Well halló!
Slight break with convention this week: normally I try to post twice a week—once for the free subscribers, once for the paid ones—but earlier this week I was “poorly” as the British so charmingly put it, so you are only getting one—i.e. this one. 😊
Also, I was hard at work on my indie publishing course, which is nearly ready to be launched—pretty excited about that!
As you may know, I have written 11 books, and have published all of them except one independently. I am someone who started trying to get published back in the days before the Internet, when the only way to get your work in front of readers was to send out query letters to agents and publishers via snail mail, and hope for the best. You even had to send self-addressed stamped envelopes with your queries so they could reject you without it costing them anything. This presented quite the challenge for someone who wrote in English but was querying from outside the English-speaking market. How were you supposed to buy American or British stamps when you were living in Germany, for example? 😅
Anyway, after years of this, I finally did land an agent who liked my first novel and shopped it around—but alas, no takers. This was around the time when blogs were starting to be a thing, so to alliviate my disappointment I started blogging. Long story short, I built a community online, and when I was ready to publish my books, there were people there who already knew my writing and wanted to buy them.
I published my first two books independently through my blog and then (finally!) landed a traditional publishing deal. Huzzah, right? But no, the experience turned out to be a major disappointment, so when it was time to release my next book into the world, I decided to go indie—and have never looked back. Today I run a thriving business, my books are available in around 50 stores around Iceland as well as online, and they are bought by readers as far away as Japan and Brazil.
So yes, I am an indie publishing enthusiast. I love the indie publishing community, which is one of the most supportive groups of people I have ever known—rivalling even the Substack community. Today there are a wealth of tools and technology to make indie publishing easy and fun.
The stigma that once clung to self-publishing or “vanity publishing” as it was often called (which tells you everything about the common attitude) is slowly disappearing. The sentiment used to be that if you published your own work you must have been “forced to” because you couldn’t land a traditional publishing deal, so your work must be substandard. Not so any more. Today indie publishing is an option, rather than a last resort. In fact, a recent global study by the excellent Alliance of Independent Authors showed that independent authors today earn a higher income than traditionally published authors, and their incomes are increasing year-on-year while those of traditionally published authors is declining.
Can you tell I am passionate about this? Yes? If you want to know more about my upcoming (online, self-study) course, you can …
As for our section from The Little Book of Icelandic, this week we continue with the Icelandic insults. There is, per usual, a vocal file of me reading them … if I sound a bit lacking in energy it’s because of the aforementioned “poorly”. In fact, the only time I sound properly enthusiastic is when I drop the F-bomb … totally unplanned, but there ya go! Hard to say that word without going all-in.
🤣
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