Sorry to say that we cannot offer you a signing. We cannot do anything to support, help or benefit Amazon. Theyre the enemy of independent bookshops and aiding them in any way — mainly ordering their books and selling them and promoting them — would be suicide. Things are tough enough without cutting our own throats. — JB Dickey, owner

via Seattle Mystery Bookshop: Cant Shake the Devils Hand and Say Youre Only Kidding.

Amazon is setting themselves up to be the world’s biggest publisher. They’re starting imprints for every genre. They’re signing big name talent like Barry Eisler and Ed McBain (well, the latter’s estate, anyway). Between their imprints and the indie author/publishers they distribute (myself included), they’ll account for a huge chunk of the “books in print”, perhaps a majority.

And this guy refuses to work with them.

He’s a sole proprietor, so at least he’ll only take himself and any employees dumb enough to stick around with him when he falls. But he’s refusing to carry the biggest publisher of the 20-teens, because they’re “the enemy.”

Hopefully, most independent bookstores will not follow his lead, and instead position themselves as community-oriented service businesses, focusing on discovery and recommendation. Just moving paper isn’t enough anymore.

Ebooks are… different.

I know, I know, you’ve heard that a thousand times. But for reals, they are. And even though I’ve been working with ebooks for 14 years, it still sneaks up on me. The conventional wisdom does not apply.

As some of you saw on the Twitter machine, I have a new book out. Between Heaven And Hell: Revelation is the first book in the BHH trilogy, written for NaNoWriMo 2009. In the past 18 months, I’ve written, rewritten, hired an editor, rewritten again, took naps, poked the manuscript with a stick, all the things you’re supposed to do if you’re enterprising/dumb enough to wear a publisher hat over your writing hat (which is only possible because while the writing hat is a smallish fez, the publisher hat is a big, roomy Stetson). And now, finally, it’s available for sale.

*blows party noisemaker, echoing forlornly from the cavern walls*

Admittedly, I haven’t been a whirlwind of publicity. I’ve mentioned it off-handedly, as in passing, on Twitter. I haven’t asked for retweets, and have received almost none. Launch day sales, all told, will buy me a burrito, and maybe, if I’m lucky, an iced tea. Small.

And this is okay.

That’s the part that snuck up on me. I’m still awash in what Kris Rusch calls “produce thinking,” applying legacy publishing standards to ebooks, and getting discouraged for absolutely no good reason.

Print books do need to open big. The produce analogy is a good one. A book has to turn a profit in three months, because the sales it gets in the first three months are the vast majority of all the sales it will ever have. Because not too long after that, it will be pulled from bookstore shelves to make room for the next book. It’s a similar, if a bit slower, phenomenon to what we see in the film industry. In movies, if you don’t make back your production costs opening weekend, you failed. If you don’t turn a profit in three weeks, well good luck with the DVD. Books, the dead tree variety, are almost as bad.

But as I mentioned above, ebooks are different. Ebooks are what Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail. Ebooks are forever.

So Revelation hasn’t made much money to start out. About 50 cents a month over the 18 month production time. But that’s now. In a year, when all three books are available, it will be a very different story. Patience, Grasshopper. Let it grow. Let people discover it, and read it, and tell their friends. It will still be available in six months, a year, two years, ten years.

So for now, I’m working on getting it released on the Nook and on CreateSpace for folks like my mom who still prefer paper, and then I’m getting to work on Between Heaven And Hell: Crusade, the second book in the trilogy. Because the best use of my time right now is writing more books. Promotion comes later.

I believe there will be a war between the writers who want agents and traditional publishers to “take care of them” and indie writers who want to control their own careers. — Dean Wesley Smith

I’ve been worried about this for a while now. I’ve noticed people choosing up sides on blogs and Twitter. Folks like Smith, Konrath, Hocking, Barry Eisler and myself on one side, and traditionally published authors like Lilith Saintcrow and Maureen Johnson on the other. One side wants, even needs, publishing to change so we can control our own destinies and write whatever we want. The other side needs publishing to remain the same, or at least stable, because that’s how they feed their families. They’re invested in the status quo.

