15 Years of Indie Publishing

Well, as of April 2026, I have now been indie publishing for 15 years, which is the longest continuous time I’ve ever actually done anything in my life. I’ve never had any other job or professional association that has lasted this long.

I’ve done this for so long that when people are angry with me, they no longer preface their remarks on my failings by saying “Listen here, young man…” 🙂

I suppose that puts me in the upper tier of indie authors not in income or market footprint, but in sheer bloody-minded longevity. Like, there are still indie authors out there who have been doing this for longer and still publishing regularly, but not all that many. Eventually indie authors typically burn out and just stop publishing. Or stop publishing due to Real Life reasons (illness, family illness, moving, changing jobs, etc), or get some kind of tradpub deal and stop indie publishing.

It makes sense that indie authors burn out. Sometimes, or even frequently, both writing and the business side of writing can feel like a slog, but I have been blessed with a mind that loves the grind.

I don’t say that all to gloat, but instead to express my immense and humble gratitude to God (as Abraham Lincoln said long ago, the “beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe” & the “Great Disposer of Events”), and to all of you, the many people who have read (and after 2017 when I started with audiobooks, listened to) one of my books.

By good fortune, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing and the 300th episode of my podcast The Pulp Writer Show coincide. So for both this blog post and the 300th episode of my podcast, I thought I would take a look back at the last decade and a half and reflect on Fifteen Lessons Learned In Fifteen Years Of Indie Publishing.

1.) Embrace The Slog

I think if you want to be a writer, you actually have to like writing.

There are a surprising number of writers for whom this is not true. Like, they enjoy having written, or the rewards of the writing, but they don’t actually enjoy the part that Glen Cook famously called “put your ass in the chair and do it.” I am fortunate that I do enjoy that part, but a lot of writers don’t.

Writing is often a “grind” in the same way that things like diet, exercise, and home maintenance are. Like, if you do them for one day, it’s not enough. You have to do them consistently day after day to have results. I think writing is the same way.

Effort applied over time cannot do all things, but it can do a lot. This applies to writing as well. A little bit every day can really add up over enough time.

2.) Finish The Book

A lot of writers get like 1/3 through their book and give up, or start something else. There’s often a good deal of perfectionism involved in this.

Here is a rule of thumb: a finished, imperfect book is infinitely better than the “perfect” version that only exists in your head but will never exist anywhere else because you will never write it!

Steve Jobs famously said “real artists ship.” I think the corollary is that if you want to be a writer, you have to finish things and then move on to the next thing. If finishing a novel seems daunting, I would suggest first writing short stories or perhaps novellas and learning to finish those. No one runs a marathon without first learning to run a mile, after all.

3.) Back Up Your Data

This is an important one. I’ve gone through a lot of computers in the last fifteen years, but I’ve never lost a large chunk of work because I back up regularly.

I would suggest a three-part system – use whatever automated local backup your OS provides onto an external hard drive, do manual local backups onto a flash drive of appropriate capacity, and then have some sort of cloud backup you can rely on. That way even if your house or apartment blows up (God forbid!) you’ll still have a copy of your stuff somewhere.

4.) Be Willing To Learn New Skills As Needed

It occurred to me that most of the software tools and programs I use on a day to day basis did not exist when I started in April of 2011, or that I’ve had to learn in the years since.

Like, 15 years ago I didn’t know anything about online advertising, Photoshop, 3D rendering, graphic design, social media, paperback formatting, ebook formatting, audiobook production, podcasting, small business taxes, and a bunch of other stuff, but I’ve picked it up in the years since. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at any one of these things, but I’ve been able to combine them well.

Life is change. That means you’re going to have to change whether you like it or not, but it’s best to make sure you’re changing to your advantage.

That can mean having to learn new skills. Depending on the skill, it can be either onerous or fun, but it’s still worth doing.

5.) When Possible, Give Away Stuff For Free

I know some writers get really worried about giving away stuff for free. They’ll price their first novel at $9.99 or higher, and then say things like a latte at Starbucks costs $5, why shouldn’t my book, which was so much more work, cost more? (Though these days I think a Starbucks latte probably is more like $8.37.)

Giving things away for free gives readers a chance to try your work in a risk-free environment. If someone picks, for example, FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT and they don’t like it or give up on it by Chapter 4, they’re not out anything but time. But if they enjoy it, they might pick up FROSTBORN: THE EIGHTFOLD KNIFE for $0.99, and if they like that, they might go on to the rest of the series, where the books are $4.99. That really ads up over time.

