Yesterday, I discussed 5 disadvantages to indie publishing. Today we’ll look at 5 advantages.
1. Control– You have the final say over what the cover looks like, what price to sell at, what content comes out, what content stays in, length, and pretty much everything else. This allows you to put your vision out there without interference from those who “know better than you do.”
2. Minimal Middlemen– It’s pretty much just you and your audience. You can interact and engage with them. You can give things away without asking permission. You can write what you want to write, regardless of how New York thinks it will sell.
3. Keep More– Indie-published authors are not sharing profits with publishers and agents. From your own website, you keep all the profits. Yes, you share some with PayPal, but they are a service for handling money, not for handling product.
4. Speed– With a traditional publisher, many writers cannot publish at the same pace they can create. For an indie author, speed is everything. The faster another book appears on your shelf, the more income it generates by virtue of an early start. Speed is also important when it comes to correcting errors. A traditional publisher has an initial print run, all of which would contain the mistake. Indie POD and ebooks can be corrected as soon as the mistake is discovered, minimizing the number of readers who end up with the error in their copy of the book.
5. Learning– By necessity, an indie author has to learn, and learn all the time. File formats change, software is developed, and new markets open up. While some writers want to do nothing but write, others (like moi) have a broad spectrum of interests. Keeping up with changes in the industry helps satisfy some of those interests.
