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.