Lynette McClenaghan

There is too much emphasis on the problems facing Indi authors and their dependence and deference to the Publishing Industry. As an Indi author I’m tired of hearing about how every route to self-publishing takes writers and authors back to the traditional publishing industry’s clutches.
Myth Three
The new paradigm for self-published authors is more lucrative for writers, because of decreased overheads. In fact the writer is required to shell out money for a number of services before the book even appears for sale. Alongside this the Indi writer has to engage in self-promotion and publicity. An acquaintance of mine paid in excess of $12k for his work on a manuscript. The original edit was so badly botched that it had to be redone – this involved more money. For example, there were no spaces after many of the full stops and the book was riddled with punctuation errors. This was a supposedly professional job.

You can’t sell an Ebook without great metadata. If want this task done properly you must do it yourself. This is another time consuming task. I write supernatural and dark fiction and discovered that the metadata was completely incorrect. On one E-Store my titles were categorised as Romance fiction. I had to research metadata then go through the process of getting the right metadata then passing it to a distributor I no longer use. I have since taken control and outsource necessary publishing services. It’s a case of buyer beware.