So far, both sides are getting along, agreeing to disagree. But this tolerance is starting to slip. Debates are getting more heated. But it’s starting to look more and more like familiar political structures, taking on the flavor of unions versus freelancers. I fear that like American politics, the two sides will diverge to the point where they can no longer talk to each other, no longer respect each other’s point of view.

Barry Eisler’s defection to the indie side has shaken a lot of people in traditional publishing. When a New York Times Bestselling author walks away from a half million dollar advance to go indie, it makes indie publishing real. We’re not the lunatic fringe anymore. We’re the competition. The disruptors. The heretics.

Not that it’s all smiles and bunnies in the indie camp, either. There is dissension in the ranks. While some indie authors race to the bottom to sell their books at 99 cents before they lose their competitive price advantage, others decry how 99 cents “devalues” the book as an art form and demand their peers price their books higher, lest readers get too accustomed to paying a buck a book. I suspect this argument will settle out when the 99 centers figure out that they can’t sustain that price, and that their market dries up too fast. But I hope we get it ironed out before traditional publishers, along with the authors that depend on them, mobilize against the threat indie publishing poses.

Jennifer Mattern on allindiepublishing.com has an interesting interview up today with indie phenom Zoe Winters. They discuss something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, the sustainability of the 99 cent price point.

I think almost no one can make a solid living with 99 cent ebooks because you have to have huge volume for that. When I sold 6,500 ebooks in June 2010, that was around $2,300. Well, most people can’t live on that, especially after you take out Uncle Sam’s cut. — Zoe Winters

This is what bothers me. The Between Heaven and Hell trilogy — which comprises the first halfish of the Unification Chronicles, so this is already complicated — is somewhat genre-bending. Here’s the elevator pitch for the first book, Revelation:

When Daniel Cho sees a dead man walk away from a car wreck, he becomes the catalyst for a final battle between angels and demons.

What genre does that sound like? If you picked “science fiction,” you’d be right, only you didn’t pick that, did you? As the story develops, it turns out the angels and demons are really humans with a purely technological basis for immortality, and over the millenia they’ve inspired our myths of gods, angels and demons. In book five of the series, we’ll find out how and why they became immortal in the first place, and what that means about humanity and our place in the galaxy. But to start out, this book seems like urban fantasy or horror. We only find out it’s really science fiction later.

This genre ambiguity means the niche for people who want to read my books is on the smaller side. I will never pull down numbers like Amanda Hocking because paranormal romance just isn’t what I write. I have to accept that my niche is finite, even with the ebook market expansion accelerating.

And given that, 99 cents is troubling. A sale at 99 cents makes me only 1/6, or 16.7%, of what I make at $2.99. Hocking, Locke and others like them can get away with that because their pool of potential customers is so much larger. But if I want to make a living at this, 99 cents can only be an occasional promotional price. $2.99 or even $3.99 has to be the default.

A year from now, when the entire Between Heaven and Hell trilogy is available, plus two stand alone novels and my novella “Do Over!”, I’d have to sell about 500 copies of each book a month to sustain myself. Even that seems high to me, although I’m probably underestimating the size of the overall ebook market by several decimal points. Those will slide down the long tail over time, and be replaced by new books as I keep writing. As long as I stay around 3,000 copies overall a month, I can make my living as a writer. In theory, that’s sustainable.

At 99 cents each, on the other hand, I’d have to sell 13,000 copies a month to make the same amount of money. 13,000 new readers every month, 12 months a year. That’s more than the population of the whole town where I went to high school. Every month. In my niche, I just don’t see how that’s possible.

I’ve seen claims that standardizing on $1 is inevitable for ebooks, and their math is compelling. And while I’m not one of those who frets that $1 is “devaluing” the book, I can’t deny that under the current royalty conditions, $1 doesn’t work for me.

(If Amazon extends the 70% royalty to 99 cents and I’d only have to sell 6,000 copies a month, well, that’s a horse of a different color.)

