Or why I need a very long holiday from it
This week, I released a video: Why I’m stepping back from independent publishing.
In it, I describe many of the problems I have with the current state of indie publishing, including the “scene” or community, or whatever you want to call the blurry group of “authors” and their culture. This is a video I recorded months ago but never released because I wanted to see if the industry or my feelings changed in that time. The energy felt right this week, but truth be told, these are thoughts that have been in my head for more than a year and have leaked out while I covered other topics since then.
People in the comments focused a lot on AI, but that is only a small part. Kind of like a small, almost meaningless, conflict causing a divorce, it’s really just the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the exit ramp.
So, with that in mind, let me sum up what I said:
1) I want to avoid stagnation and try something new.
2) The indie fiction market is garbage – and it has been bad for a very long time. Rather than being about originality without gatekeepers, it has become a field of frozen micro genres with zero innovation and a built-in resistance to originality. I do not like this or feel motivated to participate in it anymore.
3) AI has made Amazon a worthless marketplace for consumers because of the insane signal-to-noise ratio it causes. Most AI promptbros do not understand this, as they cannot comprehend or predict second-order effects and above. The analogy would be Zimbabwe to those who understand.
4) The author culture in independent publishing is terrible and has gotten worse. Authors, as it turns out, hate writing books. They wanted to use ghost writers in the past; now they want to use AI, and it’s embarrassing to be associated with these sorts of people.
To add a bit to the above:
The indie fiction “culture” likes to talk about itself a lot, and the real way to make money is to sell author services—things like book covers, editing, marketing services, or (especially lucrative) courses for naïve new authors looking to find the “magic formula” for success. You know you’ve hit peak grift when the target is no longer the reader, but the author, and this has been the case for perhaps 10 years. If you start to see people selling “prompt services” (or similar things like courses on AI prompting) for authors, if they don’t already have them, this should signal to you that any rush to cash in on AI bookslop has long since passed and the real customer is the (gullible) prompter, or wannabe author.
So that’s what’s up. I need a holiday from “indie publishing.” In the meantime, we can all consider how we (as both readers and writers) can set up and use filters to find those increasingly rare, original, good books. Publishers are already in a position to do this, but can they? Their house seems to me not to be in great order, either. I’ll be working on some other art, maybe trying to better fuse my two high-level skills of music and writing. Wish me luck.
Oh, and you can still buy my books if you want to.
I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.
I think your writing conundrum combined with the the awful state of ai in the industry is tainting your outlook just a little too much here. But there is an awful lot of truth in here, too.
But you are correct in saying you should only write when you want to write, and you should only write stories that you find fulfilling. That is indeed a good reason to step back and take a break.
You are also correct in that, it’s a horrible time to be an indie writer, but that will pass, or things will change, or a way to differentiate good writing will crop up again. One could say it’s a bad time to be selling indie books, but it’s just as good a time as ever to be a writer.
It’s just as valid to be writing while the industry is down so that you have more to sell when it comes back up. Of course, that’s only good to do if you have stories you want to tell. This is a great time to take a break, too. Indie writers should be letting their creativity guide them here, but also, they should be building their skills.
Which comes to your point about most indie books being bad. Yes, they are. An awful lot have typos galore, struggle just with writing sentences let alone dialogue, plots go nowhere or too fast or drop off, or feel wholesale like a recent movie with different names. With no gatekeepers for the lowest level of quality, a high percentage were always bad. And AI has made that worse.
But saying not to read indie books is folly. The good indie authors have to step up their networking game. They have to gatekeep themselves.
A sizable portion on my and my husband’s book sales are at conventions, when we get to them. (We’ve taken a break because my second child is a handful at them, but we’ll get back to it.) We didn’t outsell the indie creatives who were doing fanart, but we definitely outsold creatives who did only original things. Most indie books at conventions are middling or bad, too, but we always brought the “social proof” with us. Previews to show you can write. Reviews to show other people like your stuff. I’m one of those headstrong artists who always felt I needed to make our own covers, and new covers, now that I’ve improved, are going to help even more, too.
But… I think physical sales to real people are going to be more important for a few years. Giving physical previews and having your reviews on display are going to be important. Being careful with the quality and voice of those you network with will be important. People joke about webrings coming back to get around social media, but, man, I think that would be great.
Most of all, don’t unpublish your books. This feeling will pass. This time will pass. Let your books exist as long as they can. Leave the good indie books exist, as proof that good indie books can exist.
I thoroughly enjoyed your books, especially the Eternal Dream core series, but I understand what you’re saying. It does feel a little stagnant out there. You’re still my favorite living author, though, and I if you ever publish again you can have my money.
You’re right, David. The low-price/high-volume long tail KDP sales model that kicked off the indie boom in 2013 is dead as disco. The fact that your impressive debut Kickstarter for a single book beat your Amazon sales, and did it in a single month, should tell writers which way the wind is blowing.