So, you want to go indie.

Good. It’s risky, and scary. But what isn’t? And at this point there is a path and a plan.

First, let’s look at this manuscript of yours. You’re going to publish it and put it before literally millions of people. This means you’re responsible for what those people will read. And how good it is.

Now the first thing, if you can, is to get betas to read it and give you their opinions.

… look, I know it’s not easy, okay? It’s not easy for me and I have fans. But people have lives and jobs, and are not on your schedule. Half the time when I send stuff to people to read, they … don’t read it in time. or at all. Sometimes I finally get an opinion (and one I must respect and fix up) when everything is about ready to go up. It’s … maddening. But these people are not on your schedule, and as such aren’t required to stop everything and read your book.

One of the things you definitely should know is that your betas answering or not doesn’t mean your book is great, or terrible. Look, these people aren’t reading your book for fun. They’re reading it to help (at least hopefully so) which means at some level they view it as work. So it’s not at all the same experience as someone who has bought your book for fun and intends to read it asap.

The other thing to remember, if you do get answers, is that unless more than one person stumbles on the same difficulty, it’s probably nothing. I’ve had people have the most absurd problems on beta reading, problems that would require me to rewrite the whole thing top to bottom, which I ignored because they made no sense (to me) or I simply didn’t know how to apply a fix without ditching the entire book. And also because ONLY ONE PERSON OUT OF TEN OR SO WHO ANSWERED had that problem. Guess what? When the book came out NO ONE complained about that one thing. Not a single person.

But what if no one answers?

Well, at this point I have assembled at editorial team. My first level, for “read and tell me if something just doesn’t make sense/doesn’t work is Laura Schroeder (aggrokitty@gmail.com). She’s affordable, professional and very, very thorough. She will tell you if you suddenly forgot one of you premises or didn’t follow something through. She is also amazing on telling you how NOT to sound like an AI. (Look, these days we’re all reading so much AI generated stuff that we’ve caught some of the cadences or worse some of its bad habits. of course, in my case it’s worse because the d*mn things were trained on my prose, which means some of their bad habits are MY bad habits. (there’s a bunch of us in this boat, too.) Anyway, she has seen enough of it to spot when “this sounds like AI” and she’ll clean it up.

Then there’s Deej, (iktapop@protonmail.com) my trusty structural editor. He’s really good at figuring out if your structure is doing what you want it, or if you forgot some essential movement or didn’t show your crucial scene or something. He’s not… cheap. But he’ll make sure the book you put out is the best it can be. (Note this doesn’t mean it will make you a fortune. We’ll get to that.) If you can afford him, he’s definitely worth it. How worth it? Well, his fixes for me are often of the “This scene needs to move there” or “Don’t name the character that. You’re giving away to much” BUT the thing is no one else tells me those fixes, and once he tells them it’s obvious they’re correct. And while they’re often very small things, they’re also often the most praised things afterwards. For his credentials it must suffice that he had three of edited books in the Prometheus finalists this year. (And two won. The third was mine. And I’ve covered that. While an excellent book, (NO, I do NOT say that about all my books, though I require “good” at a minimum) it was less overtly Libertarian than the adult category winner, and the Prometheus rewards both excellence and a Libertarian orientation.)

After those two get through it and give it a good drubbing, I then send it to my long-suffering copy editor (rhesagirl@gmail.com) whom I frankly don’t pay nearly enough (because I don’t make that kind of money.) I have this dream that I’ll make a bazillion dollars and she’ll just work for me, always ready to fix my absurd typos (look, it’s a lovely dream.) She’s affordable, as copy editors go. She’s also very good, and has never even accused me of writing things in Martian. In fact, the worst she does is tell me “I don’t understand this?” though she also is pretty good at telling me when I changed the ages, dates or whatever in my books, which honestly is my perennial issue.

Now, no, these people aren’t the only ones making a living making sure indie books are readable. they are, however, the ones I know and can vouch for. You might find an amazing editor I’ve never heard of. But there are also a lot of bad ones out there, so I figured I should give you somewhere to start with people I know.

However, I must tell you the best of helps with my writing so far is the chinchilla of hope gang. No, you can’t get in. You’ll have to find your own. We kind of came together organically. However, being able to post the book, chapter by chapter, as I write it, and getting people asking questions or interacting with the prose is invaluable.

It’s the closest I’ve come to my fanfic writing, when people would ask questions or react to the installment I’d just posted. And since it’s a stable group, I came to know these people, and know their personalities and whether they’re tripping on something real, or just something they misinterpreted. (Or something I KNEW they’d trip on.)

They’re invaluable. The price is… I have to read their stuff too. (Which is why you can’t get in. I can’t read everyone. I don’t have forever.) As they write it.

If you can get your own group, it’s the best thing in the world. Do I know how to do it?

I can give you a pointer: connect to other writers, talk to them. If you become friends, see if you can get together and start writing and sharing chapters, chapter by chapter. Who knows? you might get lucky.

So, after all this, when you have a manuscript all ready, what do you do with it.

First, get a cover.

And that is a subject all its own.

Let’s talk about it next week.