Time for my curmudgeonly side to rear its ugly head.
I don’t think I like the term “indie published” for what is largely a self-publishing phenomenon. The term is meant, and I have seen this explicitly in some quarters, to mirror the terminology around things like movies and video games. And that is why I don’t think it should be used for the self-publishing world. I don’t think self-publishing is in the same category as indie movie or games development and I think we do a disservice to authors pretending otherwise.
Indie games and movies, with some exceptions, are collaborative processes. Movies almost have to be. There mere presence of actors and their skill affects the quality of the product. You almost certainly need people who know how to build sets and props, handle sound, etc. Nothing about making a movie is a singular enterprise. The same can be said for video games, though it is still possible to be a one-person studio. But most video games are made by teams, and like all teams, the result is a combination of the team’s ideas and skills. Even the most auteur of auteurs in those spaces need others help to make their vision come to life.
Sometimes that help, yes, is purchased only with money, but it is often also purchased with talent and skill. A creator in movies or video games, especially at the independent level, implicitly needs to have some level of sufficient, marketable talent in order to get what they envision made to a decent level of quality. Yes, help can be bought, but the other talented people you need to make a vision come to life will generally not work with talentless hacks. They need to preserve their own marketability, their own reputations. It is not a hard and fast rule, but mere money doesn’t generally buy indie producers the skills they need if their vision/product/creation is inherently garbage.
Books are not like that.
Writers do not need to collaborate to publish. Now, people who are serious about their skill and sales will try to employ editors and cover designers and have their work beta read, etc. But unlike indie movies or games, none of that is required to produce a book. And there is less pressure to make changes to an author’s vision. They don’t need the help of others to make the core product come to life, and other’s reputations are not tied directly that book in the way, say, an actor or character artist’s work is. The cover is judged by itself, copyediting is a skill independent of the story quality, and developmental editors can merely point to all the changes the author did not make to defend their work. Self-publishing is not the collaborative exercise that other indie art is, and therefor does not have the same pressure to be better that other indie art has, especially if that work has a chance to enter the wider marketplace.
Again, I realize I am speaking in generalities. Sometimes money will buy you help you don’t deserve. Sometimes you can create a movie or, more easily, a video game largely or entirely yourself. And I do not mean to denigrate self-publishing. There are plenty of writers who have spoken to an audience that traditional publishing could not reach for them, due to market size, aesthetic choices, and/or marketing skill. But to the extent that my writing has improved, it is because I have incorporated the feedback that my writing group has generously provided me. In indie films and games, taking that feedback seriously is much more encouraged by the structure of how those products get made. That is simply not true for books.
Okay, so what does this matter? Why do I care about a nomenclature issue? I may just be being overly pedantic, as if such a thing were possible, but I think that by calling self-publishing indie publishing we create a false equivalency. I think that by setting up the linguistic expectation that self-publishing involves the same level of collaboration and thus the same talent vetting as other indie pursuits, we set the wrong expectation for writers and readers.
Obviously, as I said, there are many writers who have found an audience in self-publishing. But there are many, many, many terrible books in the self-publishing realm. Pretending that self-publishing mirrors the indie move or games scenes can encourage a writer to publish when they should not. I have two books that my writing group thought were good enough to query against. Neither got me an agent, but there is nothing to prevent me from self-publishing or serializing them. Except for the fact that I believe that since neither got me an agent, neither are high enough quality to be worth publishing. If I was making a movie or game, there would be people and pressures around me that would sharpen the work to a significantly higher degree than those that exist in self-publishing.
The process of writing and publishing just doesn’t have the same safeguards and pressures to improve that indie games and movies do. Saying otherwise, even inadvertently through our word choice, likely results in work that is not as good as it could be.
Word Count Update
25 pages on Ishtar2: Clocks and Daggers. I won’t say that script writing is easier than novel writing. The constraints of the format mean you have to work much harder to convey tone, voice, and character interiority. But script writing is certainly faster.