Mur Lafferty, one of the pioneers of podcast fiction, has posted on her blog about her decision to go indie and not seek another agent after the one she had decided they should no longer work together. She likens it to being a ronin, a masterless (and often disgraced) samurai. While that’s a romantic image, I think she has the analogy turned around.

Agents are great. I know people who swear by their agents, talk to them daily on chat, would not make any career move without them. I met a fantastic agent at WorldCon, a very knowledgeable and kind guy. But for me, where I am right now, and what I’m looking to do in 2011, I think the ronin way is the way to go. I’ve been busting my ass for six years, trying build an audience hungry for my work. And now I’m going to attempt to grow that audience, get more readers, and encourage people to buy my books. If I have to do that without an agent, or even without an editor, so be it. I didn’t have plans to be an independent author for the long haul, but it seems that’s where I am.

This is the thing to keep in mind. The agent — and the editor, and the publisher if you go that route — work for you. Without you, there is no book. Period. We are the masters, and the agents and editors are our samurai. They perform valuable services, but you must never forget that without the author, there is no book. It’s easy, the way legacy publishing is structured, to forget that. To feel like you work for the publisher, or worse, you work for the agent that got you the deal with the publisher. After all, these are the people that hand you money (after they take their substantial cut). And in other lines of work, the people that give you money are in charge of you.

Writing is different. Publishers aren’t doing you a favor by deigning to publish your little novel. You are providing them with a way for them to profit off of your work. They add value by editing, distributing and marketing the book (or at least, they used to, which is why so many of us have decided it’s no longer in our interest to work with them, but that’s another rant), but without you, without the book, they have nothing to do.

So keep your heads high, authors. You are storytellers, maintaining a tradition that predates our species. You are the base of the whole pyramid. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Switch11 over at Kindle Review has an interesting article up about why you don’t have to be Amanda Hocking or John Locke to be a successful indie author. He lays out three levels of success, with the bottom being “solid indie authors,” those that only make tens of thousands of dollars a month rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.

This level is very important if you’re an author because it’s a level you can hit even if you don’t get every single thing right. Perhaps you can’t write paranormal romance or thrillers. Perhaps you refuse to join any social networks. Perhaps you don’t have the energy to both write great books and do great promotion. Those are all negotiable – The $1 price isn’t. However, everything else is.

The bit about the $1 price got me thinking. I know Konrath is running an experiment to see if he can make more money selling The List at 99 cents and a 35% royalty than he was making at $2.99 and a 70% royalty. So far, it seems to be working, in that he’s selling more than six times as many copies, and thus making more total revenue. It’s encouraging, especially if the pressure towards the $1 price point intensifies. And I know I’ve said on this very blog that pricing ebooks lower doesn’t cannibalize sales because you bring in more readers that wouldn’t have purchased your book at all at a higher price.

But I wonder if this rate of sales is sustainable. I have absolutely zero evidence for this. This is just my intuition talking. But to me it seems like selling all your books at 99 cents is like clear-cutting a forest. It’s quick and initially very profitable, but it’s not sustainable and leaves you with an empty, worthless asset once the original burst of profts passes.

I’m in this for the long haul. I want to make my living as a novelist, month after month. And I worry that the rate of sales people are seeing at 99 cents is chewing up their potential market — contrary to my own previous statements, the market isn’t truly infinite; I’m not going to start buying romance novels at any price, and know others feel the same way about the stuff I write — faster than the market for ebooks overall is growing. People aren’t planting new trees fast enough to keep up with the clear cutting, in other words.

I could be wrong here. The ebook market may be a tide rising fast enough to raise any and all boats. But it sounds too good to be true, and I’ve long since learned that things that sound too good to be true almost always are.

So I wonder if I might be better off keeping my prices for most of my books at $2.99, even if that means fewer sales and less money overall, at first. Let the fire burn dimmer and cooler, but for longer time, long enough to pay my bills while I write more books.

