Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Amazon are running a promotion this October called PoweredByIndie. Basically to celebrate authors who self publish with them. They are highlighting as many as they can, but suggest we all blow a few trumpets too. This we can do, because we like blowing trumpets, and have learned more as an Indie than as anything else.

When I think back to how our lives used to be, long before the days of self-publishing, I am totally amazed at how far we have come.

For more than five long years, we had tried our hardest to get one of the big mainstream publishers to show an interest in one of our books, but the results were always the same. It was ‘sorry, try again later…’ or ‘sorry, but good luck for the future…’

Sometimes, we had been encouraged to hope for more than that, when they had actually requested the full copy of the book to read, but it never got any better than that. At one point, we managed to get an agent, a very respectable London firm, who thought our books were eminently publishable. They tried hard to create some interest, but the results were the same.

Just when it all seemed hopeless, the Indie publishing revolution arrived!

The more we read about it, the more intrigued we became. We could do this!

It has been a long journey and the learning curve even longer, but we are now fully-fledged Indie authors with eight books to our name. The experience has been frustrating at times, yet very rewarding.

The Indie system continues to encourage and inspire us, and had led to even more connected adventures. Becoming Indie authors was definitely one of our better decisions…