Check Out the Article I Wrote for "Writer's Digest" Magazine on Being a Hybrid Author!

…I mean that literally. Go check out the magazine. Because it’s a paper magazine, or a digital version that you have to get a phone/tablet newsstand subscription for. And I literally cannot link to it.

One of the absolute best things about 2019 is that I’ve gotten to write author advice articles for publications like Writer’s Digest and the RWA Romance Writer’s Report. One of the not-awesome things about getting to write these articles is that they’re difficult to share. But print is still alive! People email and private message me all the time to let me know they’re reading my articles. I’ve noticed that print subscriptions are very reasonable these days. You might want to check them out :)

The Writers Digest article appears in a column called “Indie Lab”—it appears on page 18 of the November/December 2019 issue. The tagline is: “New rules. New strategies. New paths to success.” It is geared toward authors who may be self-publishing and thinking through issues unique to that situation. My article gives perspective around the tradeoffs of becoming a hybrid author.

For those of you who don’t follow the authoring world, being a “hybrid” author means publishing work independently as well as publishing work through traditional publishing houses. Some authors prefer indie publishing because you keep creative control as well as retaining 100% of your own royalties. Traditional publishing comes with marketing and editorial support, and perks available only to publishers, but, for those services, publishers take a cut. In my article, I present five seldom-discussed tradeoffs that go beyond defining key differences between the two models, and instead consider aspects that authors might not have thought of.