Because that’s the other thing to consider. While Konrath is right that indie ebooks are assets, things you own that continue to generate money without additional work on your part — let’s set aside promotion for the sake of argument — sales will taper off over time as your market reaches saturation. This is what Chris Anderson calls the “long tail.” The demand for any book will slide down the tail towards just a trickle of sales, but never stop so long as the book remains available. The key is to keep writing, adding book after book until all their long tails stacked up provide enough money for your needs.

I doubt that 99 cents will give me time to do this, but I’m willing to give it a try. The first book in my Unification Chronicles series, Revelation, will start at 99 cents and stay there. I plan on releasing the other six books in the series, along with any follow on novels — there exists a 20 year period between books 5 and 7 in which I could write for the rest of my life — at $2.99, using the first book to get new readers hooked on the story. Time will tell if I’ll be able to keep to that plan, but it’s going to be an interesting ride.

I had a really interesting conversation this morning on the Twitter machine with Lilith Saintcrow, an urban fantasy novelist I’ve liked for a few years now. Lili was linking to another post on Nathan Bransford’s site, this one explaining why, sometimes, an ebook just has to cost more than the paper version. As I’ve explained before, Nathan’s math is fatally flawed because he assumes that post-scarcity goods like ebooks still conform to supply and demand economic theory. They don’t.

I pointed out that with ebook supply being effectively infinite, it doesn’t make sense to price the books high enough to drive away anyone. That it’s better to price the books as low as you can, 99 cents to $2.99 on Amazon, depending on what royalty rate you’re looking for. Over time, you’ll pull in more total income at a lower price because of the Long Tail effect and making the purchase an “impulse buy.”

Lili disagreed, stating that the ebook market is bounded by the cost constraints on buying an ereader, that not everyone had a laptop, Kindle or Nook. While this is partly true, Amazon makes it possible to read their Kindle books on just about every platform available, from phones to ereaders to tablets to full computers. There are people in some parts of the world who have cell phones but not electricity (they charge at the village market, which does have power, or at least a generator). I would argue that the ratio of humans to ebook capable devices will approach 1:1 in my lifetime.

But don’t listen to me. I’m a Pollyanna futurist, after all. But it’s not just me saying this. Amazon started selling more ebooks than hardcovers last summer, and recently, they announced that they’re selling (not giving away public domain works, but selling) more ebooks than they do paperbacks. The world’s largest bookseller is selling more ebooks than paper books. Somebody has to be buying them.

Maybe it’s a technological filter thing. Obviously people who already buy their books online will be more inclined to read on one of the various Kindle-friendly platforms. But not everyone lives digitally. A lot of people still walk into brick and mortar bookstores and buy stacks of good old-fashioned wood pulp, right?

Do they? Mall bookstores like B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks faded away a while back, and now Borders is going out of business, leaving Barnes and Noble as the only national chain bookstore in America. Independent bookstores like Powell’s in Oregon and the Tattered Cover here in Denver are seeing a resurgence of sorts, but then again, so are record stores now that Tower is gone. And for the same reasons.

Paper books, by the end of this decade, will be collector’s items, like vinyl records are now. There will be a market for them, and they will sell, but mostly to pretentious hipsters who like to show how analog they are. For the vast thundering herds of humanity, sitting on busses and beaches, shuffling through airports, ebooks on a convenient handheld device will be the order of the day.

Lili doesn’t see that, and I understand why. She’s blogged extensively about her life as a single mom supporting her family through her writing. She has literally bet everything on the publishing system as it exists today, or rather as it existed five to ten years ago. Feeding her children depends on that system remaining viable, so she can’t afford to doubt it. When I pointed out that it was better to sell 1,000 copies of an ebook at $1 than 100 copies at $5, she disagreed, stating that those thousand copies would cannibalize the market, resulting in lower overall revenue. To her eyes, the market is fixed and unchanging. There are only x number of people willing to buy her books, so she needs to make as much off of each of them as she can.

