Indie Publishing Paths: What’s Your Next Step?

By Jami Gold, @JamiGold

Part of the Indie Authors Series

For nearly two years in this Indie Publishing Paths series, we’ve been exploring our options—and the pros and cons of those options—for many of the decisions we face as indie authors. That’s a lot of posts.

So before I wind down this series for good, I wanted to offer one last post to serve as a Table of Contents to help us through the learning and decision-making process. Consider this post a To-Do List for our indie publishing choices. *smile*

Recap: Why Should We Plan?

As I’ve emphasized throughout this series, there’s no one right way to be successful as an indie author. Just because our favorite virtual mentor chooses one method to reach success doesn’t mean that method will work for us.

• Our role models might have different goals or definitions of success from our own.
• The publishing landscape constantly changes—from Amazon’s rules to reader expectations—so what worked six months ago might not work anymore.

It does us no good to blindly follow someone else’s strategy if we don’t understand it or know if it will help us reach our goals. We need to understand the pros and cons of our options to translate their methods to the current market or to something that might be a better match for what we want out of our publishing career.

Step One:

Identify your goals and priorities and think about how you measure success. This step comes first because it’s the most important aspect of our decision-making process, as we’ll use what we determine here in every step that follows.

Our goals and priorities provide a framework for the rest of our decisions. They guide us on where we should imitate our virtual role models and where we should strike our own path. And they let us know when our strategies aren’t working as we’d hoped and to try something else.

The last step in this post discusses how to take our goals and come up with a “master plan,” working backward if necessary to plan how we’re going to reach our goals. However, before we can work backward through each of the choices, we first have to understand our options.

So for each of the next three steps, we might not want to make our decision quite yet. Instead, think of the next few steps as learning what the possibilities are and what we might want to consider or watch out for. Then once we reach Step Five, we can pull all our knowledge together to design our master plan. *smile*

Step Two:

The next step we want to consider is the ins and outs of putting our book up for sale. There are no wrong answers, as any choice can be successful. The only question is what’s the best strategy for our goals?

Making a decision about each aspect requires us to think like a businessperson:

A) Where Do We Want to Sell Our Book?

We have four options for how we can distribute our book, explored in two posts: direct & distributor, as well as retailer & and exclusive. Each option has its own pros and cons, and some options can be combined with others.

B) When Do We Want to Sell Our Book?

We have three options to consider for the timing of listing our book for sale. Depending on our goals, we might want to use a pre-order, or we might not. We might want to release right away, or we might not. It’s important to learn the pros and cons before we decide.

C) How Much Do We Want to Sell Our Book for?

We have three options for pricing our book: high, middle, and low. The best choice for our situation depends on what we want to accomplish and how we plan to get there. Depending on our priorities, we might use a loss leader to capture more readers, drive more sales to maximize income, or hope for more exposure—and we might choose different strategies for different books. We might even have our reasons for offering our book as a freebie, but that approach comes with even more cons to consider.

Do you need an example of how to match your goals to your book listing strategies? Check out how I focused on my goals and priorities to make these choices for myself.

Step Three:

No matter our goals, we usually want to hold on to as many of our readers from book to book as possible. Blog posts across the internet can give us lots of ideas for how to retain our readers, but some strategies come with extra pros and cons we should consider before we make the leap:

• It’s a common strategy to include links for other books in each book’s front and back matter, but where should we direct buy links to? Should we direct those links to our website (where we list all retailers), or should we use retailer-specific buy links to reduce the number of times a reader has to click?
• How can we make sure those buy links in the front and back matter don’t “expire”? And how can we include buy links for our next book if it isn’t ready yet?
• Should we include a teaser excerpt for another story in a book’s backmatter? Sometimes excerpts can help a next sale, and sometimes they can hurt—and we should learn the difference.
• Bonus content on our website encourages our readers to engage with us or form a deeper connection with us. Either way, an engaged and connected reader is more likely to stick around, remember our name, want to support us by purchasing our books, etc. Sounds great, but how do we do it?

Do you need an example of how to match your goals to your reader retention strategies? Check out how I focused on my goals and priorities to make these choices for myself.

Step Four:

One method for retaining our readers is to direct them to a newsletter. Author newsletters are essential for us to communicate with our readers, but it’s important to implement some “best practices” as well.

Like with reader retention strategies, some aspects of newsletter implementation come with extra considerations:

• There are two philosophies for how to build our list. By understanding the pros and cons of each, we can decide which approach is a better match for our priorities.
• The number of subscribers on our list doesn’t matter if they never open our emails. The four common sending strategies each have different pros and cons. How can we use those strategies to encourage readers to open our messages?
• While it’s a good first step to have subscribers open our newsletters, what we really want is for them to engage with our message and take action, such as clicking a buy link or sharing promo. Some types of content might help “train” our readers to be more engaged subscribers.
• If we have a lot of “dead weight” subscribers, we might have to pay more for our newsletter service. The standard advice for how to clean up our subscriber list is fairly drastic, but there are other options for removing uninterested subscribers.

Do you need an example of how to match your goals to your newsletter strategies? Check out how I focused on my goals and priorities to make these choices for myself.

Step Five:

Finally, we can take everything we’ve learned about our goals and priorities to come up with a broad set of strategies for a long-term “master publishing plan.” With our goals and priorities in mind, we can work backward from what we want to accomplish and plan all the steps leading up to that point.

Check out how I came up with my “leap frog” plan by choosing options for each of the steps above that matched my goals and priorities. For another example of a “master plan,” here’s a post from my blog discussing Liliana Hart’s “5 down and 1 in the hole” strategy.

Understand Your Options and Your Reasons

After two years of monthly posts, there’s a lot of information in this Indie Publishing Paths series, but I hope this breakdown of the steps we can go through to learn our options and weigh our choices provides direction through the glut. If we understand what we want to get out of each decision, we’ll better recognize when our strategy isn’t working. And if we understand the pros and cons of each option, we’ll have a better idea of how to adjust to the varying publishing landscape. *smile*

Thanks for hanging out with me during this series! And let me know if you have any questions…

After escaping Area 51 armed only with a ukulele, Jami Gold moved to Arizona and decided to become a writer, where she could put her talent for making up stuff to good use. Fortunately, her muse, an arrogant male who delights in causing her to sound as insane as possible, rewards her with unique and rich story ideas.

Fueled by chocolate, she writes paranormal romance and urban fantasy tales that range from dark to humorous, but one thing remains the same: Normal need not apply. Just ask her family—and zombie cat.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

About Stone-Cold Heart, the latest release in the Mythos Legacy series:

A gargoyle betrayed by his soldiers…

After centuries of stone-cold death, Garrett discovers his legion has deserted him. Without their help, he’ll succumb to eternal sleep once more unless he can trick the woman who woke him into trusting him with her soul.

A combat veteran scarred inside and out…

Her last night in Afghanistan, Raquel Guerrero’s team fell victim to a suicide bomber, killing everyone but her. Now, despite her determination to never again let anyone close, her sense of duty compels her to help an endangered warrior survive.

Trust isn’t in their vocabularies…

A tentative truce frees them to investigate his regiment’s abandonment—and unleashes passionate temptations. But when the truth is uncovered, Garrett and Raquel’s fragile bond—and the healing power of love—might be the only thing that keeps them alive.

Amazon | iTunes | GooglePlay | B&N | Kobo | Additional Retailers