I’ve also written and given away via my newsletter a lot of short stories. I have to admit that while I enjoy short stories, I mostly do this to increase the clickthrough rate of my newsletter.

It’s best to think of giving away things for free as like planting seeds. If you’re a farmer, you pay a lot of money for your crop seed, but then you have to sacrifice it in hope of getting a crop (and potentially losing all the money you spent on the seed.) Giving away ebooks for free is kind of like that.

6.) Don’t Expect Sales To Go Up Every Year Or Quarter

There are pros and cons to the publicly held and traded corporation model, but I think one of the big cons is that shareholders often demand that revenue expand every quarter.

Number Go Up, to quote the Internet meme.

The trouble is that it isn’t sustainable in reality and leads to a lot of economic damage along the way. There’s a good chance that when the AI companies tank, they’re going to take a good chunk of the economy with them because they pushed this growth at all costs mindset. And even on a smaller scale when a company has mass layoffs to make the Number Go Up, it causes all kinds of havoc in people’s lives.

In writing and publishing, you definitely should not expect sales to go up every quarter or even every year. It just doesn’t work that way. Overall, if you have more books you can generally expect that they will sell more, but it doesn’t always or even frequently work like that. Sales tend to ebb and flow like anything else.

Also, what we call will politely call “macroeconomic” events tends to affect sales a good deal. After 15 years, I’ve found that the book-reading population tends to overlap a fair bit with the “news doomscrolling” population, so every time there’s a significant news event, sales tend to drop. They always drop during a US presidential election year, which inevitably shocks indie authors who started publishing after the last election. The 2024 election had that a lot because, as you no doubt remember, there were a lot of Dramatic News Events that summer.

Sales also tend to drop around Christmas because of holiday bills, and again in August/September, since that’s when a lot of people have significant back to school expenses.

If you have a really good sales month or year, that’s great! But DEFINITELY do not plan on it lasting forever or going up, and if you do have that kind of windfall, it’s a good idea to do sensible financial things with it – pay down debt, save it in sensible investment/retirement accounts, that kind of thing. It is a terrible, terrible idea to take on additional debt, hire employees you don’t need, or commit to other unsustainable financial commitments.

“Living well below your means” is a principle that can help one avoid much pain.

Also, if you do have a windfall month or year, be sure to save for the tax bill the next time you file taxes, because Uncle Sam (or your national equivalent of Uncle Sam) will very much want his cut.

7.) Don’t Start A Series Unless You Plan To Finish It.

This is less of a thing for romance or mystery novelists, since their books tend to be more episodic.

However, if you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, it’s a really good idea to make sure you sure finish your series, because there is nothing SF/F readers hate more than a series that never gets finished.

There are a couple of reasons for this, but there have been a few high-profile examples of popular series remaining unfinished, and that really soured readers on unfinished series, which is often detrimental to new writers.

So if you’re going to write in series, you need to commit to finishing them, even if it’s a lot of work. I’ve done that myself a couple of times. For a while I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to finish SILENT ORDER or STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE, but I got it done.

If you are a newer writer and you want to write in series, I would suggest starting with trilogies. They’re less of a commitment, than, say something like FROSTBORN, which was 15 books.

8.) Don’t Stress About Bad Reviews

Every writer has to learn to let bad reviews go. Obsessing over them isn’t healthy, and freaking out over them on social media is never good and can have bad consequences. It is a hard lesson to learn, but you just have to learn to ignore bad reviews.

Like, people can take this to insane extremes. There was a criminal case a while back where a writer drove to someone’s house and attacked a critic with a wine bottle because of a Goodreads review. Granted, that is an extreme case, but there have been numerous examples of writers going to war with critics over social media, or even just complaining about it on social media, only for the Internet to fall on their heads.

So, you just have to learn to ignore bad reviews. It’s not easy, but you can just follow these two rules about bad reviews.

First, say nothing.

Second, do nothing.

Never complain, never explain, to paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli.

If it helps, the longer you do this and the more you write, bad reviews matter less because you can’t remember everything. Like, after you’ve written your first book, you can remember every single bit of it and every decision and thought process that went into it.

