9 Things Every Indie Author Needs to Stop Worrying About Now

There’s no shortage of things to fret about as a self-publisher. You’re the captain of the ship, but that’s both good news and bad.

Because while everything about your success or failure is ultimately up to you, everything about your success or failure is ultimately up to you. Nobody will help you out unless you’re partners or are paying them. Nobody will automatically be in your corner. Nobody will shake the pom-poms for you.

If you were traditionally published, you might not get a ton of promotion, but at least you’d get placement, in a few places, for a while. Even though the publisher might barely know you exist within their huge catalog, you’d at least be there, and your success would be their success. At least someone else would have a reason for you to succeed. But as an indie? You’re on your own, baby.

The responsibility that comes with indie publishing can feel overwhelming. It’s not just that you could trip and fall. You could also fail to keep an eye on everything you should. You could forget about something, position yourself incorrectly, or generally be blindsided by something you hadn’t thought to watch out for. You might feel like a plate-spinner, trying to keep too much in the air lest something fall and shatter.

It’s true that there’s a lot to keep an eye on when you’re an indie, and there are certainly many tasks you’ll need to manage.

But there are also plenty of things that indies worry about that probably aren’t worth your mental bandwidth.

Here are some of the things you can likely stop worrying about, and instead spend that recovered time writing.

1. Picking the Right Genre (Or Even *A* Genre)

Convention says that writers should pick a genre — thrillers, horror, romance, maybe generalized literature — and stick with it. The thinking makes sense; it’s based on satisfying readers of your current work by giving them more of what they already like.

This is an extremely personal decision, though. Some people like to write in a single genre, living forever in their favorite tropes and reader expectations. That’s totally fine, and many authors find success that way. But what if you like to write more than one thing? What if your purest creative soul begs to be allowed to write romance AND horror? Then sticking to a single genre would mean basing your art on a marketing decision (writing something profitable over something you wanted to write more); it would rob writing of its fun because you love variety and value freedom more than anything; it would be a stupid long-term decision seeing as you don’t want to be tied down to a single genre for the rest of your creative career.

There are three main concerns with genre-hopping. The first is the idea of satisfying readers by giving them more of what they already like. There are people who only really like one type of book, and if you have some of those people in your audience, they may not feel satisfied enough by your output in one genre and may therefore go elsewhere. While that can be true, that concern mostly fades for people who produce at volume. If you only write one or two books a year, hopping genres will indeed leave some readers wanting because they’ll have to wait a few years between their ideal reads. But if you produce over a million words a year — a large book each month or three to four novellas a month — you don’t have this problem.

High-producing writers don’t have to pick one genre or another. They can do one genre and another.

Critics also say it’s confusing to readers. If your brand doesn’t stand for a tightly focused style of work, how will readers know what to expect from you?

First of all, readers are smarter than that. Maybe there are readers who would see your book with a gunslinger riding a unicorn on the cover, with a product description that describes it as, “Harry Potter without wizards but with gunslingers, talking unicorns, epic fights, and more turkey pie,” and think it was a romance novel set in Bangkok in the 17th century. But if there are, they’re not in your group of ideal readers — and confusing them doesn’t matter.

But there’s another thing: You know that expression “The only constant is change,” which is all ninja-like in positioning the antithesis of “constant” as a constant? Well, does no one consider that there might be readers out there whose genre is a lack of genre? It’s certainly true of a lot of people; the shelf across from me right now includes Fight Club, House of Leaves, Catch-22, the Harry Potter novels, and a fantastic young adult sci-fi romance called Everyday. There are a lot of readers whose genre is “books they think are awesome,” and those are the people genre-hopping writers are most likely to attract. Maybe they won’t love every book you write, but they also won’t automatically dismiss one (or be confused by it, furrowing their Neanderthal brows in a vain attempt to understand) simply because it has nanobots instead of unicorns.

The final argument against genre-hopping is about discoverability. In a physical bookstore, it’s true that proper genre shelving mattered, because you wanted people looking for romance books in the romance section to see your book. It’s similarly true that if you wrote a sci-fi novel after writing dozens of romances, even your most loyal readers would never see it because it wouldn’t be shelved with your other books. But in online bookstores — especially for writers who have their own mailing lists — this problem disappears. Thanks to various recommendation lists (“You might enjoy these books,” “Customers who bought this book also bought these books”), cross-genre books will be “shelved” next to one another if enough people have bought them both — and, if you cultivate a list of people who like to read across genres, you can inform them of both titles to make that happen. Your own books will also all be shelved together permanently. If someone wants to see your other work, all they have to do is click on your name and get the lot.

