Marketing Issue 2: Introduction to being an Indie Author Part 1

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Chapter One: Introduction

It was October 9th, 2016 when I first hit the publish button on Amazon. I call myself a true blue blood Indie Author (I never said modesty was my strong point, now did I? Hahaa…). But from that point onwards, I’ve never looked back.  As the founding member of The Book Club, I have been inundated with queries as to how to publish a book. Aspiring authors often approach us thinking we are publishers. Fortunately, we are not. We are a group of authors and that’s why we are able to give you a clear picture of how things are. We are the ‘helpers’ who love to guide every Indie Author to reach the finishing line.

Listening to the new aspiring authors has been a learning process for me. I freely gave them my knowledge, but in return, I gained a lot from them. Each author had a different journey to make. Every author who approached me had a path of their own to follow. I walked on that path with them. One author started as a blogger and became the number one Indie contemporary romance writer from India. She rose to such heights that even Amazon had to recognize her popularity and today traditional publishers approach her instead of the other way around. This is the power of Indie authors.

Another started as a traditional author and shifted to the Indie world since the publishers told her that her books were not selling. Today her book is a bestseller, ranking between 1 to 10 in the romance category.  I am not promoting them, though I suppose, that is a second nature to me. Here I am trying to draw a graph that authors, whether Indie or Traditional, have crossed over to being an Indie author and vice versa. While traditional is still a dream come true for many authors, Indie is a land of unseen possibilities where only the reader is our judge.

And as for me, I have said ‘no’ to one of the top-most publishers in the UK and a few publishers in India because they wanted to change my story.

The publisher from the UK told me that I have to remove ‘the relatives’ from my Finding the Angel. According to them, a love story is only between a boy and a girl. I beg to differ. We are Indians. We have stories between families. And in all the reviews I got after it was published, readers have loved my side characters which they felt have enriched my stories. Whether it’s Hariram from Finding the Angel or Mr. Charkraborty in Destined, all have an audience out there who cherished the contribution of the side characters to my stories.

To be continued on 2nd October.....