The Journey from Traditional to Indie Publishing

Explore my evolution from traditionally published author to independent publisher, revealing the challenges, lessons learned, and the empowering decision to embrace self-publishing. Learn about the critical shifts in my narrative that shaped my vision for inclusive and accessible literature. 
• Understanding the differences between traditional, indie, and hybrid publishing 
• The pivotal moments and decisions in my journey as a writer 
• Insights into building a small press and advocating for diversity 
• The challenges faced when transitioning to indie authorship 
• Essential tips and strategies for aspiring indie authors 
• Encouragement to embrace and celebrate every writer's unique pathway

Chapters

• 0:01 Journey to Self-Publishing
• 19:05 Navigating Indie Self-Publishing Industry
• 32:41 Navigating Indie Author Marketing and Promotion
• 43:29 Mastering the Art of Pitching

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes. I'm Amra Payelich, writer, teacher and storyteller. Pull up a chair and let's dive into stories about writing life and lessons learned, sharing wisdom from my armchair to yours. So welcome back to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes. And today I'm going to be talking about my journey to self-publishing, sharing why, how and providing some tips. So I'm going to first take you back and talk about my journey as an author. So I'm originally a traditionally published author. So I think I might need to just explain three things before I begin. So a traditionally published author is one who gets a publisher. The publisher pays them for their rights and then the publisher publishes their book, promotes their book, pays for the editing, pays for the, and the author receives 10% of the royalties from that every book sold. Usually, a publisher pays an advance on royalties. So you receive a payment, a lump sum payment, and that payment might be split up in a few different payments, where it might be upon signing, upon submitting, you know one part of the manuscript or the whole manuscript, and then on publication, and you have to sell enough books to earn back to pay back that royalty. So only once you have sold enough books to pay back that initial royalty. Will you get more royalties?

Speaker 1: 1:50

An independently published author is someone who has the book, has their intellectual property, and they decide to publish it themselves sort of like a small business, thinking of themselves as a small business. And publishing goes through the process of sourcing people to edit, so paying someone to edit their book and then doing all of the things to get it published, and promotion, paying for promotion, and they earn whatever profit they make from the books they sold. And there is one third model, which is called the hybrid model. So this is when a publisher publishes your book and you pay them for providing you with this service, for doing the editing, the cover, the formatting and the publishing. However, the rights are still yours. You still own that intellectual property. They do not earn anything on those books sold because you have paid them for that service. You have paid them for that service. So I just wanted to make clear that if you are getting published and a publisher expects you to pay them, or if they are a publishing service that supports writers with the publication, then you own and retain those rights. So now that I've explained those three publishing models, I'm going to talk through my publishing journey.

Speaker 1: 3:44

So I'm one of those people that was always wanted to be a writer. That's all I wanted to do as a young person. I was always scribbling away writing, even when I couldn't write, I was doing circles on a page. When I finished high school, I did not know what I wanted to do. I did not have any direction, but I knew what I wanted to do. I did not have any direction, but I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

Speaker 1: 4:07

About a year or two out of high school, I found out about this course that is called the Diploma of Arts in Professional Writing and Editing. The course is still around. I did it at the Council of Adult Education and Holmes Glen TAFE. It is also at RMIT and Victoria University that I know of, and there might be some other universities that offer it, and so this was an opportunity to sort of learn about the publishing industry. There were different courses offered, you know, like learning short stories, novel writing, and this was taught by industry professionals, so by people who had actually been published, had the experience in industry and knew what they were talking about, knew how to steer us through that process, and very soon after I started that course, I started sort of following the tips that I was given and I had three things published and I got paid for the first time for my writing and I of course then started, you know, working on a novel, finished the course, working on a novel um, and working towards seeking a publishing contract, um, which took a little while.

