A group of nine experienced independent authors have come together to create a how-to guide for potential indie authors. The Indie Guide to Indie Publishing will feature nine authors: Blake Northcott (Kindle Best-Seller Vs. Reality), Amy Leigh Strickland (Olympia Heights), Kiri Callaghan (Funeral Potatoes), Dave Wheeler (Mindwave Comics), Bobby Nash (Evil Ways), JL Bryan (Jenny Pox), Kyle Strickland (Say No to Sparkles), Teal Haviland (UtopYA Best Debut Novel 2013, Inception), and Carly Strickland (Sunshine’s Night Out.) The book will feature articles on a range of topics from eBook formatting to self-promotion and include an index and glossary of terms.
Many other sources on indie publishing don’t follow the process from editing to promotion, and many of these single-author books simply lack the variety of expertise. The Indie Guide to Indie Publishing is a start-to-finish guide to publishing and promoting your indie book. The inclusion of nine authors means that each writer is sharing their specific expertise. Many of these authors started with no experience and had to piece together their research from scattered sources. They hope, in publishing this book, to streamline the process for future aspiring authors.
In a way, it seems like the perfect project for the Kickstarter spirit. Kickstarter is about putting control into the hands of the consumer. You fund the projects you want to see made. Independent publishing follows that same ideal. Indie publishing puts the power of content creation in your hands. The Indie Guide to Indie Publishing cannot prescribe commercial success, but it can make the ins-and-outs of formatting, distribution, and marketing less of a mystery.
The project leader, Amy Leigh Strickland, began publishing in 2011 with her novel, Olympia Heights: The Pantheon. She has since published four other novels, including two more Olympia Heights novels, a vampire novella, Kissing Corpses, and a steampunk adventure, Rescue OR, Royer Goldhawk’s Remarkable Journal. Strickland is the CWO of Matter Deep Publishing, an independent family publisher working out of Birmingham, Alabama. This how-to guide to independent publishing will be the second Kickstarter project for the small publisher. In 2012, Matter Deep ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund an art book, The Incognito Project. After the successful funding of the campaign, Matter Deep and Terry Strickland Art hosted an art show in Birmingham where guests could view the art from the book and purchase signed copies for their own collections.
The Kickstarter for The Indie Guide to Indie Publishing launched on July 14th, 2013 and will run until August 13th. The initial project is asking for $8,000 to pay for author fees, design, and backer rewards. Plans for stretch goals include extra mini-articles on more specific topics such as Kindle Select and Kickstarter. Backer rewards include copies of the book, design services, and stickers, shirts, and bookmarks that remind authors, “You should be writing.”
You can pledge to the project at its official Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matterdeep/the-indie-guide-to-indie-publishing
