Seven Things I Am Thankful For As An Indie Author

It’s Thanksgiving 2022, which always makes me think of this quote from the book of Deuteronomy:

“You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.”

Abraham Lincoln’s original Thanksgiving Proclamation expanded on that idea:

“Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.”

There are many things for which to be thankful this year.

But this is a writing website, so I thought this year’s Thanksgiving post should focus on things that I am thankful for as an indie author.

1.) That I got as much written as I did.

I wanted to write a million words this year. I’m not going to quite get there – I think I’ll end 2022 at slightly over or under 800,000 words. The time in which I would have written the remaining 200,000 was soaked up by a combination of family issues, home repair, necessary travel, and illness, of which there was quite a lot this year. But still! 800,000 words is a lot of words, and I’m thankful to have been able to write that many.

2.) Freedom from publishers and editors.

I’ve written whatever I’ve wanted for years, and look at the submission guidelines for a publisher reminded me of the Bad Old Days where everything had to be reshaped to meet the requirements in the submission guidelines. None of that matters any longer, and you can write whatever you want and publish it wherever you want.

3.) The different self-publishing platforms.

There are a lot of different places to self-publish your work – Amazon, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, Scribd, and others. There are also newer ways that might involve some more work, but pay off for some people – Patreon, Vella, Webnovel, and so forth. None of this existed in anything even remotely resembling its current form 15 years ago, so I am thankful for that. 15 years ago the only way to get published was to submit to an agent and wait 10 to 18 months for the snarky reply, if one came at all. Now there are many excellent avenues for self-publishing.

4.) The hard work of my narrators.

I put out a lot of new audiobooks this year, and I frankly kind of got overwhelmed with it for a while. In August/September I had about 50 hours of finished audio I needed to listen to in the space of about six weeks. But it paid off – the FROSTBORN series is done in audio, and we also got MALISON as a bonus. If I push it, GHOST IN THE WINDS will be out in December, and the GHOST EXILE series will be complete at last. I’m thankful for all the hard work Brad Wills (and Dynamix Productions) and Hollis McCarthy (and her editor Shaun Toole) put in to bring those audiobooks to life.

5) Photoshop.

Yes. I’m thankful for an Adobe product. Truly it is a Thanksgiving miracle!

But learning to use Photoshop and employ cover design has been incredibly helpful to me. It’s offered immense flexibility in changing cover design and setting of Facebook ads and so forth. Or to just make semi-amusing image headers to accompany my blog posts. So I am thankful for that as well. Even though it is an Adobe product. 🙂

6.) Vellum.

Vellum is the ebook formatting and generation program I use to prepare my ebook and print book files. It is a lot easier and more powerful than the stuff I used before Vellum. Like, back in 2015 when I wanted to make a print book, I had to carefully assemble a Word doc using one of the official templates. Now it’s just point and click to generate an interior PDF file, and it looks better than the templates I used back in the day. It’s nice that the software tools are overall a lot better than they were when I started in 2011, and I am thankful for that.

7.) Readers.

Finally, and most importantly, I am thankful for all of you, the readers! I am very thankful for all of you who have read the books, listened to the audiobooks, and come along on the adventures of the characters.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

(I couldn’t find a picture of a turkey, so I went for a picture of a sandwich to attach to this post.)

-JM