All The Indie Ladies

Being a writer is a lonely profession.  Being a self-published writer can feel even more isolating, as we beaver away trying to establish ourselves as successful authors without the backing of a publisher.  You can’t help but wonder what everyone else is doing and if you’re doing it right!  So I thought it would be a good idea to talk to some other authors and ask them to share their self-publishing stories.  I was lucky enough to feature some extremely talented and generous female authors on my blog some time ago, so just in case you missed it, here they are!

INDIE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

I’m so excited to welcome my first guest author – Jackie Mallon.  As part of a series that will give a ‘behind the scenes’ look at how authors find their own path to publishing, Jackie talks about her experience with the Amazon White Glove Program and the challenge of getting her writing ‘out there’.

After months of trying to get a traditional publisher to consider my debut novel, Silk for the Feed Dogs, and many lovely rejection notes expressing their fear at taking a chance on an unknown writer, my agent was approached by Amazon. They had just launched a new publishing venture, Amazon White Glove Programme. Its aim, my agent explained, was to raise the level of self-published material out there by focusing only on writers who had already won over an agent with their work. Out there. How many times have we been told we must put ourselves out there? Those two words have also come to represent the vast dark depths of the internet, mystery-filled. There is so much we still don’t know. Well, I am here at base camp to describe my experience out there, even though I confess there is still so much I don’t know.  Read more…

INDIE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT (PART TWO)

As part of my ‘behind the scenes’ look at self-published authors, I’m delighted to welcome Jamie Baywood – author of ‘Getting Rooted in New Zealand’.  Jamie chats about how her own life experience provided the inspiration for her novel and the learning curve that is self-publishing.  A Californian girl who went to New Zealand to meet her Scottish husband?  I’ll let her explain 🙂

It was always my dream to live abroad when I was growing up in California.  I had bad dating experiences in California and read in a New Zealand tour book that the country’s population at 100,000 fewer men than women.  I wanted to have some me time and an adventure. New Zealand seemed like a good place to do so. Although I intended to have a solo adventure I ended up meeting my husband, a Scottish man, in New Zealand.

 I consider myself an accidental author. I didn’t go to New Zealand with the intentions of writing a book about my experiences there. I had funny experiences that I had trouble believing were true. I wrote the stories down to stay sane. I wrote situations down that were happening around me and shared them with friends. The stories made people laugh so I decided to organize the stories into a book and publish in the hopes to make others laugh too.  Read more..

INDIE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT (PART THREE)

As part of my series featuring inspiring Indie Authors, I’m delighted to welcome the very talented Michelle Muckley to my blog.  She has proven, after self-publishing three novels with another one on the way, how authors can build their own writing career from scratch – with no small amount of commitment, passion and downright perseverance!  Here she is to discuss her writing journey and a few things she learned about self-publishing and herself along the way.

When I first started writing I’m not sure I ever had the intention to publish a book. Perhaps there was a little bit of hope that one day it might happen, but I didn’t start with the intention of being the next J.K. (Rowling, not the dude from Jamiroquai with the dodgy hats). But the more I wrote, and the more that my work started to resemble a book, the more my goals started to shift. They changed from a desire to try to write a book, to the idea that I could finish it. And if I could finish it, then why couldn’t I publish it? So once I reached the stage that I had a ‘finished’ book, I packaged up my three chapter samples and made them look as fancy and as writerly as I could. I then wrote to a small army of agents, each of which wrote back to me rejecting my work. I was disappointed, and reluctant to acknowledge that my work wasn’t up to scratch. So instead I tucked it away in a cupboard and forgot about it for eight months. In the meantime I moved to Cyprus, got made redundant, and started to remember there was at one point, something more that I wanted from life.  Read more..