What advice on self-publishing would you give to aspiring Indie authors?
Can I go on a bit here, Teresa?
1)Write short books. No one can be bothered to read long books, sadly, as my shelves are full of the blighters and I tend to write them too. A book less than 50k should do it. Consider a series, like my The Ritual. That was fun to do, more fun than actually writing the original novel. 20-25k each episode.
2)Think long term. I don’t anticipate making any money in this business until 2016 and if I haven’t done that by then, I’ll pack it in and go back on the tools.
3)Think about your marketing. Your ability and persistence when it comes to the marketing of your work is three times as important as the ability to write well (and luck is five times more important than that, sorry to point out.) On Twitter, you will be competing for space with genre tribes, concrete cliques, stalkers, tweetstickers, pimping pairs, top bloggers, one-shot tourists, eager debutants, review hunters, brand-savvy seasoned pros who’ve sold thirty thousand books, who know every trick in the book, plus all the Indie rappers, artists and photographers out there looking for a piece of the pie. Plus, I neglect to mention, the autobots and buffer merchants who make it so hard for everyone else because they don’t read your Tweets, only pump out their own. Work out the dynamics of that. Work out what that would mean if everyone did it. We’d be stuffed, wouldn’t we? Then you have the Egyptian bazaar aspect: Put a tweet up and you have about two minutes before it disappears forever.