But after 172 books? I honestly can’t remember everything I’ve written unless I look it up. Like, if someone complained about the griffin diarrhea bit in MALISON: DRAGON FURY, I would kind of just stare blankly because it would take me a while to remember it!

9.) Social Media Is A Potentially Destructive Time Sink

This kind of relates to the previous lesson, but there are a lot of ways that social media can waste enormous amounts of your time.

Arguing with strangers is one of them, and the most obvious and potentially the most destructive.

But passive consumption can be just as insidious. The phenomenon of “doomscrolling”, of endless scrolling through bad news, is well known, and is psychologically harmful. There’s also “comparisonitis”, which can be especially insidious for writers, since people generally put their curated selves on social media.

Interestingly, sometimes people put their curated “negative” selves on social media. From the way some people complain and present themselves in their posts, it’s amazing they have the energy to type out posts complaining about their woes. No doubt that is done for engagement. There are also countless people who simply make up outrageous stories about hot-button issues for clicks and clout.

You also want to avoid arguing with strangers on social media, because it will inevitably turn out that the person in question is unemployed and therefore has infinite free time, and also has poor reading comprehension and some sort of rage-based mood disorder.

Overall, I would say the best way to engage with social media while keeping your sanity is to remain positive, share as few personal details as possible, don’t argue with strangers, and only say things that are verifiably true. That will let you avoid a lot of potential trouble.

10.) Pay People Promptly And On Time

Speaking of avoiding trouble, paying people on time will let you avoid a galaxy of woes.

No one person can possess all skills, so if you write long enough, you’re going to need to subcontract out some stuff, whether it’s editing, cover design, web design, accounting/taxes, audiobooks, and so forth.

So if people do work for you, and you are satisfied with this work, then you should pay them on time.

This is a concept that a lot of people can’t seem to grasp, and I’ve heard a lot of horror stories over the years about authors who try to weasel out of payment.

So if you hire people to do things for you, and they do them to your satisfaction, then pay them the agreed amount on time.

This will also the nice side effect that if you pay people on time and build up a track record of this, they will be more willing to accommodate reasonable requests from you.

11.) Don’t Worry About NFTs, Crypto, The Metaverse, LLMs, Or Whatever The Latest Doomsday Tech Trend Is.

The second half of the 2010s and the entirety of the 2020s have been filled with technologies that turned out to be useless, stupid, infested with scammers, and overall destructive – cryptocurrency, NFTs, the Metaverse, and of course generative AI. (Apple CEO Tim Cook announced his retirement right before I finished writing this post, and I think one of the chief positives of his legacy will be that he kept Apple mostly away from the generative AI mania.)

I remember when cryptocurrency was inevitably going to replace fiat money. Or when NFTs would be the future of art, or when all the Very Smart People said that the Metaverse would be the future of work and online communication. A lot of these technologies’ boosters said you had to get on board with it right now or you would be left behind in the glorious technological revolution.

You’ll note that none of it actually happened. Crypto’s main use case is facilitating cybercrime, and NFTs are worthless. The Metaverse, like most of Facebook’s bright ideas, wasted a lot of money and did nothing useful.

Generative AI is on a similar course – none of its glorious promises of a better future have actually happened, and all it’s really done is a lot of destruction and waste. The money is running out, public opinion is turning sharply against it, and eventually LLM technology will dwindle to a sketchy corner of the Internet much like crypto. Or to put it both more optimistically and snarkily, the best quote I heard about LLMs is that it was strange people heralded the next generation of industrial automation technology as the beginning of the Singularity. It’s like thinking the computer that controls the fuel/air flow mix in your car is suddenly going to overthrow society and replace all human work.

The one thing these technologies had in common (other than all being massive frauds) is that many writers worried it would be the end of writing. That crypto was going to replace government money, or that all art would become NFTs, or that people would prefer AI slop novels over human written ones.

However, none of this actually happened, and people who predict the future are usually wrong. Various ancient and medieval societies made attempting to predict the future punishable by death. There was an element of religion to this, but I suspect some hard-headed jurists were less worried about offending the gods through false prophecy and had instead realized that many so-called “prophets” were just grifters attempting to scam money out of the credulous. This principle holds true today.

I’m sure by 2030 there will be some new technology called “groobelfarts” or whatever, Various grifters will swarm over social media, saying grooblefarts are The Future, and that if you don’t get behind the groobelfarts (preferably by buying their course and signing up for their newsletter), then you’re going to get left behind by the great and glorious groobelfarts revolution. But it will turn out to be 95% a scam, and then by 2035 all the grifters will move on to the next tech.

