On the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross talks about the latest ALLi projects designed to support both the creative and commercial sides of an indie author’s life. In this episode, she discusses the new indie author bookstore, the Indie Author Income Survey, and why understanding your own definition of success matters as much as the numbers. Orna encourages authors to think about what “enough” looks like in their writing lives and offers practical steps to move toward those goals, whether that means updating your author profile, planning your next release, or carving out regular time for business decisions.
Listen to the Podcast: More Money and Meaning — ALLi's Latest Projects for Indie Authors with Orna Ross
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Our Creative Self-Publishing stream is brought to you by Orna Ross's Go Creative! program—helping authors harness the power of creative flow in writing and publishing.
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About the Host
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcript
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to the inspiration stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast.
It's Orna Ross here, director of ALLi, just back from Author Nation, which was absolutely wonderful, and I'll be discussing that with Joanna Penn in our upcoming podcast next week. We'll bring you all the lessons learned and all the wonderful things that happened at Author Nation.
Today, I'd like to talk to you about some of the projects that Ally has been working on; lots coming together here at the end of the year, and I just wanted to make sure you all know about what's happening.
I've loosely gathered the thoughts for today under the topic: money and meaning.
Those two are sometimes put in opposition to each other, but of course as indie authors, they are completely integrated. I suppose the reason for choosing that title is because these are ways in which ALLi support our members, and indeed wider indie author community, for both a creative and commercial perspective.
So, I'm going to be talking about our new member bookstore. I'm going to be talking about the Indie Author Income Survey; those two things in particular.
Indie Author Income Survey Insights for Money and Meaning
So, why talk about these things at all? Whenever we do an indie author income survey, we always get responses from people that say things like, it's deflating, I'm nowhere near these numbers, what am I doing wrong? Others, of course find it inspiring to see how successful indie authors are doing. Others are actually part of that success.
But I understand very well those who feel that hollow thud in the stomach when they see what is possible for some indie authors or a fizz of envy that goes, oh another, six figure indie author income story, that's not why I write, it's not why I'm doing this; I wish I could see something that's more reflective of me.
So, I wanted to just talk about that. The survey is very interesting and again, we'll be talking about that separately on another podcast, but if you want to see it for yourselves, it's on our facts page, allianceindependentauthors.org/facts.
You can download the report there along with the Big Indie Author Data Drop, which is where we gather in lots of different interesting data points from all our partners, and put them together into a single report along with the income survey, so that you get a good snapshot of where indie authors are right at this moment, as much as the data allows.
A lot of people keep the data about self-publishing to themselves, which is a pity. It's understandable, but it's a pity because it means that we can't see clearly exactly what indie authors are doing, and a lot of our achievements are quite hidden from the rest of the publishing sector and from the wider world.
So, there's a lot of misinformation about indie author publishing. So, this is our attempt to set the record straight and, as I said, allianceindependentauthors.org/facts if you want to download the report.
The main thing I wanted to say here is that these income stats are information for us, they're in no way any kind of creative verdict on an author’s talent or importance or relevance, or any of that. This is just a wide range survey of what's happening for authors income wise, and we are very aware at ALLi that we don't all want or need the same thing from our writing and publishing.
For some, the dream is a modest side income. For some it's that they want to earn their living, give up the day job. For some, it's just that they want to write and create books and put them out there. As we know, there are also one book authors who just self-publish a single title for family, for friends, for their business, their job, whatever.
So, ALLi's a very broad church on everything, and particularly on motivations.
So, it's really important that we know what our definition of success is, because if a survey is making us feel bad, that's an indication that probably we're not quite in tune with our own definition of success.
So, I'd like you to just step back for a moment from comparison, and just a little bit of reflection right here where you are. Then I'll mention it again at the end of the podcast if you want to do a little bit of free writing around it. But just ask yourself, what does enough look like for you right now as a writer?
This is our inspirations stream. So, focusing in on your own particular creative motivations. What kind of writing life am I actually trying to build here? In terms of money, but other things too. The meaning heading, what does that actually signify for me?
Then, what's one change that I could make over the next year that would actually move me a little closer to where I want to go? Or even over the next few weeks before the end of the year.
It might be raising prices on some of my formats. It might be putting in a plan to publish an extra book in a series and getting that done in the early part of next year. It could be ring fencing two money hours each month for business planning and decisions. That's something I do myself. I have money days, twice a month, every two weeks, and since I started doing that, it made a huge change to my own personal satisfaction, my own money, and my own meaning.
So, the main thing I'm trying to say is money, in your publishing business, is not so much a scoreboard of your worth or anything, it's more like a measure for you. It tells you what you're looking for, what your range is, and so on.
So, the income survey, that kind of covers the money angle, the commercial angle, if you like.
Introducing ALLi’s Indie Author Bookstore
I'd also like to talk about the new indie author bookstore, which we've been spending a lot of time putting together. It took us an awful lot of longer than we expected it would because we wanted to integrate it as much as possible with what is already there in our member infrastructure, and that proved to be quite a technical challenge. But it's one that we have overcome, and the bookstore is ready now for our members to start uploading their books.
This side of Christmas is like a soft launch. We are expecting still some bugs to be ironed out. But we would encourage you to now begin to think about putting your books up.
What that is, just for those who don't know what the Indie Author Bookstore is or haven't heard anything about it up to now, just to say that this will be the biggest collection of quality author books on the internet.
It's our member books and we are going to be bringing those; there will be active campaigns quarterly to bring readers to this bookstore.
