How to succeed at Indie Publishing

Follow this simple template to success (or do what I did and ignore the template and just shut your eyes and pray it turns out OK)

I have spent enough time in the various self-publishing groups and gently cyberstalking phenomenally successful indie authors to know that the key to success is not rocket science. Here is the surefire template for success¹.

The Surefire Template for Success:

1. Write crime fiction²

2. Make them police procedurals

3. Write in the third person, past tense

4. Have a male lead (probably a DCI, middle aged, white)

5. Give him a drinking habit/weight issue/messy divorce/anger management problem

6. Be funny if you can, but at least make the team a kind of family

7. Probably best to use a male or gender-neutral pen name

8. Write fast

9. Write a series. The more the better

10. Make them good.

Now let’s mark my work

I’m not the only one, Chat GPT.

1. Write crime fiction. Tick (phew!)

2. Make them police procedurals. Big cross. See below.

3. Write in the third person, past tense. Easy win!

4. Have a male lead (probably a DCI, middle aged, white). X Fail. Insert the Family Fortunes noise. The main character is a young female journalist. The main police officer is a middle-aged female DS of mixed heritage.

5. Give him a drinking habit/weight issue/messy divorce/anger management problem. Hmm. Half a tick? A quarter? More on my struggles with being mean to my own characters another time.

6. Be funny if you can, but at the least make the team a kind of family. Well *I* think they’re funny.

7. Probably best to be a man or use a male/gender-neutral pen name. ?? TBC

8. Write fast. Bah.

9. Write a series. The more the better. Does two count as a lot? It felt like a lot when I was writing them.

10. Make them good. Please god.

I will write more about the rest of the list in another newsletter, but in the meantime let us dwell on my first few failures.

Write Police Procedurals

When I started on this project, I didn’t read much crime fiction. Yes, I had read a few Agatha Christies, most of the Sherlock Holmes books, and I studied a Wilkie Collins at university, but apart from that I couldn’t really think of a crime novel I’d read.

This was a bad start. It already felt like a mercenary endeavour (more on writing for money in future), but to write a genre I didn’t read added an element of snobbery. Did I think I was too good for crime fiction? Surely not. Given I will read anything that contains either 1. dragons or 2. mice who talk, I don’t think I can be charged with snootiness about any genre. It just wasn’t for me. However, I think we can all agree that, in life, it’s best to try not to be Gerald Ratner. I wanted to like my own products, you know?

Template Schmemplate

Luckily, salvation was right around the corner. I realised that of course I read crime fiction! Were Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels not crime fiction?! And then I discovered other authors. Authors like Belinda Bauer, Janice Hallett, Lisa Jewell, Elly Griffiths. All brilliant.

The cover may be to market (minus a red coat ofc), but the present tense is not

There was just one problem: none follow the Surefire Template for Success. (Apart, possibly, for Elly Griffiths, but not in the books I have read by her).

Now you may say that this is evidence that the Template is more a set of suggestions. See how brilliantly these people have done, you might cry! Lisa Jewell is at pains to let you know she doesn’t bathe in £50 notes, but she also sold 2m copies of one book in the US alone. Belinda Bauer was the first crime writer to be long-listed for the Booker. These people are rocking it.

But they aren’t self-publishing to appeal to a very specific audience, that is to say, Whale Readers. These are people who reliably read at least one book a week. (I am in an incredibly book-hungry crime fiction group and I can tell you that one book a day is more the norm.)

So yes, these writers break the rules, and yes these writers may be living in £3m homes, but they are traditionally published with proper marketing people. Their books can jump out of the crime fiction readership pool and into the literary fiction and popular fiction reader pools.

Woman in a red coat for book 3 though!

For my plan to work, I was meant to stick to the Template For Success.

But then I started writing, and what came out on the page was a journalist trying to blag her way into a hotel. You see? This is what happens when you let your subconscious do the talking. After all, it’s easier for me to write a journalist (something I used to be) than it is to try to work out if police are calling it SOCO or CSI these days (the jury is still out).

So there we have it. I have failed to write to the Indie template and, for reasons I will share another time, I have opted not to try to find a publisher who can shoehorn my books into the right eyeballs.

Pray for me, people.

So where are these books anyway?

Good question, I’m glad I typed it for myself. Due to yet another egregious error, and for reasons too dull to get into (but I’m sure that won’t stop me getting into them eventually), I wrote book two first. This means I cannot publish the first book until I have finished editing the second book (that is to say, book one). Since I am very much enjoying pretending to have a career as an author, this is not as distressing as you might imagine. Currently, I can live in a beautiful land of what ifs, where I imagine my books will magically buck the trend and succeed despite the fact I have failed to follow the Surefire Template for Success.

But to actually answer the question, I am about half way through editing the first book and then it will need to go to a proper editor. I have to get the covers designed and then I’ve got to lay it all out and get the print and digital files made. Write the blurb, work out how to do all the various Amazon settings, think of a title and a pen name, find ARC and/or Beta readers and learn how to do Facebook ads that don’t suck.

Just thinking about all this makes me want to scrap the whole idea and go to my allotment instead.

Look how happy I am on my allotment.

Links that will now justify the time I spend online:

'POOR THINGS' MADE ME SICK: I'M REDESIGNING IT. Art YouTuber LavenderTowne perfectly summarises everything I hated about this film whilst doing mesmerising “fan” art. (h/t my daughter.)

Herds of Moss Balls mysteriously roam the Arctic together. Little moss balls called Glacier Mice wander about and no one knows how or why. It’s too much! I heard them discussing these on No Such Thing As A Fish and now I just want Miyazaki to swear off retirement for one more film.

‘“I don't like no whips no chains and you can't tie me down.” I mean this is where we've fallen since 1968.’ Rick Beato is on very amusing form here ripping apart the song lyrics in the Top 10, while also digressing to point out that the banjo part in Beyonce’s Texas Hold ‘Em is wrong (‘Someone should have said, that note doesn’t really sound that good, it’s kind of lame.’)

LISTEN! PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying pairs brilliantly with Wall of Eyes by The Smile. I am obsessed.

1. Disclaimer: Surefire here means “possible.”

2. Or romance, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.