Lately, I’ve been\u00a0reading the term “indie author” to describe self-publishing. I find it interesting that none of the authors on the professional authors e-publishing loop I referred to last week\u00a0use the term. They just say self-publishing, or re-releasing their back list in ebook form (self-publishing\u00a0is a shorter way of saying that). I’m interested in why the use of “indie author” has come about. Is it because “self-published” has a negative connotation when it comes to fiction?\u00a0Or to differentiate that you haven’t paid a vanity press to print your book, or to get you reviews, etc? Vanity press being, in my point of view,\u00a0a printer who calls themselves a publisher who will print anything sent to them. They don’t care as long as they’re getting paid. Compared to, say, paying for your own editing services (or swapping editing services) to one individual, paying for your cover art (or creating it yourself)\u00a0from probably another individual, and uploading the book to e-book venues yourself (or, again, paying someone else to do it). To ME, that’s self-publishing. When you’re really doing it all yourself instead of paying a vanity press usually way more money than necessary to do it for you.<\/p>\n
The thing I don’t understand is that all authors are “independent authors,” because we’re independent contractors. I guess if you have a 5-book contract with a major publisher…no, I would still consider that author as running her own business (which she is). Even Nora. So…isn’t Nora an indie author?<\/p>\n
Unless you’re an employee of a publishing house, you’re independent as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n
So…is “indie author” used to differentiate from “published with a major house?” To differentiate from “being under contract”? If that’s the case, I’m very much an indie author. Because I haven’t sold to a major publishing house and\u00a0I’ve never\u00a0sold a 2+ book contract.\u00a0Yet I’m not an indie author, according to how I’ve seen the term used, because I’m not self-published.<\/p>\n
What am I missing?<\/p>\n
Educate me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lately, I’ve been\u00a0reading the term “indie author” to describe self-publishing. I find it interesting that none of the authors on the professional authors e-publishing loop I referred to last week\u00a0use the term. They just say self-publishing, or re-releasing their back list in ebook form (self-publishing\u00a0is a shorter way of saying that). I’m interested in why… Continue reading Why Indie Author?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publishers-and-publishing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4138"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4168,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4138\/revisions\/4168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}