On Publishing, or Why I Chose the Indie Route

I want to talk a little about publication today, and I feel like I need to start with something particular, something that most writers with ambitions to publish still feel: traditional publication with an agent and a publishing house and all is better. There's still a touch of stigma, a scent of low-quality or "vanity publishing," with the idea of self-publishing. I get that. I feel that. I grew up in a time when self-publishing was vanity publishing. Shit, I even almost fell for the vanity publishing thing in college. (It was the company then named Publish America, now America Star Books, which is notorious across the Internet for being a scam. Fortunately for me, I found out about their bad reputation before signing anything with them.)

That was then, when Facebook was restricted to people with .edu emails, and I had a new cell phone that ohmigod you guys, takes pictures!

This is now.

Here's the cool thing about self-publishing and the ultimate reason I decided to go down its path: you don't need permission to put your words into the world. In traditional publishing, there's this funny catch-22 that you have to get an agent in order to be published, and in order to get an agent, you have to be published*.  (I've found this little conundrum to be true about applying for jobs and renting apartments, too, by the way. It's very annoying and probably why first-time job/apartment seekers end up in shitty places.) But self-publishing doesn't trap you in that conundrum, and after years of dealing with that kind of vicious cycle in other aspects of my life, I didn't want to fight with it in my writing. I wanted to, as Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant's book says, Write. Publish. Repeat.

Things began to click in 2015. I bumped in to the books by Joanna Penn and the guys at Sterling & Stone (of the above-mentioned Write. Publish. Repeat.) Pronoun was a sponsor of NaNoWriMo that year, which is how I found out about it, and its user-friendly and completely free platform for creating and distributing ebooks continues to be the best thing since my discovery of Scrivener (which I also found because it was a NaNo sponsor. Hmm, I think I'm sensing a pattern...) Canva and Pixabay made designing graphics fun, and viola! I am now an indie author.

*Not always all the time, of course, or there'd be no such thing as traditional publishing. But you get it. I'm generalizing to make a point.