Behind The Scenes: Voices From Indie Authors - Part 2

In Part 1, we explored the challenges and realities of self-publishing, from writing and editing to the endless decisions authors face after finishing a manuscript.

Now, we hear directly from other indie authors about their journeys, insights, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

A.K. Gilbert is the author of Gods and Men: A Dream of Fire and Blood, a high fantasy novel steeped in rich world building, detailed characters, and loads of action and suspense. We spent some time discussing all different aspects of the indie author world. Here’s what he had to say:

Publishing Route

“At the time I published A Dream of Fire and Blood, it was very important to me to get my name out. I chose the Vanity publishing route. It took a while to find a publisher that I felt would represent my work in an acceptable way. I am constantly hammered with emails, telephone calls and in some cases text messages from other vanity publishers and promoters. All of them claim to love my book. When I ask them to tell me anything about my book, they can’t. I have removed my email from my Facebook author page to cut down on some of the unwanted traffic.”

Vanity publishers are a unique type of publisher that provide a viable option for some independent authors. The simple fact is, traditionally publishing a book is very difficult. There are so many steps involved. You have to find and secure a literary agent, which means hours and hours of time writing and sending query letters, and getting rejected more times than you can count. Then, finally, getting some attention you’ll have to make revisions to your work before they’re ready to try to get a bigger publisher to take your work. And that can take months to years! But then, once a publisher finally chooses you, you’ve got waiting (and work) to do. And you lose certain rights and control. The title of your book will probably be out of your hands. And the cover, also. It comes with benefits, like they typically pay you an advance and they typically cover the costs of editing, formatting, and cover design. But then, oftentimes, you’re usually left to market all on your own, unless you’re lucky enough to land a large publishing house, that is.

This is where the vanity publishers come in. They differ in a few key areas. For starters, you usually get much more control over your name, branding, book title and cover, and so on. And, to their credit, most vanity publishers will help you market your book. But, there’s no payment advance. You have to pay them for their services. So, instead of a publisher to author relationship, it can often feel more like a customer to seller relationship.

Writing Processes

“My writing week is divided into days. The days I must work and those I am off. I work Tuesday through Friday and usually I am at my desk by 6.00pm. No later than 6.30pm. I have a daily goal of writing 3 pages on these days. Saturday through Monday is when I really go hard with a goal of 6 pages. I usually hit 8 or 10 pages on non-workdays. On weekends I am a morning writer, which I have come to prefer. It is regular for me to spend up to seven hours in one setting on weekends. Editing, I set aside for the last Sunday of each month. I brainstorm 24/7. I am never disconnected from my writing. Marketing is where I am lacking. I prefer a hands-on approach to all my projects. I have taken over the editing following the release of my first book. Formatting, I leave to my publisher.”

The writing process for us authors is usually the best part. It’s exciting, seeing how the characters come to life and expand beyond our wildest dreams. I can personally vouch for this, as some of my characters have evolved well beyond what I originally intended for them to be. But it’s also hard work. It’s actually daunting and intimidating when you sit down and think something like “I need to write at least 80,000 pages”, that's a lot! But, when you take it step by step, or set daily writing goals such as Mr. Gilbert, you’ll find it a much more enjoyable practice. One that can sometimes captivate you more than reading itself.

AI: Usage and The Future

“My feelings on AI are mixed. It can be great for research purposes and little else in my opinion. I would also like to mention that AI will never replace the creativity of the human mind.”

This is a hot button topic, to say the least. AI has exploded in usage and popularity recently. But with new technology always comes consequences and costs. AI can be an extremely helpful, and time saving tool on the one hand. But on the other hand, it can be used to outright plagiarize other creative work. Some people are using it to generate entire books, and trying to sell them. The morality and ethics of this should be left to another article for another day, but how does it affect independent authors now? Lots of us have been directly accused of using AI, even when we haven’t. Perhaps the most prominent method is the em dash. Which, quite honestly, is absurd, considering its usage in popular novels such as the Twilight series and even dating as far back as the legendary Edgar Allen Poe. And the AI detection methods grow more confusing with AI checkers online.

As a personal example, I recently wrote an article for someone. I ran the article through a popular online AI detector and it came back as 17% AI generated content. Ironic, considering the article was entirely written by hand. Then, upon submission of the article, I got my client to run it through the exact same software. The results on their end of the screen showed over 20%, even though nothing had changed at all. Then, to take the experiment further, I logged into Grok, gave it a subject and word count and gave it instructions to “write as humanized as possible, with the goal of fooling AI detectors”. I ran this AI generated article through the same checker and received a score of only 4% AI generated content, also known as “human written”. So clearly, AI detection is far from where it needs to be, and throwing accusations around isn’t the solution.

Cover Art

“The cover for Gods and Men, A Dream of Fire and Blood, Part 1 was hand drawn by the very talented Lindsey Warren Layne. She listened to my idea and produced it to perfection and I couldn’t be happier. The cover design for part 2 of A Dream of Fire and Blood was created by Sarah Joseph from my Publisher, Book Writing Pioneer. She also listened to my design and created it to perfection. The cover is the first thing of any book that gets noticed. A great cover can entice people to give your book a shot. A bad cover can sink you. Some people really do judge books by their covers”

Cover art is one of the most important aspects of marketing your book, and I think this is a lesson that is hard learned by indie authors. It's tough! Cover design can get expensive, fast! And you can do it yourself, sure, but you risk creating a cover that doesn’t match your genre, that looks unprofessional, or that doesn’t catch the eye of your target audience.

