#IWSG : Traditional or Indie?

The Insecure Writers Support Group is a marvellous group set up by Alex Cavanagh. On the first Wednesday of every month, members post thoughts, fears or words of encouragement for fellow writers.The link above takes you to details about the group and how to join. You’ll also find a list of bloggers signed up to the challenge – do check them out).

This month’s question: What publishing path are you considering/did you take, and why?

Publishing still seems a long way off. The WIP nearest to being ready was co-written with my writing partner during this year’s A-Z Challenge. Whilst some progress have been made since April, it’s been a bumpy ride. David – my co-author – took the leap to using Scrivener at the start of the year, but I wasn’t able to learn it in time for April. Whilst our chuck it together method worked well enough for April, we’ve had to make the transfer back into Scrivener and we’ve also needed to pull together the research material individually sourced so it’s available to both in Scrivener’s shared library.

All of this was just a drain on time – for two time-crunched writers. However, the big decision related to the story content itself. Having the A-Z structure was helpful in that it provided us with a roadmap; now have to decide which bits we’ll keep, which we’ll lose and which we’ll save for later books in the series.  Finding time to write is hard enough, finding time to talk about it is even harder. But I’ve enjoyed the co-writing process tremendously, so am confident that we will find a way through.

Returning to the specific question – our aim is to be traditionally published – after all, who doesn’t want the buzz of using those words “my publisher”. But we will go indie if the traditional route doesn’t work out as, after our combined efforts and hard work, we are committed to getting it out to the reading public.

In discussing publishing options, we’ve both been ploughing through the massive amount of information available about both publishing roadmaps; I, for one, will admit to ending up more than a little boggled. I know more research and preparation will need to be done, but I feel that’s best done when the manuscript is complete and – at the very least – out with beta readers and/or editors. So, our decision could change once that process is complete.

I know there’s a wealth of experience in the IWSG on this subject, so I was delighted to see the question and I’ll be reading as many of your posts on the subject as I can fit in over the next week or so!

© Debra Carey, 2018