Indie Publishing - Part 2: Not the Mega-Stars of Publishing

When I did my own market research into today's fantasy book sales, I needed to subdivide the market and writers into a number of convenient categories - to help assemble my own strategy for reaching out this market as a writer.

Most people can easily identify the "mega-stars" of any particular publishing genre: those bestselling authors that achieve success on a truly national or international scale. Invariably, such authors are represented by large, well financed, traditional publishing houses - which can bring many tools to bear in the marketing and promotion of these books. This also makes it difficult, however, as an author new to the genre, to necessarily utilize these authors as a role model to help identify the tools and formulae that could potentially lead to success.

While as authors, we can all admire such acclaimed writers such as J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, most of us realize that we are not all destined to achieve that same level of stardom. Many of us would be more than satisfied with seeing our books selling thousands of copies rather than millions. For many of us, even hundreds of books sold would be a beginning.

Consider for example, the story of one the "mega-stars" of today's fantasy literature, Sarah J. Maas - who many will point out began her literary career publishing chapters from what eventually evolved into the "Throne of Glass" series online (on FictionPress.com). Despite these humble beginnings, however, it should also be remembered that Ms. Maas abandoned online publishing once she started looking for an agent for her work in 2008 (which was also the year that she graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York), eventually signed with an agent in 2009, and landed her first publishing contract with Bloomsbury in 2010. Her first novel would be subsequently published in print in 2012. Although her rise to success was truly meteoric, we cannot say that it was the story of an indie author that turned professional.

So for those of us who are independent authors that still desire to publish in this genre, albeit with slightly less ambitious goals in mind, we will have to look to those that are not quite in the same category as the "mega-stars" to help us understand where our opportunities and lessons to be learned might be.