Advice to Other Indie Authors

“I would have taken more time before I submitted my book and corrected all the errors myself. It would have saved me a lot of time and headaches. I would advise all first time authors to not rush the process and read and re-read your book until you are satisfied.”

Ansley Johnson is a Christian author of several books, namely the Tempestuous Lullabies Series: The Lullaby of the Drowned Wife, The Lullaby of the Fallen Star, and The Lullaby of the Pressed Petals. These stories feature twists and turns you won’t see coming and are filled with beautiful presentations of the Gospel and Christian values. Here’s what she had to say.

Publishing Route

“When I first started looking into publishing I pretty much saw that anything that didn’t meet a certain word count was passed over by most traditional publishers, and I didn’t want to have to go back and expand and stress myself out to meet a certain word count when I felt like my stories were told and done. I also wanted to keep the creative process entirely in my control. Being a Christian author, I know that genre isn’t the most popular and I didn’t want to feel pressured by a publisher to change anything about my writing. I believe the only way that I would be tempted to start using a Publisher of any sorts would be if for one they were a Christian publisher and for two they didn’t take away too much of my creative process. I’m not really ready to give any of my profit to someone else unless I see it greatly benefiting me but also not completely taking over my life because I’m a wife first, a mother second, and an author third.”

The pressure from traditional publishers is very real, and sad as it may be, algorithms can help filter manuscripts and pass over ones that don’t meet a certain word count, whether that means it's too long of a book or too short. This also goes back to loss of creative control. A traditional publisher won’t change everything about your novel, but they do have immense pull and the ability to apply ample amounts of pressure where needed to mold the book into something they deem marketable.

Writing Processes

“Being barely a year into my publishing journey I’m more focused on just getting my books written, edited and polished. Being a stay at home, homeschooling, mom of three it’s very difficult to say how many hours I can even put in because it varies so much day-to-day, week to week, and month-to-month but I think if I can dedicate one to two hours a day that’s generally my goal and that includes everything from writing to editing, creating my cover art, working on bookmarks or posting to social media. I definitely didn’t realize how much I would be doing other than just writing my books.”

Writing is but one aspect of publishing a book, and many authors (myself included) discover that writing a novel is usually just the tip of the iceberg. It can feel like writing is the most daunting, time consuming part at times, but once that’s completed? You’re faced with editing, polishing, formatting, launching and publishing, marketing, social media, in person events, cover design, back of book blurb creation, and so much more. It can be overwhelming, exhausting even, but it’s a journey and this is simply part of the process us Indie authors must go through.

AI: Usage and The Future

“The only places I’ve really incorporated AI is in my brainstorming, because it helps me keep all of my ideas and the timeline in order, and then I use it again at the very end of my editing process to help finalize the grammar and help me get that professional feel to my writing. I would love to one day find an editor that I connect with who can do everything and more that AI has done for me so far on my journey.”

Cover Art

“My cover process has been kind of all over the place. Originally I tried to find a cover designer on Etsy and was essentially scammed because they just used an AI cover generator and whereas I didn't like the cover it made I wanted something with more of a human touch so to speak. So when I went on to continue publishing my tempestuous lullabies trilogy I did work with a digital artist, and I absolutely loved the covers that she came up with, but my two most recently published books were covers that I created myself using Canva.”

Creating stunning cover art on your own can be intimidating and even difficult for some people, but Ansley shows it's more than possible. Canva, as one example, is a really accessible way for indie authors to dig in and get creative to tinker with cover designs until they come up with something they are satisfied with.

Advice to Other Indie Authors

“Make sure you actually check the entire manuscript before you publish it. On every single one of my books, I have had to go back and fix minor errors that I made during the editing or formatting process. Most of the time the mistakes weren’t even caught by me, but caught by one of my early readers. Thankfully, the mistakes never made my books unreadable, but I had an entire book where the first half of the book the font size and spacing, and even the font itself were consistent, but then halfway through the book everything changed the font style, the sizing the spacing all of was completely different. And on a completely different book, every chapter after chapter 15, its chapter header art wasn’t even above the chapter. It was thrown in the middle of the chapter somewhere between some paragraphs. So yeah, double triple quadruple check the whole manuscript before you publish it. Check every single page. I would also tell them to have fun with it and write what you wanna write. Find your network of readers who like your genre and just have fun with it. At the end of the day it’s whatever you make it and the journey itself is incredibly rewarding and so much fun.”

📌 Stay tuned for Part 3: Voices from Indie Authors, continued, where we share insights from two more writers.

Joseph Cruey, also known as Ink Fist Joe, is an author of dark, morally driven fiction and a freelance writing coach dedicated to helping aspiring authors bring their stories to life. Through his work on fiverr, he provides blog writing, editing, formatting, and one-on-one guidance to writers navigating the path to publication. His debut novel, "The Wraith of Magdalena" is available on Amazon. You can also catch some of his blogs on Cottagestead.