Introduction

Let me tell you a story about a boy; a boy who wanted to be a writer.

The boy was born into a world where computers were as big as houses, a smartphone was what Max had in his shoe, and social media was Russian TV.

“You can’t be a writer,” everyone said. “Writers are poor. You need to get a proper job.”

So the boy did, and he did well at it, but the desire to write never left him. Looking back, he’d spent his career writing—just disguised as computer programs, teaching, writing business manuals, and creating websites for fun and profit.

One day, the boy decided enough was enough. Some might call it a mid-life crisis—the boy preferred to think of it as that point where anyone, regardless of their age, says, “You know what? I’m not putting up with this shit anymore.”

So, he wrote a book. A terrible book.

Then he wrote another book and sold it to a traditional publisher.

Now, you might think that’s the end of the story. A happy ending indeed!

But it wasn’t.

See, in those intervening years, the boy had become a fair corporate manager and entrepreneur, so he knew how business worked. Once the euphoria had worn off, and he had a good look at what he’d signed up for, he realized that this was no dream come true. “I’m getting screwed,” he cried. “I can never make a living this way!”

So he wrote another book and sold it to his readers.

He’s never looked back.

My Journey

I’m sure you’ve recognized the autobiographical nature of the story of the boy.

I started a voracious reading habit early in life. I decided well before the end of primary school I wanted to create those incredible stories; to one day take readers soaring on flights of my imagination.

Being bookish, fat (back when fat kids were rare) and named Nigel, I guess it was my destiny to haunt the library at school. However, all those years inhabiting the dark corners of the library cemented an already deep obsession with the written word.

By the end of high school, I had published cartoons in the local paper, won school accolades for writing and written a few hundred pages of my magnum opus.

But there was a problem.

It was the late 80s, and I was a math and science kid. For starters, I hated English. I scraped through General English by stringing together bullshit with memorized quotes from Cliffs notes. I had no chance of getting an English degree.

The writer’s journey was also the road to poverty, as those around me were quick to point out. They were right, though—with no actual writing skills and no alternative to traditional publishing in a limited local market, my chances of becoming the next Tolkien or King were zero. Zip. Nada.

So, I stuck with the technical track and worked my way up the corporate ladder for 30 years. I started as an electronics technician, then a computer programmer and IT entrepreneur, and spent the last decade in a variety of management roles.

I have nothing to complain about. My work pays well, my partner of 24 years is a wonderful person, and I can get through most days without wanting to strangle either of the boys. But that quiet little voice has always nagged at me.

Well, maybe not so quiet.

My partner, Kate, is intelligent, funny, and tolerant of my many, many faults. Somewhere around the start of 2015, that not-so-quiet little voice must have got the better of her. One night, she looked me in the eye and said, “I love you with all my heart, but this has got to stop. You have a choice—write the damn book or shut the fuck up and never mention writing again.”

Getting such an unambiguous message from the one that matters most in one’s life can be an important catalyst. I have never forgotten Kate’s message, and it still drives me every day.

So I wrote the book. I sat at my computer in early March 2015 and wrote a 50,000ish word novel in 4 months. Yay!

The problem is, it sucked. Like, total smoldering turd, shall-never-see-the-light-of-day kind of sucked. What made it worse is that not long after I finished the draft, I found a folder full of writing from school, and it was worse. I found a short story I was proud of at the time that had a flashback inside a flashback!

Confident I had deluded myself all these years, I decided to write about something I felt I had half a clue—computer software.

Not confident enough to try writing an entire book again, lest my non-fiction sucked worse than my fiction, I wrote tutorials for Django, an open source web framework I had enjoyed using in my computer programming days. Don’t worry if you have never heard of Django; most non-programmers haven’t either.

About ten years before, the creators of Django published a user manual they later released online for free as an open source book. I decided I would update the book to see what feedback I got from readers, rather than take the soul-destroying path of writing a complete book that everyone hated.

That idea worked well. The Django community picked up on the updates and was encouraging in its feedback. So, I kept writing and publishing the updates for free on a website I created.

