THIS MUST BE WHY ALL INDIE AUTHORS ARE RICH: A Publishing Plan, Such As It Is

When I first started writing fiction — roughly a hundred years ago — the plan was simple: publish on Amazon. And I did! I put a couple of stories up there that I’ve since taken down, mostly because they weren’t very good and needed work. (The full, deeply ADHD explanation of why they weren’t ready is a whole post of its own — the one about the memory hoarder living in my skull.) The problem now is that I have some books I actually think are good, and I want to publish them. But Amazon is the devil, and I don’t especially want to hand the devil my money. Which means selling ebooks on their platform is kind of out. So I’ve been doing some research on alternatives, because I want people to be able to read these things, and it turns out there isn’t a great unified way to get an ebook into a stranger’s hands. I can sell the book on a site I own — but then the reader has to figure out how to sideload it onto their e-reader, and now I’ve turned “buy my book” into a tech support ticket. So do…