Indie vs Legacy Publishing

Indie Versus Legacy: Let’s Rumble!


Everyone is doing it and considering the less-than-inspiring performance of my small press and legacy published books, I thought I’d give it a chance. Independent publishing. Despite the success of folks like Amanda Hocking and J. A. Konrath, being an indie author still makes me wince. It feels like, well, giving up, or at least settling for less than the best.

Or it did.

At the end of Feb 2011, I put out my first independently published mystery, The Vital Principle. I’d been talking to a legacy publisher about it, but the editor told me frankly that sales are difficult and they didn’t put out ebook editions, so… I thought about it and decided, well, heck. Maybe I should try being an indie. I felt I didn’t have much to lose.

When my book first came out, I worked very hard to get some reviews, and got some terrific ones. I chatted a little about it, but really, nothing like the work I’d put into promoting my other books. The first month it sold 60 copies, which wasn’t bad. In comparison, my first book published by small press might have finally sold 60 copies after about five years (I stopped tracking it when it failed to sell 9 copies the first year).

This last month, my indie book sold over 200 copies. Today isn’t over, yet, and it’s already sold 11. Sure, those aren’t huge numbers, but the point is, it is gaining ground. My indie book has already sold more copies in its first three months than my second small-press book sold in two years. If it keeps this up, by the end of the year, I will have earned more than the advance on my latest legacy publisher book, not to mention that it will be another year before that book even comes out! By then, assuming all things stay the same, I will have already earned twice what I got in royalties from a legacy publisher.

One of the big questions is, why?

It wasn’t marketing, since I marketed the heck out of my first five books. However, I did change my marketing strategy in a significant way. I became less interested in “look at me!” and more interested in “what can I offer an interested reader?” I also focused more on just chatting with folks. Ironically, during the last month, I frankly did nothing on marketing, and it’s doing even better. Go figure.

The biggest factors to me seem to be the same ones Konrath talks about: covers and price. You need a good cover and with legacy publishing venues, you pretty much have no control. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I admire everyone I’ve worked with, so I’ll leave it at that concerning covers.

I also firmly believe that legacy publishers (and a lot of authors) price their books way, way too high. People get twisted around the axle over the price of a single unit, refusing to understand that the value is the revenue stream it generates. Your book isn’t worth $.99; it’s worth whatever revenue it generates, regardless of unit price. My $.99 book is earning more for me than all my $7.00 books, combined. This confusion folks experience appears to be similar to the mindset of those who insist taxes must be raised to bring the deficit down, when the reality is that reducing taxes will create more revenues for the Government because business will prosper and generate more overall income to be taxed. Bring prices down, people buy more. Simple.

Anyway, the point is that if you’re not one of a few bestselling authors, having a lower unit price means a richer revenue stream. I would caution folks about making the assumption that if you sell 1000 $.99 books ($.40 royalty), you’ll only make $400, while you could have made $2,000 if you priced it at $7.00 ($2.00 royalty). The problem is, you probably wouldn’t have sold the 1000 books if they were priced at $7.00. If you sell 1000 at $.99, all you know is that you can sell 1000 copies of your book for $.99. The rest is an inaccurate projection.

Beyond that? I’m still figuring it out as I prepare to release my next indie mystery, A Rose Before Dying, later this month. I do have a big dilemma, though. Should I submit my next manuscript to a legacy publisher, knowing even if they accept it I won’t see it released until 2014? Or should I just suck up my pride and do the indie thing again?

It’s a hard decision.

If it was solely about the money, it would be simple: indie. But you learn a lot working with the team you get with a legacy publisher, and I personally enjoy it. I enjoy improving my craft, and the best way to do that is to work with folks who will make you swear, sweat, and then rewrite. It’s not quite the same relationship when you hire an editor, and they never seem as willing to aggravate you as the legacy publisher editors do. Weird, but true.

I’ve babbled enough and have to get back to work. My next project is to finish a holiday novella I’ve been working on for over a year. I’m determined to finish it. Maybe by next year!

Is He Lying?

Passive Voice: Is he lying?

Some of you may remember my blog about passive voice and how it might actually be useful to you when developing a character’s dialog. How?  Folks engaged in denial or lying, often use passive voice as a way of deflecting attention away from themselves or their responsibility for the events in question. No one, not even the most terrible serial killer, believes they are bad people or responsible for terrible actions against another human. That’s where passive voice becomes a writer’s most useful tool when portraying that bad guy or gal. Because she'll rarely say, "I killed him." Instead, she'll say, "He was killed by a gun." Yeah, like the gun acted under it's own volition and she had nothing to do with it.


Most folks who do terrible things almost always blame the victim or the weapon itself, or the circumstances. I would never do something like that—she made me do it. Or the weapon just up and did it on its own.


Expert law enforcement personnel and psychologists know to listen for these tell-tale signs of shifting responsibility and use of passive voice to deflect attention. Here’s a good example and a refresher on what passive voice is.


Passive voice is when the action is not performed by the subject of the sentence. The subject of the sentence is the recipient of the action. For example, instead of saying, he hammered the nail into the wood, you could use passive and say: the nail was hammered into the wood. The passive version is ambiguous because you don’t know who hammered the nail. And it’s that ambiguity that attracts liars to passive voice.

I should note that folks who either can't face responsibility for their actions, either because they're just irresponsible people, or in the case of a true tragedy, where someone honestly didn't mean to do something.


Let’s say the police have arrested a woman who may have smothered her child in his crib. The woman, unable to admit her terrible action, uses passive voice to avoid admitting her responsibility.


“Who smothered your baby?”


She shrugged and twisted her wedding ring around her finger, unable to meet the gaze of the policeman.


“You were there, weren’t you?”


She nodded.


“He was crying, wasn’t he?”


“He kept crying—he just wouldn’t stop!”


“So what happened?”


“I tried to comfort him, but he just wouldn’t stop. I didn’t know what to do! I just wanted him to quiet down, so I held him for a while.”


“And what happened when you held him?”


“He was smothered by the pillow, I guess. I don’t really know. He turned his face into the pillow and after a while he quieted.”


“Did you press his face into the pillow?”


“I—I didn’t realize—he must have been smothered by the pillow—that’s all I can say.”


You’ll often hear these types of statements from folks who can’t quite accept their part in a tragedy. For example, a bus driver inadvertently involved in an accident may use passive voice to minimize his role, “She was hit by the bus.” He doesn’t say he hit her or ran over her when he was driving the bus. He phrases it as if the bus had acted on its own when it hit her.


Passive voice isn’t the sole tool, however. That bus driver may really shift blame by using active voice, e.g “The bus hit her.” As if the bus drove itself and independently made the decision to run over a pedestrian all on its own.


Those kinds of shifts in focus are extremely useful in characterization and they can be applied either to an innocent person who just can’t accept or absorb his role in a tragedy, such as the bus driver, or it could be a more conscious effort by a liar/bad guy to shift the blame to the victim.


To me, these little nuances in characterization and the underlying psychology of developing realistic characters are intrinsic to the foundations of a fascinating story.


I’d love to hear any habits of speech or actions you’ve noted that make characters come alive.

Amy Corwin is the author of over half a dozen historical romantic mysteries, paranormals and cozy mysteries. She can be found on the web at http://www.amycorwin.com and http://amycorwin.blogspot.com. Her latest book, The Vital Principle, is now available from Amazon.