Become a Successful Indie Author
Craig Martelle
In the quest for success in the writing business, we all rush anxiously from guru to guru, oracle to oracle, hoping that someone will reveal the magical formula to make the gods more propitious and cause the bestseller deities to smile down on us.
Unfortunately, the magic formula that these oracles keep revealing is always pretty much the same: work, work, work, and then work some more. Write books, hustle them. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
So Craig Martelle’s “Become a Successful Indie Author” is not exactly breaking a lot of new ground on that front, but it’s a concise, easy-to-read blueprint for going from nothing to published author, and then from published author to author who actually sells books. As Martelle himself says, it’s helpful to read other people’s success stories in order to get ideas, and his story is one of finding a good genre fit for him, working to hone his ability to write to those genre expectations, and then putting out a lot of books and marketing them. He goes into the process in more detail, but that’s the crux of it.
There are also a lot of useful tips on everything from churning out the words to running ads to tracking your data to registering as a business. This is very much a business-focused book, so, while writers more interested in the “art” side of the equation may not find a lot to inspire them there, it’s definitely a handy reference and idea-generator for how to actually generate and track revenue as an author. If you’re just hopelessly clueless about how to turn your writing-for-a-living dream into reality, this book will give you a lot of practical ideas on how to get started. It’s mainly aimed at writers of mainstream genre fiction, with its insistence on seeking out lots of feedback and catering to your readers’ expectations, but literary or nonfiction writers can also find a lot that’s useful here.
E. P. Clark: Author, Book Reviewer, and All-Around Literary Handiwoman 