… a whole new self publishing generation of writers have come up behind me
Over the past week on Threads, I have asked a few questions. I asked how much money people were making from self publishing, because that had recently been in the news, and because we got the shiny new poll feature, and I had to try it out, right?
And then I asked what self published writers found the most difficult thing.
The results were both surprising and unsurprising, and made me realise two things.
In the first place that nothing ever changes. Writers still find marketing the most difficult, and by far the majority of self published writers don’t make much money. This is easy to forget when you move mostly in circles of people that spend thousands on advertising.
The second thing I realised was that a new self publishing generation of writers have come up behind me. Those people are having a hard time finding valuable information. I was part of the Kindleboards generation. We had a central place where we could find information and discuss self publishing. The Kindleboards is still active, but it’s a pretty anaemic place these days, and most of the useful action happens in Facebook groups.
Anyone can set up a group on Facebook. There are some really good groups, but it’s very hard to know which ones are good. Apart from the really good groups, there are also lots of mindbogglingly awful groups: ones that are full of spam, and groups where the information that gets disseminated is likely to get your Amazon account banned and everything in between.
Pay to play?
It’s become much harder to figure out where to get your advice without having to with part a few hundred dollars for a course or some kind of membership, and you don’t even know whether that’s going to be worth the money for you.
When I came up through the Kindleboards, a lot of information was available for free. It’s called paying it forward, and I’d like to do that for upcoming writers, for no other reason than that I got it myself. I don’t sell courses, I don’t sell consulting. I make my money primarily from writing fiction. Yes, it is true that I have some books about self publishing. They are an aggregation of posts of wrote on the subject in different places. You can get them for the price of an e-book, which is a lot less than getting a $400 course where you’re not sure whether it’s right for you.
So with those realisations, I will be writing a couple of posts about the basics of self publishing, and I will continue to publicise them through my Facebook page and other social media accounts. I don’t open comments on these pages, because I got sick of dealing with a deluge of spam comments, but you are more than welcome to comment on the Facebook page, to ask them on my Patreon or ko-fi page, or other social media outlets where I’m active.