Not everyone can be defined by a single label. If you want to write across multiple genres, do it, and find your ideal readers who are equally unwilling to be defined by their genre.

2. Protecting Your Copyright

Your work has a copyright the minute you’ve written it. It’s automatic and requires no effort. So, what we’re really talking about here isn’t protecting your work. We’re talking about the way most writers sweat the issue of copyright, which is going to all sorts of extra lengths to register and reinforce it. I’m not suggesting you’re not protected; I’m simply arguing that taking those extra steps are not worth the time you should spend writing.

Out of all the work out there to be stolen and infringed upon, do you really think that yours is going to be the one some poacher steals? Oh, you know someone it happened to? Did the poacher turn your buddy’s work into a blockbuster and cost them a ton of money? Or was it just some random asshole?

If your copyright is somehow infringed and turned into a huge breakout hit, don’t you think whatever it would cost you to get your fair share of that huge breakout hit would make it worthwhile?

Of course, copyrights are infringed upon from time to time. So what? Once you get your sense of artistic indignation out of the way, what harm was really done? The chances of someone doing something terrible to your rights are so incredibly remote that in our opinion it’s simply not worth the expense, hassle, or mental space to consider. It could happen, but you could also be hit by a bus. Does that mean you shouldn’t cross the street?

3. Piracy

People sweat piracy as much as they sweat copyright, but obscurity is a far bigger issue. You’ll never stop piracy. You can try, but before you do, try calling the film, music, and porn industries and ask them how that strategy is working out for them. You could spend valuable hours scouring Internet file-sharing services and torrents to see if anyone is stealing your stuff, then try to stop them, but your efforts will net you a shuffle. If you’re popular, people will always share your stuff.

This might actually be a good thing. The people who read pirated books are never going to buy your work anyway; it’s a totally different audience than purchasing readers. Even if you could scrub your stuff from the Internet, you’d only be keeping your book from pirate readers. You wouldn’t convert those readers into buyers. They’d simply read something else that was free.

People staying interested in your work — even if that means stealing it — is a good thing. The more people who see your books, the more likely they are to talk about it. Money lost to piracy is almost a sensible marketing expense. The more people who are talking, the more people who will hear. Some may become buyers.

4. How Much Money You’ll Make

I’ll answer this now so you can stop worrying: Not much at first.

You’ll work really hard for months and months, and won’t make much money at all. Keep at it, and that should turn around, but in general, this stuff takes time. But you knew that already. Only deluded people think they will publish one book and retire.

The fact that everyone spends so much time thinking about something they already know the answer to reveals the “How much will I make?” question to be not much more than a delay tactic. Get over it and move on. You won’t make much at first, but the sooner you start, the sooner “not much” will become “more.”

The issue of money does matter, but how much is the wrong question to ask. Don’t think in terms of dollars and cents (euros, pounds, whatever) in the beginning. Think about creating books that are truly worth buying, doing it over and over, and getting it into as many hands as possible. Think about gaining a better understanding of what makes prospective buyers tick. Think about forging better connections with your readers and growing your mailing list.

Do those things faithfully, and money will (eventually) follow.

5. What Anyone Else Thinks

You’re probably going to get pushback as you build your indie writing business. You may get it from well-meaning family and friends, or from fellow writers who think you should try to publish traditionally, that your decisions about what to write are somehow incorrect, or that you’re going about your marketing all wrong. You’ll get advice on your work, your titles, your covers, the genres you write in, your pricing, and so on. Some of it will be good, and you should listen to it all. But in the end, once you know what you’re going to do, cut it off and stand firm — and at that point, some of the advice and pushback will start to sound like criticism … or even pity.

Don’t worry if your friends think you’re wasting your time. Don’t worry if you write some saucy, horrific, or profane scenes that Grandma wouldn’t approve of. Don’t worry if your writing group disagrees with your marketing or branding. Once you’ve listened, assessed, and decided, your decisions are yours to make. They are no one’s business but your own.

