Interestingly enough, I think I’ve been asked why I self-published more so than I’ve been asked about indie authors in general...so maybe this should have been my first post. *shrugs* Either way, buckle up, because I have quite the tale to tell!
Actually, I’m going to keep it short, because I’m supposed to be writing Bound and Determined right now…
From a surface level, I became an indie author (in other words, I self-published my books) because there weren’t really any other options. As a thirteen-year-old girl with a raw, unpolished manuscript who didn’t know jack-diddly-squat about the publishing industry except that I’d have to sign a contract, what was I supposed to do? My first attempt at a proposal was absolutely horrendous, and there were virtually no publishers in my genre who accepted unsolicited queries. Scratch that. If you’ve read one of my books, then you know that there are virtually no publishers in my genre period.
So when my aunt suggested publishing through Amazon, I set aside my dreams of traditional publishing and began researching Kindle Direct Publishing.
(Let it be noted that my idea of research is watching one video and reading 300 words, deeming that sufficient, then immediately jumping right into the trial-and-error stage of exploration and discovery.)
A week later, what was I doing? Uploading my manuscript and clicking Publish.
Now, that might not seem like much of a publishing journey, but at the heart, I was more than an impatient and clueless child who went after the first thing that came her way. Nay, I strove for freedom and independence, for ease of operation and simplicity, for uniqueness and creativity.
I didn’t want to sign a contract. I didn’t want to abide by the rules of the publisher, who dictated how many books I could write in a series, how and where and when my books would be sold, what I could do with my books. I didn’t want to be without control or authority. I didn’t want to be told what I could or couldn’t write, or to feel forced to write for an editor, agent, publisher, or market.
I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to wait until I’d completed Novel #84 before an agent ever took an interest or a publisher ever accepted it. I didn’t want to wait on responses and rejections. I didn’t want to let my book—no matter how bad it was—to sit on a shelf (figuratively speaking, of course, as it was technically on my computer’s hard drive at the time) for thirty years.
No, I wanted to be myself. To be in control. To have the final say over what happens to my creative endeavors and intellectual property. To work by my own deadlines and at my own pace. To publish what I wanted, unpublish what I wanted, and rewrite what I wanted. I wanted to put a story out into the world that I believe is Holy Spirit-inspired and God-breathed (the typos I will take credit for).
That is why I became an indie author.