So I wouldn’t worry about generative AI, or whatever the next Big Technology is. (Probably groobelfarts.)

12.) It’s A Really Good Idea To Have Your Own Website

If you’re serious about indie publishing, you’re essentially running a small business, and these days a small business really needs its own website.

I know some writers rely entirely on their Amazon profile pages or social media profiles. This is a really bad idea because the ebook stores and the social media platforms are changing things all the time, and one of those changes might knock your visibility down to nothing. By contrast, with a website, you control it and you can set the content.

It’s also very useful to have a central location to direct readers. Ideally, your website would have links to all your books, so you can just send readers there.

A lot of writers overthink this, but a standard WordPress or Wix template or something of that nature will work just fine for you. In fact, the fewer bells and whistles on your website, the better. It makes it easier to maintain and is that much harder to hack.

13.) It’s A Really Good Idea To Have Your Own Email List

Related to the previous point, it’s also an excellent idea to have your own email list to mail readers.

There are some legal requirements around this and it’s best to follow them, obviously. But an email list, even after 15 years, is still my most powerful tool for reaching readers. As we mentioned above, the various ebook stores and social media platforms forever tinker with their algorithms and visibility. Having your own website is important, but getting people to visit it can be something of a challenge.

And that’s where the email list comes in. With it, whenever you have a new release, you can email people and let them know. Whenever I publish a new book, the best sales day is always, without fail, the day I send out the newsletter.

How to get people to sign up for the newsletter? I’ve found that the best way is to consistently give away things for free. If you sign up for my newsletter (and if you haven’t, you should do so right now!) you get a bundle of three free books. Almost every time I publish a new book, I also give away a free short story. So giving away free stuff via the newsletter is a good way to build it and to keep subscribers.

14.) Don’t Cheat Or Be Unethical

Like every other business, there are a million ways you can cheat or be unethical in indie publishing – plagiarism, stealing covers, paying for fake reviews, paying for bad reviews for someone you don’t like, buying social media followers, manipulating Kindle Unlimited page readers, cranking out LLM slop books, and so forth. Some of it is technically legal but unethical, and some of it is outright illegal.

It can be very frustrating to see people you know are cheating get ahead.

That said, it is always best to walk the straight and narrow road as best you can. There are many religious and ethical arguments for doing so. But even if those don’t appeal to you, the consequences might. If you cheat and do sketchy stuff, sooner or later it will catch up to you.

It might take a long, long time. Bernie Madoff ran his scam for decades before he ended up dying in a prison hospital. Sometimes it catches up to you much more quickly. Sam Bankman-Fried only ran FTX for three years or so during the height of crypto mania before it all blew up in his face.

People who work for the devil, in the end, always end up paying him rather than the other way around.

So don’t cheat or do unethical stuff. Your life will be happier and easier, and at the very least you won’t have to live with the constant low-level fear that the consequences are about to catch up with you.

15.) Tomorrow Is Another Day.

Perhaps today didn’t go well. Maybe you were too busy to get any writing done, or you got to your writing time and you were just too tired to concentrate. Maybe it was a bad sales day, or you got a bad review, or you got some bad family news, and one of the other myriad ways that Real Life exacted its tolls arrived.

Perhaps today was a bad day, but tomorrow is another day. It will be another shot at the ring.

I suppose fifteen years of self-publishing means I’ve been doing this for over 5,400 days. There have been some good days and bad days in the mix, but the thing to remember about bad days is tomorrow is another day. If you miss your writing goal on one day, you can try again tomorrow.

And a little bit of daily effort ads up cumulatively over time.

CONCLUSION

So those are fifteen lessons I have learned in the last fifteen years on indie publishing.

As always, I would like to thank everyone who read and enjoyed my books, and I hope to keep them coming.

Meanwhile, we’ll close out with a bonus. By happy coincidence, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing overlaps with the 300th episode of my podcast, THE PULP WRITER SHOW.

To mark the occasion, I’m giving away a free ebook: WRITING LESSIONS FROM THE PULP WRITER SHOW, by Jonathan Moeller and A.B. Bachmann (the researcher, editor, transcriptionist, and webmaster for the podcast). You can get it free at my Payhip store until the end of May.

-JM