After a few months, a reader suggested I approach the original publisher of the book to see if they wanted to publish an updated version. I liked the idea, so I emailed them. The answer was a polite no, but the publisher invited me to chat with an acquisition editor to see if a proposal for another book on Django interested them. After a quick email discussion with the editor, we agreed on a topic of interest, and the editor invited me to submit the proposal.

I expected never to hear from them again, but less than a month later, the publisher emailed me. The senior editor had accepted the proposal, and could I please sign the attached contract?

It’s still hard to put into words how I felt when I got that email. I experienced the full range of emotions, from black terror to euphoria and back again in the space of a minute. I was a published author. WOOHOO!

Impostor syndrome set in immediately. Getting a book deal was an incredible stroke of luck, and I would soon be exposed as a fraud.

I didn’t have long to feel sorry for myself, though. Those 20-odd years of business skills that helped me write a rocking proposal were also about to save my arse when the reality of my tight deadline sunk in.

I would need every time management skill I had ever learned to pull this off. I had 12 weeks to write a book from scratch while working full time in a day job that had nothing to do with computer programming.

To say I was a little crazy during those three months is an understatement. Kate wisely spent about half of it touring Europe with her sister, while our youngest put up with mad dad. But the book got done; by the end of November 2015, it was off my hands and with the publisher.

After finishing the book, I did little with the website until around February 2016, when I tidied up the site and added more content. I was also reading blogs on writing and getting published, and it wasn’t long before I dug up material on self-publishing.

Like everyone brought up on the self-publishing equals crap myth, I didn’t give it much thought—after all; I was a traditionally published author. Albeit one who hadn’t received more than a small advance for his writing pursuits, but hey, I was on my way.

Meanwhile, I was getting more and more requests to turn the website content into a book. The problem was, the original publisher had declined to update the book, and I knew no other publisher would touch it because of the open-source content.

Another writer in the Django community suggested I try lean publishing. Lean publishing is where you publish an incomplete book and add content as you go. Traditional publishers in the computer and software space have been doing this for years—they release a book early to generate publicity and revenue for a book before it is complete.

I had a few decent chapters finished and nothing to lose, so I published those first few chapters with the option for readers to pay if they wanted to. It’s called Pay What You Want (PWYW). This pricing model is common in indie publishing and is a brilliant idea. You set a minimum price, and the reader can pay any price they want, as long as it’s above the minimum. In my case, I set it to zero so the reader could download it for free.

I published the partial book late on 23rd May 2016, turned off my computer and went to bed with my expectations as high as my asking price—zero.

The next morning, I checked my emails as usual and got an even greater shock than the publishing offer—hundreds of people had downloaded the book. Some had paid for the book, even though they could download it for free, and I had made $21.61 while I slept.

That’s a laughably small number, I know, but it triggered a seismic shift in my thinking. Not only would people pay for a self-published book they could get for free, but I also received my introduction to the world of passive income—that magical place where you don’t have to trade time for dollars.

If you take into account the time invested so far, that 21 bucks equated to around 10 cents an hour, but the book earned $100 in its first week and $1000 in the first two months. For comparison, my traditionally published book paid a $1000 advance it still hasn’t earned out.

In the intervening years, the book has returned somewhere around $100 an hour for the time invested in writing and publishing it—not a bad return on investment at all! I am also grateful the original publisher rejected the offer to update the book. I ran the numbers, and if they had published the book, I would have made a fraction of the money I made as an independent.

It also wasn’t a one-hit wonder. I published a third book on Django that made over $1000 in its first week and has produced a solid return ever since.

Over the last seven years, these books and their updated versions have earned a pretty decent second income that has been almost entirely passive for the last four years.

None of this came easily. I battled through several years of intense learning, false starts, crushing moments of anxiety, frustrations, and fuckups to get to where I am, and I am still not “there”.

What I do know, however, is that it is possible to make a living from your writing; that the starving artist is just a myth.

And it’s not just me. Thousands of other writers around the world are duplicating this success as indies—many of whom are doing far better than most mid-list traditionally published authors.

Which brings me to the reason this book exists.

About the Book

The more I research and the more writers I talk to, the more convinced I am that limiting beliefs are holding many writers back. Limiting beliefs, not just about their writing ability, but beliefs about the market, publishing, and how to make a living as a writer.

