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What it really takes to Indie Publish
Author Tallulah Lucy shares her process and how much she loves it, despite the hard work.
As the person behind the Facebook group The Dragon Writers, and a founding member of the writers’ co-op Skolion, Tallulah Lucy has learned a thing or two about publishing a novel, and she walks us through her process with writing, editing, indie-publishing, and promoting her novel Keyflame.
She began work on her YA fantasy Keyflame in 2009, and has gone though the rewriting process several times – always learning, and working at making her writing the best it can be.
Tallulah, tell us a little about what inspired you to write Young Adult fantasy, and what did you learn from your favourite YA writers?
When I started writing Keyflame, YA was not really a thing. And I really could kick myself for not pushing forward with finishing and polishing it up then because it was right at the start of the "YA golden age". Hunger Games was published that same year, and the Twilight movie had just come out. Twilight wasn't even called YA then, it was called romance.
I started Keyflame thinking I wanted to write a romance that hit the same tropes as Twilight, because I liked a lot of the Twilight concept but had problems with some of the plot. And because I was full of nostalgia about my little university town that I was about to leave, it also became a love-letter to the town - a time capsule that I could read to visit the town again.
It was my "silly Nanowrimo romance project". I thought that the niche I wanted to seriously write in was sci-fi/fantasy because that's what I read. It was years before I discovered that YA as a genre was actually my home. When I first read Leigh Bardugo I had this amazing moment of, "This is me, this is the kind of story I like to tell, this is the kind of character journey I like to follow".
It's a misconception that YA is about the age of the character; it's about that time of life when you're discovering who you are and what your values are. It often has young women at the forefront and it often has them defeating bad guys and coming into some sort of power.
Whereas "adult" science fiction and fantasy are often centered on the macro (warring nations, long journeys across continents, a full cast of characters with complex ideology and even more complex morals), YA often zeroes in on the micro: on first kisses, and family squabbles and personal journeys, on how saving the world affects the individual.
Some of my favourite YA authors are the aforementioned Leigh Bardugo, Maggie Stiefvater, Rae Carsen and Samantha Shannon. But I think the one I've learned the most from is you, Cat :).
I've written a number of other stories in the time since I first wrote Keyflame, and I thought that I was writing fantasy and just not getting it right. When it clicked that I was writing YA, I realised that my little romantic Grahamstown story might actually deserve a place in my catalogue too and started revising it.
You made the choice to self-publish Keyflame, and with that, took charge of every aspect of the work, from content edits, copy-editing, proofing, design, and layout – could you give us an idea of just how much work went into getting Keyflame ready to go to print?
There are lots of steps but I think people looking to self publish need to accept two things:
1) You can't get something for nothing. If you simply dump your first draft on Amazon, it's not going to go anywhere. You need to invest two things and how much you invest of each depends on your personal circumstances: time and money. You can promote something without spending money but it takes loads of time because you often have to learn new skills (marketing, graphic design, art etc), or you can pay for advertising which is quick but costs a lot. (I do a combo). If you refuse to invest in your product, it's not going to be a successful product. You have to respect your reader enough to give them the best product possible, and you have to acknowledge that your own personal network is probably very small and you need to put in a lot of effort to reaching people beyond it
2) The "self" in self publishing is a misnomer - which is why a lot of people who chose this route use the term "indie publishing". The truth is that a book needs a team. You can't do it all yourself, because you'll never have an outsider's perspective on your story and no one person will ever have all the skills needed to properly produce a book without years of study.
I was incredibly fortunate to be a member of an authors co-op called Skolion where we trade these skills, but most indies hire on a team.
The first draft was written between November 2009 and February 2010. I gave it to three friends to proofread and read it out loud to my little sister who loved it. Then I made the stupid mistake of thinking "why not" and putting it on Amazon with a cover I drew myself. It didn't go anywhere, of course (I had I think 20 sales in total).
In May 2018, I started revisions thinking it would be a quick and easy process.
