The Most Overlooked Step in Indie Publishing

It’s all about what you don’t do.

In the industry of indie publishing, where the main sales platform rewards authors for frequency, it’s not uncommon to hear people confuse “writing” with “typing.”

I know this is going to make me sound like a snob, and that’s perfect because when it comes to telling a compelling story, I am a bit of a snob. If a story with little thought given to theme, the protagonist’s wants and needs, philosophical conflict, and so on takes off, and not just because the author throws a huge budget into the marketing and cover, that’s what I call a fluke. Maybe the author accidentally included a theme without knowing it (that happens a lot, but it’s not ideal) or they just modeled the protagonist so closely on themselves that they were able to successfully convolute the protagonist’s wants and needs with their own and have it work.

Whatever the case, typing and writing are not the same thing. Typing is the process of transcribing thoughts into little characters that we interpret to mean specific things.

But before we can transcribe thoughts, we need to have them.

With burnout at all-time highs in this business, I hear from authors all the time that they feel wrung out. They worry they won’t be able to come up with the next…