5 Major Problems that Every Indie Author Has (solutions included)

If you're reading this, you're most likely an indie author with bad sales. It's a given. You're most likely one of the over 50% who make less than $500. And if you go by what the word around town is, you've written on of the possibly 90% of books that make less than $100.

But why is that? Why are indie authors so bad at selling something they fought so hard to do on their own?

There's all sorts of reasons and problems, and here, we're going over the 5 major problems that we can see at first glance. This isn't to bully people or to make fun of anyone, since I am also an author who has made less than $100 on a book. Half of this is from experience and the other half is from what I have learned over the years. So, are you ready to do better or are you still a lazy bastard?

5. Editing

I know this feels like a given, and I understand that editing is expensive and time consuming. But what we see a lot of times in indie books are the same complaints with little to no desire to fix them. I see tons of reviews talking about grammar mistakes and spelling errors, there's formatting issues, the cover is bad, the syntax is bad, there's too much fluff, there's not enough story, more has to be detailed here, less detail there.

The list goes on and on. I know that there's a lot of problems in traditionally published stories, but we have to admit that they edit their garbage to have people want to buy it. And that's the key: you want people to buy it. You want people to begin reading, because if they are turned off before the good part gets going, then the remainder of your story was all for nothing.

Solution: Get your work edited by eyes other than your own.

We miss everything we are used to, we love our own voice(when writing, of course), and we don't want to kill our darlings. Get someone to kill and destroy for you. Find a word serial killer and get their ass on the line. You don't have to pay, either. There's plenty of people willing to help edit on reddit, there's programs like grammarly that could help you out.

And, of course, you can always look up help or articles on how to write better. Pretty much the biggest threat to us when writing is the feeling that we have to rush out a product. We're not Chinese factories (I hope you're not) and we don't have to crap out our lovely work. Just relax, slow down, and dismantle your story page by page. It's what F. Scott Fitzgerald did and he made a classic out of a story about drunks.

Also, make sure your sample is good. I'm tired of boring intros with nothing happening, or worse, seeing why the book was written without knowing why I would want to even read it.

4. Marketing

So you have your book out, it's all cleaned up and ready to go back into the market. It's still not selling. What gives?

Did you try turning the kindle on and off again?

No, it's not kindle's fault, it's not the search engine's fault, and it's not the fault of all the other books being thrown around and hiding you from an audience.

The problem is you're not marketing your book, or at least you're not doing it well.

I could go on forever about how to market well, what audience you should focus on, and I may do that at another time. The thing is that your book is being marketed wrong, in the wrong direction, and it's stuck as a big nothing burger.

Solution: Spend money to make money.

You want something from nothing, and that's possible, but very unlikely. Now, this doesn't only mean you have to spend money, it's used as a metaphor as well. You can spend time as well, and others will spend their time on you. Get involved in people within your area of writing, talk to people online with similar interests, get the ball rolling.

And if you're more of a reader than a writer, then hot dog, you're in the right place to do some reviews. Learn how to review, do those reviews, promote the heck out of them, and the people you're reviewing just might help you out as well. Or better yet, people will see you know your stuff and check out your own work. Just promote your own name, make yourself into a brand.

Another thing is to make sure your work can be found for free. Using free options like wattpad, a blog, reddit, and other places are just the tip of the marketing iceberg. You want people to enjoy what you are as a writer, not individual titles. Individual titles are for traditional published people, and you're indie. You're on your own experimenting and going out of the ordinary. Just stop worrying about making money on the first day and focus more on making a following to stay with you.

As long as you keep throwing yourself in every direction, both free and for a price, you will stick somewhere and that is the money maker area right there.

3. Reviews

Now you have your editing down, you're marketing yourself like a Kardashian, but here's the even bigger problem: reviews.

Having reviews are more important than having sales. They are like the subscribers to a youtube channel. Just imagine if you saw a channel with a bunch of views and little to no subscribers. That's suspicious. that's like an indian porno channel right there, and very few people will want to put their money into that. It doesn't help that you can't really show how many sales you have to someone browsing.

