It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. That’s a good thing for me because it makes my post today easier…which I need because I’m brain dead. *smile*
Recently, I had to take hours and hours out of my schedule to fight with email. My email inbox is always a disaster because I receive between 100-150 writing-world emails on a normal day, but I valiantly try to stay on top of the important stuff. (I don’t always succeed, however.)
On top of that deluge, as I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, I also discovered that my email program had decided to move almost every message from my inbox into a different folder. (That doesn’t help with finding emails.) And then the program duplicated every message. (That doesn’t help either.)
The final count in one folder was over 23,000 emails. Grr. To clean that up, I had to manually find and delete duplicates and then move the messages back where they belonged. I got it “down” to 4000 emails. Yay! *sigh*
So if you’re waiting for an email from me, let me know. I might have gotten a bit frustrated and punched that delete button one too many times. *grin*
Anyway, let’s talk self-publishing. Indie publishing isn’t made up of just one decision to put us on one path. The choice to self-publish is just the first of dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions we’re going to have to make as part of our indie career.
My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University is working to highlight some of those choices and give us a few guidelines for figuring out how to make the best decisions for us. We don’t want to follow a mentor or advice that isn’t a good match for what we want.
To that end, last month my kickoff of the series started with the topic of knowing our goals. Depending on our goals, we might want to make different choices about pricing, release schedules…or distribution.
This month we’re going to start with a closer look at two distribution options and discuss when one might make more sense for us than another—or when a combination might work even better. (Next month we’ll look at two other options.) There’s no right or wrong answers—only what works best for us.
For example, there are many opinions out there about whether we should go exclusive with Amazon or distribute “wide” (with multiple vendors). And then if we aren’t exclusive with the Kindle Select program at Amazon, there’s no end to the opinions about where else we should sell our books and how we should list them at the retailers.
Authors have succeeded with any and all of the choices. So again, this isn’t a question of one option being “right” and the others being “wrong.”
However, depending on our goals, we might find one (or more than one) option a better fit for us. Once we know which way we want to go, we’ll know which tips to listen to for best practices and the like.
I hope you’ll join me at Fiction University for this month’s post!
Join Jami in her upcoming workshop:
Get ready for NaNo by learning how to do just enough story development to write faster with “Lost Your Pants? The Impatient Writers Guide to Plotting a Story.”
Have you seen authors succeed with different distribution paths (some with Kindle Select and some not, etc.)? If you’re self-publishing (or planning to) have you struggled with knowing where and how to distribute your stories? What pros or cons to any distribution option have you experienced or heard of?
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