Do Indie-Authors suffer from inferiority complexes? I’ve been following forums on KDP Voice of the Author and Goodreads for a bit now, and I’ve noticed some common “threads” if you can bear the play on words. Schemes to get your self-published book noticed. Begging for reviews. Moaning about one-star reviews. Sites to promote your self-published book. Ways to trade reviews or move books up on “lists”. Do I need a new cover/book description/agent/blog? Requests for recommendations of overlooked self-published works. Cheek by jowl: I need reviews to become a bestseller/someone is rating my books unfairly, how can I make them stop?
Here’s my question: If you present your work professionally (and that means well-edited and properly formatted) when exactly does the customer in the Kindle Store tumble to the fact that your book is self-published? You have to scroll down really far, well below the book description to find the publisher data. Do readers do that? Or do they just go to the Look Inside, then make their choice about purchasing? I looked at a couple of pages of an Amazon Search for “Epic Fantasy”, as a test, and I really couldn’t tell unless I clicked on an individual book and looked inside it. There’s no cover blurb that screams “Self-Published”.
If we can remember that we are Indie Authors and Indie Publishers, and do all aspects of both jobs with equal attention, if we make our writing the best it can be, and don’t rush a project into print too soon, we are more likely to have a decent product to promote—and no reason to apologetically refer to our books as anything other than…books!
And then the readers, the sales, the reviews will come. But the writing comes first!
Here’s my question: If you present your work professionally (and that means well-edited and properly formatted) when exactly does the customer in the Kindle Store tumble to the fact that your book is self-published? You have to scroll down really far, well below the book description to find the publisher data. Do readers do that? Or do they just go to the Look Inside, then make their choice about purchasing? I looked at a couple of pages of an Amazon Search for “Epic Fantasy”, as a test, and I really couldn’t tell unless I clicked on an individual book and looked inside it. There’s no cover blurb that screams “Self-Published”.
If we can remember that we are Indie Authors and Indie Publishers, and do all aspects of both jobs with equal attention, if we make our writing the best it can be, and don’t rush a project into print too soon, we are more likely to have a decent product to promote—and no reason to apologetically refer to our books as anything other than…books!
And then the readers, the sales, the reviews will come. But the writing comes first!
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