The ebook market is still growing, and that growth is accelerating, not declining. And with ebooks, the supply may not be truly, mathematically infinite, but if your market of potential readers is x, then the supply is always x+1. There are always more readers, unless you’re JK Rowling, whom I believe does actually have 6.5 billion sales. She would have to start beaming books into space. But for everyone else…

Ebooks, in fact, make discovering new writers easier and more tempting that ever. And this is really why impulse pricing is so important. I already buy more Kindle books than I can possibly read, even having my Kindle read them to me while I’m driving. When I see an interesting book in the “Recommended” or “Buyers also bought” lists on Amazon, if it’s under $3, I just buy it. Even if I don’t get around to reading it, it’s worth such a low amount of money to have it handy in case I want to. But if the book is more than that, I’ll click the Sample button instead. This sends the first few chapters to my Kindle as a “stake in the ground” in case I come back to the book later. And you know what? I almost never do. Unless the sample is hella compelling, why spend more money on Book A when I already have all of Book B on my Kindle? Both are the same genre, both look interesting. Convenience wins, because humans are lazy when they can get away with it. And impulse pricing is what buys you that convenience.

In fact, that’s how I found Lili in the first place. I hadn’t read much Urban Fantasy, but eReader.com had the first book in her Hunter series on sale and I decided to give it a try. I was put off at first by her obvious pseudonym, but that was before I learned about who she was as a person and that she kept her real name on the down low to protect her kids. The book was gripping and exciting, and I’ve been hooked ever since. But without that impulse price, I never would have given her a second look.

And this is the danger that authors who have built careers on print ignore at their peril. Their worldview, their paradigm, is based on a publishing industry and more importantly a publishing market that doesn’t really exist anymore. If they can’t adapt to new realities, like Amazon selling more ebooks than paper books, all they’re going to be left with is a pair of dimes.

I keep seeing news articles about Amanda Hocking, and they’re all careful to point out that her experience isn’t representative of indie publishing in general. Even Hocking herself doesn’t understand why writers she believes to be better than her don’t sell as well. A lot of it comes down to luck.

I’m getting a chance to look at the indie publishing experience through a different set of eyes, and I’m coming to realize it takes an unusual collection of skills, as well. My friend Rachel is gearing up to publish several of her short stories and her first novel on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, etc. Let me get this out of the way. Rachel is a superwoman. She’s a better writer than me, she is good at just about everything she does and she and her husband have resumes that make you think they’re genetic mutants, superspies, or both. But Rachel doesn’t know much about indie publishing yet (she’ll be an expert soon, I bet), and by watching what she’s going through, it’s showing me why I think this indie thing is so easy. It isn’t. It just looks that way to me because of an accidental education.

Here’s some of what you need to know, besides the actual writing, to do well at indie publishing.

Editing

On the editing thing, I know what I don’t know and have hired an excellent editor whose opinions I trust to help me out with that aspect. But it took me a long time as a writer to realize what people meant when they said I “needed an editor.”

The real value of a professional editor, freelance or otherwise, isn’t in finding typos and subject/verb agreement. That’s a copyeditor, and while you need one of those too, and sometimes they’ll be the same person as your content editor, that’s not what a content editor does. Your editor is there to sanity check your choices as a writer and make sure the story is as good as you can make it. The telling of the story is important, but if the story itself has giant holes or inconsistencies, it doesn’t matter how beautifully it might be told.

Kathleen provides this for me. She checks to see if the story really makes sense, if this character would really do that, and points out where I really need to rethink that three page monologue (hint: anywhere you have one). She’s not changing the story, or putting her stamp on it. She’s helping me make it what I wanted it to be in the first place.

This is extraordinarily difficult to do by yourself. You’re too close to the story to really question the fundamental choices you made when you wrote it. That’s why if you’re going indie, it’s a worthwhile investment to find an editor you can trust and pay them what they’re worth.

Graphic design

Like it or not, people do just a book by its cover, especially online. Your cover is the first thing, along with the title, that a potential reader sees, and how it looks tells them a lot about you as a professional. If the cover looks attractive, with solid design, good typography and imagery, that tells them that they can probably expect that same attention to detail in the text. An weak cover, something that looks slapped together in five minutes in MS Paint, can drive readers right past your book. Remember, this isn’t the old days when people took what they could get. Entertainment in the 21st century is a marketplace of abundance, and you’re not only competing against both the other indie authors and the big NY publishers, but you’re also competing for your readers’ time with Call of Duty, Netflix, Angry Birds and who knows what else.

