• My question is the result of marketing an indie novel. As an unknown author I have to be practical.

Let’s call a spade a spade. You’re not with an independent publisher, you’re self-publishing. I don’t say that as an insult, but a real publisher, be they independent or a major player provides services that your manuscript hasn’t seen. You didn’t have an acquiring editor, who knows both writing and the readers of your genre, sign off on the manuscript so far as it being something written at a level the average reader might enjoy. Instead, you reached that decision, declared it ready, and went to Amazon and Smashwords.  As a result it’s not seen the hand of an editor knowledgeable in either fiction writing technique or one trained in your genre.

That’s a very different thing from being chosen as the best of hundreds of manuscripts submitted, and then passing through the publication process, which involves extensive and varied kinds of editing. For what an editor does, and does for you, you might want to read this: http://www.manuscriptediting.com/seidman.htm

I mention all this because in general, self-published work sells to friends and family. Outside that circle it usually sells less than one hundred copies. The killer, from a self pub point of view is that no matter how much selling you do; no matter how many people you manage to send to your website (and no one will go there unless you point them there) it comes down to how they like the sample.

In general, you can expect the hard copy sales to be a small fraction of your Kindle sales.

I feel I should expand on what I said, because I really don’t want to be mean, or discourage. This is a major hot button issue for me, though, for several reasons:

First, is that our English teachers never tell us that what we’re working so hard to learn is a general skill that most adults will use on the job, and that it’s related only peripherally to the writing professions. True, most of our teachers learned their skills in those same classes and are unaware that there’s anything more to learn, but still, the result is that we learn the basics of nonfiction writing and leave school believing that writing is writing, and that all that separates us from the pros is a great story idea, natural talent, practice, and luck. And that sets us up for point two.

Years ago if we wanted to be writers we had to type our manuscript, edit it, type it again, an repeat till we couldn’t stand the idea of typing it again.

Then we had to convince a publisher to invest significant money in bringing our work to market. And because of the investment publishers were careful. The only way to get a yes from a publisher was to write on a professional level. And that takes study, mentoring, and time.

But then along came the Internet, print on demand, and Amazon. Now, there was significant money to be made from amateur writers. Now, it costs no more to produce ten copies each from a million writers than to produce a million copies each from ten writers. Now, people who sincerely want to please people with our stories, but who are unaware of the fact that we leave school unprepared to write anything but reports, are the raw material of a thriving business. A million fools labor over their keyboards, to end up selling a handful of copies, while Amazon makes the profits on ten million or more sales.

Hundreds of sites advertise that they specialize in helping new writers “get their work out there.” They know damn well that they’re destined to fail and sell only to friends and family, but they don’t care because they’ll make money, and that as the one self-publishing through them, you’ll work hard to see that they do.

And that’s the real reason why it’s a hot button issue with me. People who otherwise would fail at selling their manuscript, and in response turn to finding out why it didn’t sell, might eventually become competent and successful writers.

But it’s easy to talk someone into what they already want to do, so why take years honing your craft, and learning it, when you can simply bypass all that, self-publish your work and call yourself published?

What Amazon and the others do is legal. But there’s no connection between what they do and publishing. It has a lot to do with whoring, though: Tell them how good they are, and that you love them. Then take the money.

Rant over. I feel better now.   

 • My book went through three expensive professional edits,

I hate to say this, but I would demand my money back, even if you have to sue. No one who is knowledgeable in fiction-writing technique edited that book. They may have claimed such, but—and this doesn’t reflect on your talent or potential as a writer— the problems begin in the first sentence when you mix tenses. Even an English teacher should have seen that. And they multiply from there. This forum is no place to publicly discuss someone’s writing, so I won’t comment on the story, but if the one you paid to edit claimed even the most casual expertise in the field of writing fiction for publication they cheated you.

• I am in big trouble if sales are limited to family, as including me, that makes three.

It was released on Kindle a month ago, I believe. Have sales been satisfactory? That hard copy you’re planning to issue won’t sell nearly as many copies.

• It was my impression that if one produced their own professionally edited and designed book, it was an indie creation. Indie and self-published are often interchangeable.

A publisher does a lot more than release their own book.

• Personally, I don't have years to spin my wheels waiting on an industry that runs on the sorts of power which feeds a network hardly conducive to my status as a complete unknown. Does it stop me writing? No it does not.

What you’re saying about the publishing industry has not the slightest connection to the real world. Publishers take your work and invest a great deal of money in bringing it to market. And because it’s their money being risked, not yours, they have high standards.

The TV we’ve watched over the years didn’t make us competent to either direct or write for film. Nor did reading make us writers.

Anyone can declare themselves ready and go to Kindle, of course. Selling a publisher on investing in your work is another matter. It takes an in depth knowledge of craft, and of the unique compositional techniques the constraints of the page require. We don’t become a pro by graduating high school and taking an undergrad CW course. Like any other profession it takes study, mentoring, practice and more.

• My only choices, if I want to take my book to the end of the rainbow: are to print it myself or shove my efforts into a drawer. I chose to take my book as far as I could.

No one said you shouldn’t. But you should go into it knowledgeably, and with realistic expectations.

• It's one of my peeves that so many people assume every self-published book is unprofessional.

How many self published books did you buy—not download free, but pay for—and enjoy in the past year, as against those you disliked.

I’ve been looking at self-published offerings  for over ten years. I've not found one I would want to read more the a few pages of.

I once took the time to read the openings of fifty self-published offerings from Lulu at random, to see the state of the self-publishing market. Not one of them would have lasted more than three paragraphs in a publisher’s office as a submission. And of them, only two had a sales rating better than a million away from being number one. Most hovered at the four million mark. That pretty much says it all.

Look at it from a reader’s POV. Would you look through a hundred books knowing that every single one of them was rejected by every publisher and agent they queried, with perhaps one of them worth reading? Or would you prefer to sift though the result of a professional having read hundreds for each one they edit and pass to you?

• The market is glutted with manuscripts floating into some publishing filtering system of reader-minions surfing for the latest flavor of the population

Nonsense. A first-reader’s career depends on finding work that will sell. They know that seventy-five percent of what they look at will be unreadable. They know that only three in a hundred are written on a professional level, and two of them will be wrong for that house. That’s a given. But they want to find that special book that will get them noticed. So if your work has been rejected it’s not politics or bad luck.

It’s your job to catch that editor’s attention on page one, and not let go. If you were rejected it’s because you didn’t do your audition well enough, so they hired someone else.

• I agree that posting the first few pages of a novel are not the most brilliant form of promotion in the publishing universe

The hell it’s not. If you can’t hook them on page one they-won’t-turn to-page-two. And if they don't you wasted the time to write the rest.

Readers aren’t conscripts. You need to make them say, “Hmm…tell me more.” And you need to do that as close to the top of page one as possible. You have three pages, at best, to change a reader’s waning curiosity to interest. Bore or confuse them for a single line and they’re gone.

• Bottom line is: if I don't stick to my story, who the hell will? 

A philosophical point: have you put as much effort into learning the writing/publishing field as you put into graphics design? It doesn’t matter how much I want to be a graphics designer. Intent doesn’t make it to the page. If you had approached your current profession with the same attitude and preparation you’ve put into preparing yourself to write your story, would you have succeeded?