Solution: Work on getting reviews before you even publish.

I know this sounds like you're trying to scam people, but it's actually important to have reviews. This doesn't mean you should have reviews before the story is even out, that's impossible. But you should start asking people to review, find similar reviewers on other books, on websites you go on, on places like goodreads. A review on goodreads is just as good, if not better, than a review on amazon. A blog post reviewing your book is a new door opened.

The more talk, the better. Even if it's bad talk, it's someone promoting you. I even have a weird experience with anti-promoting people, if that interests you. Let me know in the comments below, and I can write about that for sure.

The thing is, you just want talk about your work, good or bad, and you want it posted. This helps with SEO, it helps with making your work more known, and it's even something you can use to promote yourself if you really want to. I say aim for 50 is the best goal for reviews. Once you have 50, you don't have to worry too much, you have a good star average, and you'll have more organic reviews afterwards.

2. Direction

You have your editing done, your marketing down, your reviews are flashing lights in Las Vegas. You're making it big now, you're on top of the world.

But where do you go from here?

Do you keep on writing more? Continue the series? Make a new one?

This is actually a hard thing to do, because we have two choices: start a new series or continue an established one.

Here, a lot of people fail and drop the ball. They make their series go nowhere, they repeat the same thing, or they completely abandon their previous audience and make something unrelated and alienate anyone who knows them. I see this all the time.

Solution: Know when to fold them.

This is used in two ways: know when to stop and know when to COMBINE series that you have in mind.

It's totally fine to want to do something different, but you should connect them into the same universe as a previous series, even if it's in a frivolous way. Final Fantasy has a different world every time, but it's the connection of similar ideas that keeps it a series and makes it so big. There's no stopping you once you do that. Learn from that.

For the other side, know when to end your series. Most people are not willing to read 9 full length novels just to find out if someone kisses in the end or whatever your big twist is. Keep it small, keep it simple, and keep all the extra stuff for short stories and extras. I know it's tempting and your fans tell you to do it, but it's not good to go past maybe like 3 novels for a story arc.

I know a lot of people will be like "but I watched an anime and it's super long and-" Okay, if you want to make something like that, fine. But perhaps do some smaller series on the side to let the new people in. Is that good?

1. Dedication

Everything is perfect now. You have all your fudge packed and dun-dun-dun, you get lazy. You don't want to write anymore, you don't want to promote anymore, you feel like it's going nowhere.

Solution: stick to it, even if you don't publish it yet.

There's a reason why you want to write, and I know it's hard to stay dedicated. I wrote one book, saw it wasn't selling well, and just left it there like the aborted baby it is. I have no idea if it's still selling. I wanted to turn it into a 20 book series. I had a writing bible longer than the bible for it.

The thing is that I'm still dedicated to finish it, just not now. I need more time, I need to do other stories before it, I need to edit the story more and refine it. That's dedication right there, on its own. It's more important to wait than to rush into a big trap. Patients is a virtue, my dude.

A lot of us write because we want to leave something behind for when we die a horrible, painful death. So if you do want that, why not leave your best? And aim for better than what your current best is!

You can always learn more, you can always change things around. There's a reason why we have remakes and reboots. There's a reason there's 7 basic stories but we have countless stories throughout history. We all have our opinions and voices and point of views.

Once you stop worrying about the money involved and start thinking about who you are as a person and what you mean to society and history and things like that, the money from your story means almost nothing now.

Maybe aim for making a classic, rather than a money maker?

Maybe stop being a hack who is bad at being a hack?

There's so many things we do wrong, and our motive for writing may just be one of them. I'm not saying you should stop trying to write if you're bad at it, but rather you should aim to learn how to do it better and find out what you truly want in life.

In a way, the biggest problem indie authors have is deep within their heart. Look inside first. Meditate on it. And most importantly:

Enjoy yourself.

Like what you see here? Want more advice on any topic I touched? Leave a comment and I can see how I can please.