This isn’t about selfishness or bullheadedness. Once you have a group of ideal readers and true fans, you’ll be making those decisions based on what you know about them that the critics don’t. Your job is to serve your audience and yourself.

If you’ve done your job and cultivated a group of readers that are indeed ideal readers, your aims and your readers’ desires should nicely align.

You’re an adult. You’ve earned the right to do what you want, regardless of what anyone has to say.

6. Making Your Book Perfect

Your book will not — and cannot — ever be perfect. Even if you get all of the grammar and spelling and punctuation in line with the official rules, your plot could always be a bit more exciting or heartfelt. You could always foreshadow better. You could always make the dialogue ring more true.

Worrying about perfection sounds noble. That’s how you justify holding a book back: “I owe my readers the best, and this can still be better.” But it’s not noble; it’s self-indulgent. You aren’t refraining from publishing because you care about readers; you’re refraining because you’re afraid. You aren’t ceaselessly revising and tweaking your book to improve its selling potential; you’re doing it to avoid writing the next one. This is all fear and resistance, not quality control.

As Seth Godin wrote in Linchpin, “The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.”

Your book will never be truly finished or perfect. Competent indies understand that while that may be true, you must publish anyway, so you can move on to the next one.

Other Activities That Probably Aren’t Worth Your Time

To close, let’s cover some miscellaneous things that fall firmly into the description of “probably not worth your time” — activities that may give you some results but will likely require too much time relative to what your efforts will yield.

I’m not discouraging you from doing these things, or saying they won’t generate results. I’m saying that in most cases, the potential returns are small enough that your time would be better spent writing — the one activity from which almost every indie stands to reap the most benefit.

7. Print

I love print. There’s something about holding a book in your hand that makes you feel like a real writer.

But wanting to feel like a real writer isn’t enough of a justification to set aside new production to create print versions of existing books, so only do it when you can shove it in or when there seems to be another reason. There can be value in handing out or selling print books in person, and the way Amazon makes your e-book price look better if there’s print on the page for comparison is a nice psychological anchor. But even with all of that, print is still firmly in the “probably not worth it” category for most indies.

If you choose to spend time on print, just know you’re not doing something likely to yield large monetary results.

8. Book Trailers

Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books. They typically have dramatic still photos creeping across the screen and dissolving into one another, and higher-end trailers will include video. They may or may not have a voiceover, and usually have theatrical-looking text moving around and/or quotes from the book. The idea is to stick the trailers on YouTube or your website and use them to fuel anticipation for your book among an audience that’s more visual than your core reader group.

Personally, I don’t understand book trailers at all and have no interest in them despite hearing that they can be worthwhile. Ryan Holiday has a fantastic and effective trailer for Trust Me, I’m Lying, and Jonathan Fields has one for Uncertainty. But they are rare. Ryan Holiday is a born marketer and Jonathan Fields’ trailer mined perfect emotion. Both look like they had a substantial budget behind them. Odds are that your trailer will only be a waste of time and money.

As with print, you can do them, but know what you’re likely to get. Make sure the time, expense, and effort is something you’d rather spend on trailers than on writing more books.

9. Algorithms

There’s been a lot of talk about various platforms’ algorithms — especially Amazon’s ranking and recommendation engines — and it’s a good idea to know something about how they work. But Amazon especially guards its algorithms very closely so that no one really knows exactly how they work, so try to minimize time spent thinking (or ruminating) about them.

Luckily, understanding most of what you need to know about algorithms doesn’t have to take a ton of time.

Ed Robertson and David Gaughran are well-known in the indie space as being the people who know a lot about how Amazon’s algorithms work. You can pick up David’s excellent book Let’s Get Visible, which is all about understanding the various ways that Amazon puts recommended books in front of prospective readers.

Once you’ve done your initial research, incorporate “algorithm thinking” as a by-the-way thing. Let’s Get Visible has a great section on choosing categories for your work, so maybe you’ll decide to tweak those categories. Maybe you’ll wonder at the algorithms when you publish and keep them in the back of your head. Beyond that, they’re probably not worth worrying about.

Think about them, yes. But don’t put algorithm optimization above writing good books and bonding with your readers. Trying to ride algorithmic waves is usually a procrastination tactic. You can increase your visibility by spending five minutes thinking about algorithms, but beyond that your best strategy for increasing visibility is to write more books, hence making your publishing footprint harder to ignore.