A no holds barred Q&A With Barbara Freethy and Bella Andre about writing, self-publishing and being super successful indie authors.
10 Million Sold and Counting: Barbara Freethy & Bella Andre
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Excellent presentation, love your enthusiasm, personal stories, and guidance on making it in the new digital world.
I follow several indie author blogs / forums; Bella and Barbara just conducted a ‘masters class’ that should help all of us on our journey to survive and prosper through talent, perseverance, creativity, and vision.
Thank you both. Hope to run into you at a writers conference in the future. And best of luck as well! Keep writing and share your inspiration with us.
A super presentation! I may watch it again to catch things i missed there was so much good advice packed into your enthusiasm.
Congratulations on your tremendous success! It’s richly deserved. I too was dropped by a Big 5 publisher (Pocket Books) and I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I love controlling my own destiny. I have two questions: are either of you doing audio books? It seems like a fair amount of work, and it requires some initial financial outlay, so I’m wondering if the pay-off is there. Question 2: I recently got rights reversion on Books 2 and 3 of the mystery series I did for Pocket. Book 1 is selling well enough (by about 20 books!) to not qualify for reversion under my contract. So I offered to buy back my rights, and the publisher flatly refused. Do you have any advice about this? Would a lawyer be able to negotiate this, or is no, no? It kills me to have the first book in my series available at a higher price than Books 2 & 3 will be.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge. I think there was so much gold in the video I’m going to have to watch it again.
Thank you for sharing, Bella. Would you agree that it helped that your name was already known before you indie published. Wish you the best
Heide Katros
Heide,
Hi there! No, I don’t believe that my trad publishing background helped me at all, because honestly, my print runs were teeny tiny back then. I like to joke about the 8 fans I had back when I was with NY publishers…except that I’m not really joking. I literally built my readership from the ground up with indie publishing!
🙂 Bella
Thank you for a really enjoyable presentation. Very incisive and inspiring.