Yesterday I was checking my stats at Smashwords and discovered that the Smashwords founder, Mark Coker, had written a manifesto for us independent authors. As a Smashwords author I love it, and as an indie author I gladly and wholeheartedly join Mark in posting this as a commitment from this author to his readers.
Updated 16 April to fix a typo in the infographic. Whoops!
As the Indie Author Manifesto says,
“We indie authors believe all writers are created equal, that all writers are endowed with natural creative potential, and that writers have an unalienable right to exercise, explore and realize their potential through the freedom of publication. “
For years I’ve loved that words can mean specific things and I’m thrilled to be able to work with Smashwords to get my writing where readers can find it. I’m excited about how my rewrite of He’s With the Band is shaping up and I’m looking forward to getting to the point where I’m ready to ask for people who will give it a read and give me some feedback on it. My budget won’t stretch nearly far enough to hire an editor so beta readers are incredibly important to me. They’re always thanked in my ebooks and I’m looking at ways I can do something special to tell them “Thank You!” for helping me.
R.D. Mumma, author of the novel Fire Answers Fire, saw Mark’s post and wrote a wonderful companion piece celebrating Indie Readers. Without readers willing to take a chance on indie authors it wouldn’t matter if most of us ever wrote a single word or not or simply started at blank pieces of paper so long our foreheads have permanent bleeds.
Huge thanks to Mark Coker for putting this together and to Derek Murphy for creating the infographic for us.