Speaker 1: 5:32

I wrote a few different things until I found something that I wanted to um to submit for publication. So my first romance novel at the time, my first novel at that time, was a romance novel which I decided not to seek publication for because I felt like I wanted to do other things. And so the first novel I wrote was titled the Good Daughter and it was semi-autobiographical, about a girl like me who was of Bosnian background, who had a mother who suffered from bipolar and who lived in a suburb called St Albans in the western suburbs of Melbourne. And so I had taken a long time to write that book, as you do when you're starting out. But I had also developed a portfolio before I had that published. So I was published in anthologies, in the 2004 and 2005 Best Australian Stories which was published at that time, and I had received some review mentions. So that means that when that book was published and the critics were reviewing that anthology. They were mentioning my stories and gave me some beautiful reviews, and so when I had my novel ready for publication I already had a publication track record and I also had the foundation about how to submit.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So when you are submitting for publication you have two choices. You can try and get an agent, a literary agent, so they represent you and they submit the books on your behalf and try and get a contract for you and negotiate a contract for you. They also take a percentage of your income for that service. Or you can attempt to seek a publisher directly, so you submit directly to the publisher and get a contract and do your best to negotiate if you can or if you know how, or you just sort of sign whatever contract they present to you. So I had decided that I would first attempt submitting to a literary agent and I made a list at that time of the literary agents in Australia and I started at the top with the biggest literary agency I think it's still the biggest literary agency, curtis Brown and I submitted a query letter that I had, you know, really worked on and received feedback on and you know, to see whether they would be interested in reading my book. They were. I had a request for the full manuscript. Eventually the agent read the manuscript.

Speaker 1: 8:50

In the meantime I had submitted my novel for a prize. It was an unpublished prize it's called the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards for an unpublished manuscript and I had gotten shortlisted. So then I contacted the agent and said to them oh, I've been shortlisted, and they sort of moved my manuscript up quicker to the top of the pile and they started the process of submitting. At this point, because I had been shortlisted for this prize, I already had this unbelievable experience of publishers giving me their cards and asking me to submit it directly to them. And this is the interesting thing, success begets success. And so because I had already been shortlisted for this prize and sort of had a profile already and then I was in this opportunity to meet people in the industry, so my agent submitted my manuscript to five publishers. I received my first offer within a few weeks. Then I received a rejection from publisher two, three and four, and then I received a second offer from publisher five and we sort of talked about what to do and I decided to which publisher to accept the offer from, signed the contract and I was on the way to becoming a published author. And that novel came out and I had a wonderful experience beautiful reviews, a beautiful book launch. Speaking at events, um, it was very, very beautiful and amazing.

Speaker 1: 10:45

And then I wrote the follow-up book, um, which was a you know sequel to this first book. Because I love the characters, I wanted to keep writing about them and, um, because my sales weren't that great. The global financial crisis had occurred, which meant that people weren't buying that many books and a lot of publishers had experienced a downturn in sales. My publisher wasn't interested in that second book and so then I wasn't sure what to do. I remembered I had that romance novel. I thought romance sells. I was talking strategy with my agent. She was not enthused about young adult literature at that time, and so I pivoted into romance and then sort of had a bit of a tough time where I everything that I wanted to write. I sort of thought, oh, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere.

Speaker 1: 11:51

And I wrote my memoir and ended up parting ways with my agent and seeking publication for that myself, because she had submitted it to a few places and um didn't receive any interest and I continued submitting and had it accepted for publication and again got shortlisted for a national prize where I got a nice chunk of money, um, and sort of realized, well, I can do this myself, I can submit um books myself, um, but that point something had shifted and something had changed. I realized I had quite a few books in my backlist, books that were just sort of sitting there collecting dust, in a sense, on my hard hard drive, and I had started investigating and learning about this new world, about indie authors or independently published authors, so authors who basically took the bull in the horn. What's the saying? Um? So I had heard about authors who were taking control of their publishing journey, and that was something I wanted to do, and so I really started sort of learning about that world. And in the meantime I got my rights back to the romance novels that I had had published, and so I thought, well, I'm going to try and publish that. And I also had quite a few short stories that had been published in anthologies, and I'd always dreamed about publishing a short story collection. But those are not really designed much by publishers unless the author has a proven track record, and so I published my short story collection. I published all these different things, and so that's the process of me transitioning from a traditionally published author to an independently published author.

