Hanging out on Threads means the algorithm sends me a steam of frustrated indie publishers asking worried questions about the cost and chances of success in indie publishing. I try to respond with the best advice I can – spend less, expect income to take years rather than months – but there’s a longer version of that advice I wish I could implant in their head.
This is a version of that advice.
There are five broad levers you can pull to make things happen in publishing (whether indie or otherwise):
- Economic, whether it’s cash to throw at problems, or the space to give things a long lead before they become profitable, or the ability to risk money without negative consequence if things fail.
- Intellectual, or the books/content you generate/acquire.
- Human, AKA skills you have or can get someone else to leverage on your behalf.
- Social, or the connections/network you have.
- Symbolic, or the prestige, recognition, and “buzz” you have within your genre (and outside it).
I’ve been thinking about this because Threads feeds me a steady supply of posts from new writers who are lamenting the costs of indie publishing, while the mentoring half of my life has revolved around more than one meeting which starts with “stop spending money” as my first bit of advice.
Understanding these five levers is important. Half the challenge of Indie Publishing is recognising that folks come in bigger levers in one area than another. If you’re not operating with a huge bundle of economic capital at the start, following the business model of someone who had scads of it isn’t going to work. You’ll need to use the other forms of capital to generate your cash flow, or you’ll get frustratingly substandard results.
And the core rule of publishing is simple: if you don’t have economic capital (or any other type), you’ll need to pull one of the other levers to get what you need.
To put this in really simple terms, lets look at the typical new-writer-signing-with-established-publisher exchange (or what we now call “traditional” publishing).
A writer uses their Human capital (writing skill) to generate a viable piece of intellectual property. They then lease that property to the publisher in order to access the publishers’ economic assets (to cover production), human capital (editorial, design, and distribution), and social capital (publisher employees will have relationships with tastemakers and bookstores). If done right, the publisher pulls all those levers to create buzz and recognition through reviews, events, and awards, and sells enough books to generate more economic resources for all involved.
If you’re an writer or aspiring publisher without access to economic capital, you’ll need to pull other levers in order to make up for the shortfall.
That might mean generating a lot of intellectual capital and releasing it cheaply to get you solvent asap, even if it means producing a less high-prestige product (this is, after all, the foundation of both the pulp era and early paperbacks).
It might mean investing your limited seed money in leveling up your skill, knowing those skills will defray costs down the line. Sweat equity is a real thing, with its own advantages, if you’ve got the time to let things build slowly and learn what you need to know.
It might mean becoming well known in a genre group so you can leverage the social connections you find there, trading on friendships to get access to skills you may need or to carry the early promotional load. Or it may mean building a huge following on social media, which is basically using sweat equity and skills to replace the kind of marketing that’s usually accessible via a combination of cash, industry connections, and prestige.
The thing is, you need to wrap your head around the five levers. Almost everything in publishing gets easier to understand once you can keep them in mind, and spotting the flaws with following a particular strategy is easy when you can read the default assumptions of the person advocating it.
I started Brain Jar Press with very little economic capital, but I had connections thanks to running writer events and working in writers centres for a decade. I had access to award-winning writers in my genre who leant me their prestige and, on occasion, their networks. When we started publishing other people, I had people who trust me to publish their books despite the fact we weren’t offering advances. That probably wouldn’t have been easy to do as a stranger, but they knew me, and the knew my background, and the trusted both the skill set and the symbolic prestige that built up around my various jobs.
Trying to follow my path without that background would have been difficult.
On the flip side, I’ve tried to follow approaches suggested by high-profile indie book marketing courses. They don’t work for me because they assumed an investment of economic capital I didn’t have (not least because I’d spent a huge chunk of change purchasing the course).
The course wasn’t a poor investment, just not right for me at the time. Five years on, I find myself better placed to revisit it and throw money at the strategy they recommend, with time to invest in getting good at the skills required. But trying to follow it meant I spent many years indie publishing badly because I focused on levers I couldn’t access. It wasn’t until I sat down and leveraged the things I had an abundance of that I started making a steady profit that allowed me to level things up, and maybe even build up the economic reserves to try some approaches the course advocated.
I spend a lot of time talking to new indie writers in my mentoring, and the first piece of advice I give them is almost universally stop spending money. I’ve worked for small businesses so desperate to succeed they threw money at anyone who said they could turn the tide, and the results were messy as hell. Like, ruin your life messy.
Your strategy should build on the levers you can pull with ease, not gambling with money you can’t afford to lose. Taking the time to sit down and understand where you’re at, and which levers are easest to pull, is the most beneficial thing you can do as an indie. It may also be depressing – sometimes, you’re starting with nothing but a steep learning curve and the ability to write books – but it’s not nothing, and it’ll give you some insights on what levers you need to build up.