 10 out of 10, would totally recommend the experience! 

 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: B is for Books!

 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. 

Going indie in my publishing life required a lot of learning. There's a lot of advice out there--but it's not all good. And there are a lot of "how to write" books by authors that don't seem to actually have published any fiction themselves…which makes me wonder what their advice is actually worth. 

So I just wanted to highlight a couple of resources I found especially useful: 

Stella Fosse is pretty directly responsible for my GenX romances and my decision to use them as my first all-indie projects. 

We know one another through the Women's Fiction Writers Association and I blurbed her book, Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance, which inspired me to take on writing romances for characters in middle-age. The book mixes advice on writing with advice on the indie publishing. All in a personable and easy to understand way. Highly recommended!

 

Another one that really helped me figure out how the business end of indie publishing works was Business Essentials for Writers by James P Nettles. James has been doing this for a while (yes, Jim, I'm calling you old), and this book is chock full of insights and really helped me navigate with fewer missteps that I might have made otherwise. 

 If you're interested in Indie Publishing, these are two great book resources. I also highly recommend the YouTube channel Go Indie Now! if you're more of a video-learning person.