The Possessor Wars

People have asked me why I’m an indie author. It’s especially surprising to them given that I’ve published 9 book in the traditional way (I did them under a different name for branding reasons).

The simple fact of the matter is that publishing in the traditional way is a mountain that’s become too hard to climb and provides too little reward for the effort.

To give you an idea of my background, I wrote 3 books and didn’t really make any money. They were textbooks on computer programming and they did reasonably well. But I was new to the publishing game and let myself get fleeced by publishers. I blame myself for that. I didn’t do my homework.

After that, I got an agent. And if you’re writing non-fiction, I strongly recommend him. His name is Neil Salkind. I wrote six more books and made money, but not really like I should have.

The basic problem is that when you go with a large publisher, they don’t really do that much to promote your individual book. In fact, these days they’re wanting the authors to do most of the promotions themselves. They won’t even talk to you unless they get assurances from you that you’ll do large amounts of promoting your books.

What bothers me about that is that they take the lion’s share of the profits, but for what? If they’re expecting me to do the majority of the promotions, why do I need them? In an age of easy self-publishing, how do they justify the massive cut that they take when they in fact do so little, ask so much, and pay so little attention to what I produce?

One more thing about me that you should know is that I have spent a good part of my career running publishing organizations inside larger companies. Many big companies have what amounts to a publishing company inside their corporate structure. I’ve spent more than 15 years writing inside such organizations and eventually running them. 

The point here is that I am extremely experienced at producing professional-quality content. I’ve got a track record of doing that that I’m quite proud of.

The only thing I didn’t have to handle when I was running publishing organizations was publicity. So I’m learning that now. It’s a big mountain to climb, but I have to climb it either way. Because the big publishing companies are asking authors to do so much of the publicity and promotions these days, I’d have to learn it whether I went with a big publisher or not.

And big publishers really don’t get modern social media. I don’t know of one of them that really understands something like Twitter. They tend to be stuck in the past. They’re more focused on book signings in bookstores, printed promotional kits, and stuff like that.

So to make a long story short, I’ve become an independent publisher because the big publishers ask too much, take too much, and do too little.

I may live to regret that decision. But you know, I’d rather take a chance on myself and publish my way. There are plenty of people doing it and making a decent living. In the end, my success depends on me rather than some publishing giant that really doesn’t care that much about what I produce.

So that’s why I’m giving this a go.

Chad

The Possessor Wars

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