Being an indie author is about more than just being an author. As an indie author you've go to do EVERYTHING! After writing the book there's copyediting, page layout, cover design, and if you so choose, ebook conversion. Once the book is ready to be out there, indie authors then need to move into a very different phase of promotion, marketing, and sales. With Metropolicks, we definitely do it ALL ourselves. We are our own publishers, editors, publicists, marketers, sales force and social media team. And we've also produced and directed videos, managed photo shoots and multi-media events to promote Metropolicks.

Indie authors have to be resourceful, determined, trouble shooters and a sort of MacGyver* to figure things out, in order "to make things work for you." 

Our latest challenge with Metropolicks has been getting Metropolicks and The Metropolicks We Call New York City: A Guide for Singles into print. Initially both books were ebooks. So far it's been an endless marathon of edits. Even though we've had professional copyeditors look through the Metropolicks manuscript, we decided to go through another round of edits ourselves before going to print. Once the books hit the presses, that's it!

After receiving the first printed proof copies of Metropolicks in April, each of us painstakingly went through and copyedited the manuscript for the umpteenth time, going through each and every page of the book, scrutinizing every word down to the letter, every piece of punctuation, formatting, layout and spacing issues. Doing all this was no small feat since it turns out that Metropolicks is over 600 pages in print! It was very sobering to discover several new grammatical, typographical and copyediting issues. We also did a few minor re-writes.

On top of this, we have also had to deal with a number of print quality issues related to photographs that we have inside of both books and on the front and back covers. All that being said, we can only say that our journey to get our books into print continues...

*MacGyver was the name of a 1980's television series, in which the main character, Angus MacGyver, a secret agent uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences to solve complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects with his ever-present Swiss Army knife.

This blog post was reposted from FeliciaLin.com