Here I really lucked out. Not only do I have a background in graphic arts myself, but my editor Kathleen designs book covers as a hobby and offers that as part of her editing service. She’s really good, and I’m going with her covers for Revelation and Crusade, along with one of my own for Jihad.

Book design

This is something I picked up partly by hobby, partly by accident. I’ve been making ebooks for years, both my own work and converting downloaded scans or conversions into properly formatted ebooks for my own collection. I’m an old hand with eReader’s old PML markup, and I watched the XHTML-based Open Ebook Format develop from the very beginning.

More to the point, I’m a (recovering) professional web developer, and a pretentious one that jumped on the “separate content from presentation” CSS train early on. I’m the type that uses styles in Word for everything, and never just italicizes a word ad hoc (that’s what the “emphasis” style is there for).

For modern ebooks, design returns to the web of ten years ago, keeping things simple and using basic structural tags. Converting text to very basic HTML is second nature to me, as is cleaning up a manuscript to get rid of anything that isn’t supposed to be there. I know regular expressions, dammit, and I’m not afraid to use them. I didn’t set out learn these techniques to format my own ebooks for publication, exactly, but they sure come in handy now.

This means I can format my books quickly and easily to what Amazon, Barnes&Noble, etc want when it comes time to upload. Speaking of which…

Content management systems

Anyone who has a blog should be right at home with the content management systems behind the bookstores at major ebooksellers. Web based forms are easy. Right? Not necessarily. Rachel’s having trouble getting her first Kindle ebook out of  “publishing” status. It keeps reverting to “draft” and no one seems to know why. I haven’t had the chance yet to look it over myself, and I might not be able to figure it out, but I didn’t have any trouble getting “Do Over!” through the system. Why? Because I’m a blogger and former developer, and I’m already comfortable working on the web.

Marketing and promotion

In the middle of the 2000s, I spend several years in various sales positions. Retail, cold calling, the whole nine yards. I learned I don’t like hard selling, but I also learned a lot about why people buy what they do, what kind of enticements are effective in getting people to try something new. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means, but I’m comfortable handling this aspect of indie publishing myself. I’ve already got lots of ideas on pricing, promotion, cross marketing, bundling, stuff most authors never think they’ll have to think about.

Social networking

And lastly, I know how to get by with a little help from my friends. A few years back, I’d vaguely heard of Facebook and there was some tweeter thing Silicon Valley insiders were using. Now, if you don’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook, you may as well not exist. Gone are the days of a writer sitting alone in a shack, sending out his novels and never interacting with his fans directly. Now, you’re expected to be present. You’re expected to engage. Answer questions. Being able to actually talk to my favorite authors on Twitter is amazing, and I’m looking forward to getting into discussions with my fans.

I welcome every aspect of being an indie author, but that’s because my eclectic education and career path has given me the tools to do so. I know I’m atypical. So if you’re thinking about going this route, ask yourself if you’re ready to do all the different things you have to do well to pull this off.

Nathan Bransford has an interesting blog post up today about Hocking, Konrath and what they mean for publishing. Nathan’s wicked smart, but he’s making the same mistake most people with experience in print make. He’s overlooking that supply and demand thinking doesn’t apply to a product where the supply is infinite.

Paper books are priced based on scarcity. You know how much they will cost to produce, you know how many of them you will produce, and you can decide how much you want to make per copy to turn a decent profit overall. You only have so many, so you would obviously prefer to make as much money per copy as you can.