Speaker 1: 14:06

I'm now going to talk through the reasons why I chose to be an independently published author. So one of the things that was wonderful about being traditionally published was getting the support from publishers, where they sort of do everything for you. But the other side of that is that you have no control. You don't get to decide how to promote the book, where to promote the book, what the cover looks like, because they have paid you for those rights and so the publisher takes control of that. The only control you have is pitching them a book and either they accept it or they don't. And I was reaching a point in my life where I wanted more control. I wanted to be able to make decisions for myself.

Speaker 1: 15:03

Another reason that I decided to be an indie author was I had realized that my writing had grown and had become quite polished. So my memoir that I submitted to my publisher did not have much editing to it. It had proofreading and copy editing, but structurally didn't need any work. The blurbs that I had written for the last few books, so the descriptions on the back had started being used in the books that were published. I was seeing them showing up slightly tweaked, but what I had originally come up with, and so I was starting to see that I had developed some skills that would serve me well in this world. The other thing is I had not been a very successful traditionally published author. I had received publishing contracts and I have received royalties and prize money from winning or being shortlisted for prizes being shortlisted for prizes but it was not a significant income to really, you know, be able to live from my writing in any way, and so I had slowly started being a little bit more entrepreneurial about my writing and exploring ways of making money and looking at using my teaching background in terms of delivering workshops and doing freelance writing, and so I had started seeing that I have got all these different skills that I could use to try and promote and to try and generate income.

Speaker 1: 17:05

And the last reason was the publishing industry, especially in Australia, was always small. It was always small and it was always very, very competitive, but it's now getting a little bit harder. Those of you who are following the industry and who are following what's happening in the publishing industry, you will have noticed that a lot of independent author, independent publishing companies are now being acquired by large publishing companies. So the latest acquisition is, I think it's Simon Schuster and text, and so, as that happens, it sort of creates a little bit less opportunities. And I was also reaching the point in my life where there were books and stories I wanted to tell and I wanted to be able to just put them out and not sort of have to justify and try and get a publisher to convince them that this is something that people would like to read. And the more that I was investigating and looking at independent authors, I was seeing quite a few of them having success in terms of. I was seeing quite a few of them having success in terms of publishing books and running it like a small business and, you know, being able to actually transition into being full-time authors, which is almost unheard of in Australia as a traditionally published author. Most of us have other jobs. There are just the very few unicorns who are able to be full-time authors and earn an income, a living income, from that. And so those were the reasons.

Speaker 1: 19:05

How did I become an independent author? So I wanted to think of myself as a small business, and that was really hard to conceptualize, because there is something so personal about being a writer and then being a writer where you have created this book that is almost an extension of you, but then you have to think of it as a product that you are selling, and so that is very hard as a writer, as a creator, and so I almost had to create a persona. I had to create this persona of myself being a small press. So I was not just an author who was publishing my books, I was a small press and I was creating a space and addressing a need that has not been addressed in the publishing industry. And so I gave my small press a name it's called Pishukin Press and I did some thinking about my vision. What is it that I wanted to achieve with this small press?

