When One Decision Creates Seventeen More

I love indie publishing.

But there is a lot that goes into indie publishing.

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And I mean a lot.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What People Think Indie Publishing is Like

I get the impression that some people think indie publishing is easy. There’s a certain thought process I think folks have about us indie writers: we write the book, we put a cover on the file, and upload. Voilà! Move on to the next. Repeat.

If only it were that easy.

I think there’s also an impression that, with traditionally published books, the author has vastly fewer decisions to make. To be clear, having never been traditionally published, I have no idea how true that actually is.

But I do know what indie publishing looks like from where I’m sitting. In case you haven’t heard, I’ve got a new book coming out this Tuesday. This past Thursday, I published the preorder link on social media. To prepare to have that link go live, I wanted to have things ready to go.

So I sat down on Saturday morning and knew I wanted to create a web page for my new book. That led to a, um, few other decisions.

Ready?

The Reality of Indie Publishing

[Takes a deep breath] Since last Saturday, I’ve figured out how many paperbacks I need for the Hearts & Hands show later this month, decided how many of those are actually available to sell, figured out whether I needed Rush production because apparently calendars remain a thing, updated the retailer copy, built the Between the Notes page, revamped the entire homepage including a new template and visual language, revamped the entire About page, realized other parts of the webpage will remain as-is for now, tweaked other parts of the website that weren’t technically broken but suddenly seemed like they should be tweaked, learned about CSS (because why are those cover images different sizes?!), became intimately acquainted with List view in WordPress, made sure all the links worked, decided to use my other URL (h-townbooks.com) to point readers toward my books, needed to conceive of an aesthetic for that other URL up to and including a tagline, updated Linktr.ee, made a banner for the website, made different banners for Facebook and LinkedIn because apparently one rectangle is not enough rectangles, scheduled social posts, remembered that Instagram doesn’t let you put clickable links in captions, changed the site navigation, moved Short Stories, figured out how people were now supposed to find Short Stories, and probably did twelve other things I’ve forgotten because I was too busy doing the next thing to write down the thing I had just done.

And that’s just what I remembered while writing that paragraph.

None of those things is particularly difficult. That’s the weird part. I can do all of them. I actually enjoy some of them.

The problem is that there are so damn many of them.

But I always come back to the same conclusion: I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And Somehow, I Still Love This Part

I love getting to make all those decisions. Yes, some can be tedious, especially revising the website. I built all the new pages brick by brick and color by color. The one time I took a block and literally copied it and pasted it on a different page, it brought with it some deep-in-the-code issue that I spent twenty minutes figuring out. Hat tip to ChatGPT when I finally pasted the code, told it what I needed done, and it zeroed in on the culprit (pssst, it was a CSS class).

But I love thinking about how my content is presented to the world. What should my website look like? What colors and accent colors and font colors do I want to use in 2026? What image should I project? I have longtime readers who will look at the fresh website and think it’s rather spiffy. And someday, someone will discover me through that website and never know it looked any other way.

Yes, there are a thousand different decisions—and sometimes one decision creates seventeen more—but I dig it. Yes, it also consumes my brain, pushing aside my desire to write new fiction, but that time will resume in a few weeks.

The Real Reason I Do It All

I think the real reason I do all of this is pretty simple: I like making things. Not just books. The whole thing.

I like deciding what the book looks like. I like deciding what the website looks like. I like figuring out how someone who has never heard of me is going to stumble across my work. I like making the little pieces fit together.

I like taking something that exists only in my head or my Mac or Chromebook and slowly turning it into something that exists in the world. And yes, sometimes that means spending twenty minutes hunting down a CSS class when I should probably be writing fiction.

But eventually, all those decisions add up to something: a story. A thing I created that becomes a real honest-to-goodness book. That someone picks up and maybe even reads.

And that’s why I keep doing all the ridiculous little things.

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