Ebooks, on the other hand, are a post-scarcity good. There are as many ebooks as you can sell, and as it turns out, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. There is no such thing as an ebook print run. Without a constraint on how many copies you can sell, you don’t have to make as much per copy. Price the book low enough, down to “impulse buy” level, and you’ll pick up hordes of readers who never would have considered buying the hardcover. This is why one-to-one cost comparisons between paper and ebooks don’t work. An ebook priced at 1/20 the price of a hardcover will sell way over 20 times as many copies. Maybe not right away, but while a hardcover has maybe three months on the shelves, ebooks sell forever.

This is the lesson Hocking and Konrath really have to teach the publishing industry, if they’re willing to listen. Post-scarcity digital goods require completely different thinking, completely different economics, than physical goods. The longer print publishers take to figure this out, the more money they’ll lose.

We are living in a renaissance of creativity. A lot of people don’t appreciate it. But I think it’s fitting in the wake of what’s going on in North Africa and the Middle East that we think about the effect the internet really has on all aspects of our lives. And that got me thinking about what it does for creative people. Basically, it removes all our limitations. Well, the practical limitations, anyway.

All of the various media that have traditionally required corporations and established analog distribution channels are now available to anyone. Music, movies, comics, books, all can be produced by anyone with off the shelf equipment affordable by even modest incomes. And we’re seeing new mediums that never existed before, like stories played out in real time on Twitter that are something between a novel and a radio dramatization.

In the late 90s, early 00s, we saw the dawn of indie music, musicians recording albums that sounded professional, releasing them as MP3s and burning them to CDs to sell at their shows. A few years later, we saw the rise of tools like iMovie and cameras like the Flip Mino make it possible for indie film makers to release professional grade films on YouTube.

The last decade also saw a run at indie comics, and it’s here that “indie” became almost synonymous with “creator controlled.” Comics have seen a rebirth of diversity and creativity in the last ten years. Digital tools have made it possible to release directly to the web with levels of quality that would have been hard to come by on old bristol board. And with creators free to tell the stories they want to tell, superheroes have had to make room for comics about all sorts of things. It’s no wonder that these are turning out to be fertile ground for adaptation into other media, like how “The Walking Dead” was a comic long before a critically acclaimed TV series.

And yes, even indie TV is coming out of its shell, with series like Felicia Day’s “The Guild” garnering millions of viewers on the web, on game consoles, on set top boxes like Roku.

And yet, oddly, this revolution has taken a long time to make it to prose. There have been a few breakout stars like Amanda Hocking, and more traditionally published authors are coming to realize they can both make more money and retain more control over their if they go indie (see Joe Konrath for details). But for arguably the least technically complicated medium out there–ebooks can be reduced to ASCII text without losing much fidelity–prose authors are the last to make the jump to the digital age.

And a lot of that comes from the stigma still associated with the “self-published.”

While independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith, who maxed out all his credit cards to make “Clerks”, are lauded, authors who decide to bypass the corporate gatekeepers are still viewed with suspicion. If your book is so good, prospective readers wonder, why didn’t Random House want it?

Of course, the truth, increasingly, is that we didn’t bother to ask. Devices like the Kindle and iPad have made it not only possible, but practical for large masses of people to read books without the necessity of a printing press, paper and massive fleets of trucks for distribution. We finally have the means to reach our readers directly. And given that opportunity, I for one have no interest in asking permission to publish my book, and I’m certainly not willing to give up control over the cover, the title, sometimes even the name listed for the author in exchange for less than 20% of the cover price.

For years, the conventional wisdom was “money flows to the author.” The author never had to pay for anything, but also had to wait until everyone else in the process had taken their cut before they got what little was left over. Today, I’m both the author and the publisher of my work. Maybe I don’t pay anything as the author, but as the publisher, I hire an editor and graphic artist to help me make the book as good as it can be before I put it out there for readers to buy. It’s an investment, just like an independent businessperson in any other endeavor would be expected to make up front.

So I don’t call myself “self-published,” even though that’s literally true. Instead I’m joining with the musicians, filmmakers and artists and calling myself an indie author. This is my business as much as my art, and I’m proud to be in control of it, sink or swim. And hopefully, by the end of this decade, people will take indie authors as seriously as they take indie creative people in any other medium.