Speaker 1: 20:28

So I represent an underrepresented area of publishing. I am an author from a non-English speaking background, from a multicultural background, a Bosnian Muslim background, and there is not enough diversity in the publishing industry in terms of representing different types of people and cultures, and so that was one area that I was addressing and one area that I was wanting to publish books in, and then my teaching background informed the other part of my vision. So the second part of my vision was accessibility. As a teacher, as a secondary school teacher, as a secondary school English teacher, I work with a lot of young people who struggle to read, who don't come from families where parents read to them every night and they get them comfortable with reading. Their parents are from a non-English speaking background. They are migrants. They don't have that ability to do that, and so I saw the need for books that would support reading, and so my vision is publishing books in every format that I can to support accessibility. So I publish my books as an e-book, as a paperback, as a hardcover, in dyslexic font and in large print, and audiobooks. So I am investing in having audiobooks by human narrators, but for some books I do have AI narrators that have narrated the books.

Speaker 1: 22:35

And so by taking that vision approach and thinking about this as being something bigger than me and thinking about it in terms of creating a small press, a small business that is addressing a need out there, I was then able to put on this business hat that you need to put on when you are thinking of yourself as an indie author. So I now had the building blocks, of being a small business, of looking at publishing. Now I needed to learn how to do it. So how did I learn to publish and to go through this process? So there are organizations that can help support writers. There is the Alliance of Independent Authors that I am a member of, and they have tutorials and podcasts and articles and resources. There is a Facebook group 20 books to 50k and so that book was started many years ago with the understanding that you would need to write and publish 20 books in order to sell a certain amount of copies every day of each of those books in order to earn a $50,000 income, which was a living income at the time when this group was created. There is the Creative Pen Podcast, there is the self-publishing formula, and so, as I started entering this world and following up all these resources and doing courses and investing and paying in these courses, I learnt the process of how to publish a book, and so one of the things that I'm focused on, obviously, is upskilling myself, learning as many of these skills as I can. So I already had the good foundation in terms of my writing, in terms of understanding the publishing process and what was required there, and now I needed to learn all the other skills.

Speaker 1: 25:03

So I needed to learn how to design covers, how to format covers for publication, how to format a manuscript for publication, how to create metadata in order to publish the books. So metadata is obviously the title, the author, the blurb, but then there's also the categories. What categories does it fall into? Um, and so there's this product called publisher rocket. That, uh, gives you the opportunity to search all of this, to create the metadata, how to optimize the metadata. So, because I'm doing the different formats, I had to look at how is the metadata supposed to be organized to differentiate the different formats. I also then had to create covers that showed. So I had to create logos for each different edition so that, for example, when someone was looking at the dyslexic font edition, there was a logo on it that would say it was dyslexic font and the metadata would tell the author this.

Speaker 1: 26:14

So there was a lot of thinking. Obviously, with anything new that you do, you do all the research, all of the research, and then you go to actually do it, and it's a steep learning curve, steep, steep learning curve. But you cannot get to that point. You have to go through that hard moment of actually doing it, of actually releasing it out into the world and just seeing what will happen. So some successes that I have had as an indie author is obviously the joy see all of the books there, the joy of seeing my books published, but also generating income from my backlist.

Speaker 1: 27:08

So I had three romance novels, two of them that had been traditionally published, that were not very successful because it was when the traditional publishing industry was trying to emulate what independent authors were doing and they established these imprints that were called digital first imprints. So because publishing traditional publishing models are based on selling paperback versions, they actually sell eBooks at a much higher price point, and so they were noticing that indie authors were selling at a lower price point and were using all these promotional strategies like a reader magnet, which is a short story or a prequel or something to get people in and interested in order to buy and read the books. And so they were trying this. So I had my books bought and published with these models and I made a ridiculous amount of money. I made $10 per book and that's because it was a pittance to begin with, and then you know the percentage of my royalty, then the percentage that goes to my agent, and you know it was very small to begin with.

