Indie Author Collective
I recently read an article that kicked my brain in the junk and made me think there is a way to help the collective indie author movement along. This idea was born from the idea of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” From that idea I came up with the rough title “Indie Author Collective”.
Let me set some sort of imaginary stage for you. You just finish your latest book and you get it published so the public can finally consume those delicious words. But, as with so many of us, you’re unknown, so getting the word out because one of the hardest tasks you’ve ever had.
What if, however, you weren’t alone in pimping that book? What if you were a member of a collective whose purpose was the help one another pimp their wares. So instead of you being the only one tweeting and blogging about your book, you had the help of others — on a daily basis! Of course, at the same time, you would be helping to pimp other books in the collective.
Starting to sound like an idea? Let’s make it even better. What if there was a large hive that held smaller collectives dedicated to specific genres. So instead of a horror writer having to help pimp chic-lit, you would only help pimp related genres (unless you wanted to pimp a non-related genre.)
So, regularly, an author would be required to:
- Tweet or blog about one or more of the books in their collective.
- Recommend books in their collective to readers.
- Tag books in their collective.
- Mention books in forums and other resources.
And so on. I don’t think it would be a good idea for fellow indie authors to review books in their collective, because that would border on the suspect and eventually readers would shy away from those books.
This is very much just a rough idea at the moment. I would love to hear feedback from readers to see if this is something we’d like to try to get off the ground. I currently have my Autumnal Press web site that sits around doing very little, that I could start working toward that cause.
So…share with me your thoughts on this idea.
Email Post| Print article | This entry was posted by jlwallen on June 13, 2011 at 4:33 pm, and is filed under News. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
Love the idea and would love to participate/help anyway I can. Since I am not an official indie author (yet) then I don’t mind reviewing books for authors. I truly love the whole “indie” concept. I tend to march to my own drummer so the whole “process” very much intrigues me. This is one reason I started my writer spotlight. It’s only a very small drop in the ocean but every drop counts for something, right?
Sign me up! I became an official indie author in May of this year and have come to the realization that getting an audience is difficult, especially if you didn’t have a social network in the first place, not to mention I haven’t been able to get people I know personally to “invest” in a book.
And I am sure there are more people going through the same thing so I am willing to help in anyway I can. And if I can get other authors to check out my book in the process, sweet!