Back in the old days, circa 2009 when Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was in its infancy, authors were publishing books left, right and center, barely able to keep up with the sudden demand for ebooks, which quickly led to the initial Tsunami of Crap populating Amazon’s earlier online offerings. Those authors with a bit of tech-savvy could make their own covers, format their own books and, thanks to the Great Zon’s publishing platform wizardry, have that sucker published within 24 hours. Readers didn’t care as much whether the covers were top notch nor did they care whether the books were well-formatted. Back in 2009, indie publishing was pretty much a piece of cake for some authors – not to mention a veritable cash cow. That’s not the case today.

Writing a great story is the primary goal for any author – regardless of whether they’re indie published or traditionally published. However, nowadays, before a reader will even consider an indie author’s book, that book must have a compelling cover design, be properly edited, proofed and formatted, and must have a great title and blurb and even a great opening hook to get the reader to give the author’s book more than a fleeting glance. And thanks to these stringent requirements, indie publishing has created a host of cottage industries in the field of pre-made covers/custom cover designs, book editing, book proofing and book formatting. Of course, there are still a select number of very talented and diverse authors who can produce a nice cover for their books and can edit, proofread and format them. However, they are few and far between, if the Google searches are anything to go by (case in point: a search of “premade ebook covers” on Google yielded 108,000 hits). Some companies, like Formatting Experts at www.formattingexperts.com, offer custom cover design and ebook formatting for a number of platforms such as mobi, epub, etc. Others, such as GoOnWrite, at www.goonwrite.com, offer a variety of premade covers at reasonable prices. However, no matter how careful an indie author is, costs will invariably add up by the time the ebook is published. There is, of course, also the ISBN to consider. Some publishers like Amazon and Smashwords will provide one when the ebook is published, while other publishers will require an author to obtain one (which also involves a cost).

And let’s not forget reviews. Any author worth their grain of salt needs reviews because reviews – especially positive ones – tell readers that it’s worth investing their time and money to read a particular book. For an indie author, one way to obtain reviews is by doing giveaways on Goodreads and other sites. However, Goodreads requires that authors give away a paper copy of a book which requires the author to not only have a book cover made but also have formatting done for that book. One of the more popular sites for paperbacks is CreateSpace.

Until very recently, CreateSpace charged authors $25.00 for extended distribution of an author’s book but thankfully has now waived this fee.

Now that the indie author has his/her ebook published, and has also got a paperback version, the author needs to get word out about his/her book. How to do that? An author can start a blog as well as become active on social media sites like Twitter as well as through a FaceBook page. These are all useful things but again, for the author that is technology-challenged or isn’t active or familiar with social media sites, there will be added costs to set up a FaceBook page or to hire someone who can handle the social media aspect of the author’s life. Long term, hiring a pro is a sound investment but it may initially require dipping into personal funds until the ebook begins to bring in an ROI (return on investment a.k.a. "make money").

Then, of course, there is the considerable cost of advertising, but that’s a separate beast unto itself. All of this may seem daunting to a future indie author. However, these are very necessary considerations for the uninitiated who naively believe that indie publishing is nothing but a veritable cash cow. Time to reevaluate, reassess and think again…