I decided to use the cue card method, which is taking every scene and writing it on a cue card and then writing the problems in different colours. Then, in theory, you go through and fix the problems one at a time starting with plot and ending with details like dialogue. It was during this re-read, when I had to go and buy a second set of cue cards, that I realised that I can't do things by half measures. It's just not in me. Keyflame would have to be the best book I could make it or I wasn't going to make it at all.
So then I recruited a bunch of friends as beta readers. I said in my recruitment Facebook post that they must like Twilight and Twilight-like things. I felt that if I got beta readers who didn't enjoy the genre, their feedback wouldn't be helpful. I ended up with a group of ten people which is very large for a beta group, but I'd never worked with any of them before and I had a feeling a few would fall off before the end. I started sending them chapters as I worked on them - one a week. There were, I think, about 40 chapters so it took a while and some did, indeed, drop off. In the end there were four who gave feedback on every single chapter. The drop off was also useful though as it's an indication of where the pacing slowed down and I took that into consideration while doing revisions.
I did back and forth with Masha du Toit (who was on the beta team and is a Skolion member) on some of the changes, then when that round of revisions was done I sent it to Laurie Janey (another Skolion member) for a final beta before editing.
When I was done applying her changes, I sent it to Nerine Dorman (you guessed it, a Skolion member) for editing.
I spent the time while I was waiting for edits researching launch strategies, marketing and working on the cover. I also applied for my ISBNs. You need one ISBN for every format of a book. You can also get an ISBN issued by Amazon, but it can only be used on Amazon and I wanted to sell my books locally too.
Nerine really liked Keyflame and after I applied her changes, I sent Keyflame to Yolandie Horak (Skolion member :)) for second round edits.
Usually there are three rounds of edits starting big picture structural and working down to line edits. With Keyflame, the structural was mostly done with the help of all those beta readers so I could essentially skip that step.
Once I'd applied Yolandie's line edits, I sent it to Laurie Janey again for proofreading. After I got it back from her and applied her edits, I started working on the print layout. This was because I wanted the next round of proofreading to include looking for formatting errors. A non-Skolion friend (Abigail Holden) offered to do this part and I'd worked with her before on a personal project so I knew she was really thorough and had great attention to detail.
I taught myself how to do print layout in InDesign, but I really used a competitor software that's much cheaper (Affinity Publisher) and it was easier than I thought it would be and a lot of fun.
I reached out to bloggers and "influencers" (people with a big social media following) in my network and asked if they'd like to review. I did cost assessment on print copies and started arranging all the marketing things. I made a huge list back in the research phase of things I wanted to do, so now was the time to start doing them.
After getting those changes back from Abigail, I transferred the novel to a word processor again so that Masha du Toit could format for e-book. I sent directly to reviewers on their kindle addresses and asked them to please let me know if they spotted any lingering typos. There were about five gremlins still after all that!
The next step was sending to a local printer for local editions and Ingram Spark for international editions. While waiting for the files to be printed/approved, I set up preorders on Amazon and on my own website for print editions. I encouraged family and friends to buy print editions because Amazon's recommendation algorithm is affected by who purchases your book so if they purchased Keyflame when it's not the usual type of book they read, it would be recommended to the wrong sorts of people after launch. I incentivised them by creating some artwork (and asking some Skolion friends to as well) which would be printed on high quality glossy cardboard and available free with all preorders. I could fulfill international preorders through Ingram Spark. I got a total of 30 preorders.
I sent a number of free copies to bloggers and influencers in hopes that they might provide some publicity, and set up a few giveaways with some that had larger networks to try get the word out outside of my network. This was a marketing cost of about R1000 (£50), which is equivalent to a week of digital advertising but more targeted.
Amazon takes about 4 days to determine your "also boughts" for that recommendation engine, so I will run Facebook ads for the first week to people who read in the YA fantasy romance genre to get that sorted.
I'm having a physical launch at a local library which won't cost me anything, and am participating in a local book market a week later.
Then on to writing the next book!
If you’d like to win some promo art from Tallulah, check my pinned post on twitter for the details. I’ll pass on the winner’s name to Tallulah on Friday 13th March :D