A few years ago, I attended a writer’s festival in my hometown and went to a panel session with agents and publishers. The panel spent an hour lamenting the decline of the publishing industry and broadcasting how new authors had little chance of escaping the slush pile, and even less chance of making any money.

I could identify the budding authors in the crowd by how much their shoulders slumped during the discussion. I am sure I witnessed the death of many dreams that day.

I was sad for a bit, and then it just pissed me off. It was like an audience of digital photographers taking as gospel the word of a bunch of whining ex-Kodak employees. Why would an author bother listening to these stiffs?

Kindle had been around for over ten years, and many other digital platforms existed. Every author in the audience had global media reach, and I knew indies made half of all author income in all markets. They also made that income at royalty percentages that made 10-20% of net profit look like daylight robbery. Why were these dinosaurs even able to draw an audience?

Not to be harsh on the agents and traditional publishers out there—the slush pile has got deeper, and new authors have even less chance of getting a traditional publishing deal worth anything in 2023 than they did back then.

The reason for this is important, though. While traditional publishing has a place in the modern market, it hasn’t held the keys to the kingdom for a long time. Traditional publishing is no longer the first option for savvy authors with an excellent product and business skills.

Too many excellent writers still listen to this doom and gloom. Because it is so counter to my experience, it still frustrates me why anyone would let a stranger shit on their dreams like that?

Or, to be more succinct, “Why would anyone believe traditional publishing is their only path to becoming a successful author?”

While I don’t believe there is a definitive answer—because we are all different with different goals—there appear to be four broad groups of thinking:

1. Those who subscribe to the myth that only traditionally published authors are “real” authors. This is the same pretense the literati have shown by ragging on genre fiction writers for decades, even though genre fiction writers make a lot more money than they do.
2. Those who write for specific markets where the gatekeepers still exist. For example, imprints that require submissions to come through an agent.
3. Those who overestimate the difficulty of self-publishing. Self-publishing is not difficult, but it needs a consistent business process that must be automated as much as possible so you can concentrate most of your efforts on writing.
4. The budding independent authors who self-published, burned out and convinced themselves that they weren’t up to running the business side of their writing. Like group 3, they benefit from understanding the processes that need to be in place for them to become successful self-publishers.

If you are in group 3 or 4, I wrote this book for you.

I’ve broken the book up into two parts:

• Part 1 details what independent publishing is, and addresses the misconceptions authors have about self-publishing. It busts the publishing myths that hold you back, outlines the five key mindsets you need to be successful, and shows you how to master book marketing so that it doesn’t consume your life and your writing time.
• Part 2 of the book details step by step how to set up the practical side of your automated independent publishing business. I show you how to set up your author website, manage your mailing list, publish and market your books, and build your audience through effective outreach.

Or, to put it simply—Part 1 is the inspiration for creating a successful career as an independent author, and Part 2 is the perspiration necessary to set up your automated self-publishing business.

Apart from my own experiences, this book is also the result of a considerable amount of research. Over the years, I have read dozens of books, attended about 100 webinars, taken several free and paid courses, and read hundreds of articles and tutorials. Rather than distract the narrative by using in-text references or adding footnotes, I have added a resource list at the back of the book.

Your Hero’s Journey

As writers, we often forget that we are on a personal hero’s journey. Our paths might be different, with our own trials and tribulations, but we share a common goal: the desire to live our lives as the artists and creators we know in our hearts we are.

It’s within the common framework of the hero’s journey that there are parallels where we can relate. I, for one, refused the call to adventure for two decades because I thought I had no chance of success.

Have I completed my hero’s journey? Not even close. Some days I feel like I’m still floundering in the dark in the whale’s belly. Most days, however, I feel like I am facing the challenges of the road, just like every other author.

Think of me as a guide for when you begin your own hero’s journey—someone who is a step or two ahead of you, leading you to the right path.

I’ve learned that building a successful writing career is not as hard as you might think. I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the last several years; more than I would care to admit most days. I want to pass on the benefits of that experience, to show you how to identify what’s important and what’s not. Self-publishing success is very much achievable if you understand what’s changed in the book publishing world and how to benefit from those changes.

What I hope is that you can accept me as your first mentor—the one that helps you get on your way towards the life you want—the life of a successful author.

You too can slay the dragon.