Things I Wish I’d Known When Starting this Indie Gig

So, almost 8 months after I started publishing my titles in earnest, I’ve discovered a few things I wish I’d known about organising myself when I started. I know these sound basic, so bear with me, and, if you’re just starting out and have no idea what you're doing, bear them in mind.

1.      The need to keep a single, easily referencable file of the following details for each title published:

a.       Book title

b.      ISBN for each different platform (No, you cannot use the same ISBN for Kobo as you use for Smashwords as you use for Kindle as you use for DriveThruFiction and so forth. You must use a different one for each platform as each platform’s release counts as a different version, like hardbacks and paperbacks.)

c.       Link to the book page on each platform so you can copy and paste them into blog posts without having to look them up on several different tabs. Looking them up individually each time you need them is not so bad if you only have one platform, but when your work is spread out over seven, it gets slow and tedious.

d.      Blurb: as you use it in numerous uploads and blog posts

e.       Credits used in the front matter for ease of putting into different versions

2.      The need to decide on a publisher name prior to uploading anything. Face it, I wasn’t sure how serious I was going to be when I started, so I decided to try it out and then decide if it was something I wanted to pursue. This was a bad decision for two reasons:

a.       Going back to all the different pages I had recorded my book details on (Goodreads, Shelfari, Linked-In) and updating them to the correct version was a pain;

b.      Clarifying and budgeting for my publishing and writing expenses was easier to see once I separated them completely from my day job earnings.

That you can keep different pen names under one account on Amazon and Smashwords. I know it’s there in black and white but was a little overwhelmed at the beginning to actually register what those funny squiggles meant. Different pen names help you differentiate genres, so Carlie Simonsen and Madeleine Torr are pretty important for me to be able to help readers find which of my scribbles they might actually want to read. It also meant that I could branch into publishing for others more easily, which I didn’t expect to do.