Speaker 1: 28:34

When I published these books myself, I made 10 times that, and so just by going through the process of looking at my backlist and looking at all those practice books that I had written that either I didn't submit because I thought, oh, I don't know if there's anything here, or that I submitted and were rejected, I was able to put them to use. The other thing that I was able to do was to get the rights back to my first debut novel, which had been published as the Good Daughter, and conceive that and reconceptualised that as a series that I dubbed the Sassy Saints series, and so I was able to publish, or republish the first book under a new title, sabiha's Dilemma. The second book that I wrote that was rejected by the publisher as Alma's Loyalty, and then finish the series by writing a third book, jessie's Triumph, and so finish that arc and, through that process, have that satisfaction of completing something, completing the series. And you know that book is the book of my heart, because it was my first attempt at sharing stories about myself and leaning into this own voices model, which is writing about your personal experience and writing about what you know and what your cultural background is or what your identity is, and representing that. So that was very satisfying to be able to do that and go through the process of learning how to promote, how to think about teaching resources that I can create. Because, again, I've got that other hat on as a teacher and I have actually written teaching resources and teaching notes for books in the traditional publishing industry. So I wrote the teaching notes for the anthology I co-edited called Growing Up Muslim in Australia. I wrote teaching notes for other authors and so this is something that I knew that I could do and that I had the experience in, and that I could do this for my own books and create those teaching resources and think about what is it in terms of the themes that I want to represent and that I want to use these books for.

Speaker 1: 31:14

So what has been the hardest thing about being an indie author? The first one is that there is this stigma, especially in Australia, associated with being self-published. There is this view that you only take this path if you are not being published traditionally, if a publisher does not want your books. I'm here to dispel that myth. That is completely incorrect. I have read books from many indie authors who never had a traditionally published contract, who just wrote and learned on the job. And, yes, they did have to in some instances go back and re-edit those books when they had written a few more books under the belt and they had developed their skills. But that's not a bad thing. That happens even now in the traditional publishing industry, where some books that might have been outdated for some reason or have some references, authors have or publishers have gone back to re-edit them. So that is a natural part of the process to give them new covers, to give them a new lease on life. A new lease on life.

Speaker 1: 32:41

The other thing that has been really hard as an independent author marketing and promotion. When you are a traditionally published author, the publisher does all that for you. They submit your books to get reviewed, they have the networks for it and they pay for those services. They organize the interviews and the marketing and they do all of that for you. And so coming into this side of it and having to do that myself was really, really hard. Honestly, it was like you know those dreams you have where you are naked and you are out on the street and everyone's staring at you and laughing that's what it was like.

Speaker 1: 33:32

I could not do it. I really struggled with it, and so I had to create strategies of doing that. So the first thing I had to do was figure out how to promote on social media, and so I set myself a goal I had to post every day. I had to post something about my books, something that would promote them, and so I started teaching myself how to create graphics, how to create reels, how to look at my books and think about what are the tropes, what are the themes, what are the things that I can create to market it. And the only way to do this is to get into it and do it, but also to emulate other people. So now you see a lot of graphics with the tropes, and so you know, showing what the tropes are. Then you also see a lot of graphics where it's like excerpts of the book and quotes from the book, and so I had to teach myself how to do this, and I'm going to tell you honestly, my first efforts were terrible. They were really amateurish and really rusty.

Speaker 1: 34:48

But because I set myself that goal of having to post every day, I kept practicing, I kept, I kept practicing. I kept using Canva to learn how to create different types of graphics, to learn how to post them successfully in terms of the formats, and then, as I descended further into this world, I learned about different tools to do this. So I learned that there were social media schedulers, and so I bought software for that, which is called Postly, that I use to be able to post the one thing across five different platforms at the same time. I use it to schedule my posts, so I don't have to do it every day. I can just actually set them up and they just keep rotating. So that was the very much the hard, hard part of it.

Speaker 1: 35:48

And I talk now to my friends who are traditionally published, and one of them has a book coming out soon and she's so shy and so finds it so hard to promote it on social media and to sort of talk about it. And I tried talking to her and telling her think about it, because this is what I had to do. I had to think about it, as I'm just having fun and I'm just telling you about what I'm doing. I'm just sharing with you news of my book. I'm just having fun and I'm just telling you about what I'm doing. I'm just sharing with you news of my book. I'm just having fun creating this cool graphic and this cool reel and I'm posting it and this is just giving me joy. But that's something that you know she's really struggling with and I understand I was in that perspective really struggling with and I understand I was in that perspective. The other thing that has been really hard is the sales aspect. It's somehow much easier to advocate for other people than it is for myself, for yourself.