So, you've always had, as a member of ALLi, your author profile, which you put your books up there, put them out there, and we always have, all the time, people who come to us and want to know, I'm looking for an indie author to do A, B, C. We always guide them to our find in indie author database, which is operated from the author profile.
We wanted to go a step further and the Indie Author Bookstore is reader-centered, and of course, there will be campaigns to bring influencers to the store. By influencers, literary influencers, not social media people so much as librarians, retailers, bloggers, podcasters, journalists, reviewers, literary festivals, people like that. So that they can see what's actually happening in the indie author space because a lot of them, as I say, don't have a clue.
So, that's one of the big aims for it.
It's book driven, so you'll still have your author profile, and all that we did there will carry on, but this is a book-centered platform, so more than an author center. So, it's organized by genre largely, and then by themes. So, we'll be looking at different themes like Black Lives Matter or Women's History Month, or whatever. We'll be highlighting books that fall into themes like these.
So, think of this as a kind of a showcase space for ALLi members books, curated by you and no gatekeepers here. ALLi is not in any way, we're calling it a bookstore, but the store part is not on ALLi's website. What we do is just guide them through to the preferred link for our member.
We're focusing on helping readers to discover great indie titles from trusted, vetted authors. You guys who are members of the Alliance of Independent Authors, who care enough about your work to have joined an association, we want to focus all the creative energy that you have into a single place that kind of says to the world, here are the books that our members are really proud of, and here are the books that we're really proud to recommend.
So, it's all about discoverability and credibility and our great community.
As I say, the income from any sale generated just goes straight to you, your preferred link, your chosen price, your chosen retailer, your fulfillment partner.
On your author profile, you do have the option to link to many different outlets. For the Indie Author Bookstore, we're limiting it to one preferred outlet, and there are good reasons for this.
Mainly that research confirms that if you show readers a lot of different options, a lot of different outlets, they don't actually choose any. You're much better off bringing them to one place. So, we're seeing it as a sort of an opportunity to pass on that piece of education.
If you really are determined that you want to give your readers lots of options, despite the research, that's absolutely fine. Use your Book Linker link, because there will only be room for one link, as I say.
So, we link out to wherever you want people to buy. Your own store is a great option. Your Amazon page may be your option if you have an Amazon strategy. Bookshop.org, I know a lot of you like because it makes a contribution to indie bookstores for every book that's purchased. It's whatever fits your strategy.
And it's members only, it's paid-up, current ALLi members only. So, if you leave ALLi, your books will just automatically fall away. You don't have to do anything like take them down or anything like that.
We'll have seasonal spotlights. We'll have genre collections and as I said, lots of different special campaigns.
How to Get Your Books in ALLi’s Indie Author Store
So, what we need from you, our members, is to start populating the shelves of this bookstore. If you are an ALLi member and you've got at least one book that you'd like to put into the store, you need to go to your profile, log into the ALLi website and find your profile, and find where you upload your book details.
They will automatically go onto your profile if you already have an existing profile. If you don't, just start to upload your books or update them. In looking at our members lists over this time, we've seen that some of you haven't updated your profile in a while, which is completely understandable. So, this is a good opportunity to do that.
You'll just be asked for a cover, short description, your preferred buy link, and then we need you to confirm your permission that we can actually feature your book in the store and use your cover and your blurb.
Then just make sure the metadata categories are clear, reader friendly.
We made it as simple as possible for our members. So, it is just an adjustment of what is already there if you have a current platform, hopefully you will find it very user-friendly to just upload your books.
Don't overthink it. If you haven't got time to do your whole catalog or whatever, just start with a few books. Just make sure you're in there and that you're seeing your strongest series starter, the book you most want your new readers to find. You can always refine and add more later.
We will be launching it with a bit of a bells and whistles at the beginning of the new year, and we want to have as many of our members represented in the store as possible for that.
So, these are the two biggest projects that we have had in recent weeks and months at ALLi around supporting your creative and commercial endeavors. So, we want to make the books visible and accessible in trusted spaces, and it's an extra place for the right readers to find you and to be brought over to your preferred link.
From the meaning angle, I think there's something very powerful about knowing your work is sitting alongside the most committed indie authors under the banner of an organization that really believes in you and in what you're doing. It's a place you can go to that says, I take my writing seriously, I'm building something here, I'm in this for the long haul.
Before we close, just back to those questions then around the money and the meaning. What kind of writing life am I building? What looks like enough for me? What one small step can I take today or this week towards that?
Maybe that step is going to be filling in the form to get your book into the ALLi bookstore. Maybe it's simply acknowledging that you want your writing to pay you better, and that you're willing to take the steps to learn how to do that.
You're surrounded by authors who have done that at ALLi, as the Indie Author Income Survey shows. Many of them are there in the member forum every day answering questions from beginners.
Next year, we hope to formalize our mentoring processes more so that we can, without it becoming an administrative nightmare for you or for us, so that we can encourage that more and more, whereby our experienced authors, our authorpreneur members in particular, but all our experienced authors can actually help in a more formal way, those who are starting out and either are aspiring publishers or maybe just have one book that isn't selling or maybe have a few books that aren't selling, and are wondering what to do next.
As ever, stay close to your creative spirit. The numbers matter, but of course they're not the whole story. You are far more than your latest bank statement, and authors are such an important part of upholding the creative spirit in the world, and that is so needed right now.
Until next time, happy writing and happy publishing.
Bye-bye for now.
