AUTHOR UPDATE
HOW TO BE A GREAT INDIE AUTHOR
This is something I am currently still learning. Writing is a huge passion of mine, but promoting is a tough gig. Life as an indie author is much more complex than simply writing a book, publishing it & filling the swimming pool with royalties. The most significant hurdle to overcome is finding a captive audience. There are millions of readers out there waiting to read a book like yours; they just haven’t heard of you yet. It takes time, and you need to be stubborn. That said, my current promotion schedule is to post a few updates on Twitter and Goodreads whenever I get a spare moment.
BOOK COVERS
An eye-catching book cover that sums up your book's tone is critical in attracting readers to your work. When I released my first story, Obsession, I used a stock photo and placed the title and my name using a PowerPoint template. Now you may think that this state-of-the-art approach could not fail…but it did…sort of. The very few readers of my book in the first few months were underwhelmed by the cover and were happy to make me aware of this. So, what did I do? I did the same thing with my second story, Pact, and I will explain my logic about this madness next.
MY LOGIC
Still here? Haven't you got bored yet? Ok, I will keep going. My logic regarding the basic cover for my first two releases was that I didn’t know how my writing would be received, so I didn’t want to go in all guns blazing with the most attractive cover. What if loads of people bought it for the cover and, after the first few pages, decided that they hated the book? My tentative approach allowed me to gather a slow trickle of positive feedback, subsequently allowing me to become confident in my new craft. If I was going to take up writing seriously, I needed to know that I could actually write!
SEE YOU LATER
With Obsession and Pact doing much better than I could have imagined, I felt it was time to go back and re-write a story I threw together very hastily over the first UK lockdown. See You Later was my first Novella, and after practising with a certain degree of success, I wanted to see if I could salvage this old story. Re-writing/editing See You Later was quite simply a nightmare. I got bored, and frustrated, contemplated shelving it, lost my momentum…the list goes on. That said, I am very proud of what it has become, but it has put me off re-writing some of the other stories I threw together over the past few years.
WHAT AM I WRITING IN 2023?
I have already written another horror novella and a horror novel, but like See You Later, these need to be rewritten, and I am struggling to find the motivation to do this again. I haven't completely switched them off just yet, but I want to gain momentum and work on my new ideas instead of going backwards again. Anyway, here is my planned release schedule, subject to change 100 times over the weekend:
March
Red - Horror Novelette
Our Connected Madness - Horror Anthology
August
Void - Horror Novel
Dec
Chosen - Horror Novella
OTHER STUFF
I plan to get better at promotion this year, but I don’t want to push too hard with this until I have a Novel out there and a few more stories. I have more ideas than time to write at the moment, but I will eventually get there. Overall, I have been thrilled with my first year (2022) as a writer.
Stay Scared!
Dan