Speaker 1: 36:53

So I published my husband's short story collection. He is an incredibly talented short story writer who had 50 short stories published in all of the big literary journals across. You know USA, england, all of the big journals in Australia you know in the engine, in Overland, so these are the big Australian literary journals and then in American journals I know one of them was Minnesota Review. There was a lot of them, and so when I published his short story collection, I was able to send review requests, send media releases, promote it and advocate for it, and so I learned that I had to do that for myself, and so the way that I trick myself into doing that is, I think, about the big picture of my book. So I think about what are the themes and what is the thing that I'm trying to connect readers with, and that is what I focus on, because then it's not just about my book, it's not about my writing. It is about this theme, this topic that I think people need to know about. It is about me advocating, and so that has made it easier. Made it easier.

Speaker 1: 38:39

One of my top tips about entering this world as an indie author is whatever you do, practice it. The first time I published, so I published my short story collection. That was the first book. I actually remember having a panic attack when I was trying to publish it. I'd sent myself a deadline and then I had to get everything ready by that deadline, and I did not realize at that time that I could have changed that deadline. All I had to do was go into the publishing platforms and change the date of publication and give myself more time, and so I had not figured out timelines in terms of how much time it would take to edit, to proofread, to actually create the cover, to submit it to the platform, to get the proof copy and check that everything was correct and right, because sometimes when you create the cover, um it and you get the proof copy. It might be a touch to the left or to the right where the spine is not sitting correctly and that you do these things, the more it becomes automatic.

Speaker 1: 40:05

I have now set up a publishing a writing and a publishing checklist, and so I have a strategy to track my writing and track my writing goals for my book and then for the process of actually publishing the book. So the first thing is obviously to write the book, then it is to proofread it as much as I can, and so I use software to do that. I use ProWritingAid and Pseudo. Right now I've started using, which is software that has some AI embedded in it to be able to correct your work, so correct the grammar, and then also to give you some suggestions to polish and to sort of you know, correct it as much as you can yourself. I have a proofreader in place who I send the book to to proofread and to pick up things that I cannot get myself. I then create the metadata, so create all of the information that I need for the publication. I generate the ISBNs, so I actually purchase my own ISBNs from Thorpe Bowker and those are what you need for the metadata for the book identification, and so I purchased my own so that, as I published them across various platforms, that metadata is all linked and that book is recognised everywhere. Then you know the formatting of the book, the creation of the cover and then the actual publication process uploading it to the different platforms and having it published.

Speaker 1: 42:04

So I hope this episode has been helpful. For those of you who are thinking about your publishing journey and which way you wish to proceed in your publishing journey, I will be providing a handout that has all of the information about places you can go to to learn about being an indie author, and then also all the services that I use for the various things. So if you go to amrapayalichcom forward slash podcast and then you go to the show notes for today's episode, you will find out that handout. I would love it if you connected with me, either via social media, signing up to my newsletter via my website or writing a comment. So on my website, where I have all the show notes, you're able to leave a comment and ask questions, and I'd be more than happy to respond to those, and I'd be more than happy to respond to those. So thank you for joining me for today's episode and I hope this has been helpful for you in your publishing journey.

Speaker 1: 43:29

So join me for my next episode, where I'm going to talk about the art of the pitch and give some tips about how to pitch for freelance articles and publishing, but also how to pitch more generally in terms of workshops and the different pitching that you need to do as you enter this world as an author. Thank you for tuning in to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow for more insights, stories and inspiration from my armchair to yours. Remember, every story begins with a single word.