With the release of the Omnibus edition of my Red Slaves series today... some commentary on the ugly underbelly of indie publishing. https://twitter.com/DifrancescoAlex/status/1345337294228770823

First, to be clear, I could not publish books I'm proud of without holding a full time day job.

I pay for the services of both an editor and a cover artist (YAY for @LianaBrooks and @elixing ) to make sure I'm not showing my ass with any of my releases.

I also paid for a professional voice artist to create the audiobook version of the one novella for which I could afford that service. Despite the fact that one of my undergrad majors was broadcast journalism.

In other words, I know how to record and produce quality audio... but at the time we didn't have all the studio components at home to do that effectively/efficiently.

That's changed in the interim, and once I'm finished writing my latest book (I hope, THIS MONTH!), I'll start to produce audiobooks... because as a percent of total sales per title, that seems like a good return on investment based on that 1 experiment.

All of that to say... none of those services have come cheap... and they mean only a few of my titles have earned more than the cost it's taken to produce and market them.

In the meantime, I've earned an MBA with a concentration in marketing... so in theory I know how to market my books as well. Except marketing ALSO takes money and time.

Which... when you have a day job... you have at least some of the money portion of that equation... but you REALLY don't have the time.

PPC campaigns require daily supervision, as do Amazon ads, and any other ad campaigns you might imagine.

Running sales, or taking advantage of author exchanges or other book promotion services, is hit or miss, depending on the whims of the gods... Despite glowing advertorials to the contrary.

My experience to date is that testing the water with any of these services has cost me more than it's made me.

All of which boils down to: I recognize the privilege I enjoy in being able to release any professional quality books... because I have the day job income to facilitate all the work that goes into that production effort.

And some day, I hope all this investment in my creativity pays off to the extent that I can give up my day job. But I'm also realistic about the fact that it takes quite a bit of money up front to even have that dream.