Ways to help an indie author

This post is supposed to be a humorous way to point out ways you can help your favorite indie authors; please do not take anything here too seriously.

Step one:

• Buy their books.

Indie authors spend days, months, and sometimes years working on their books, and every sale means the world to us. So if you really want to help an indie author, buy a copy of one of their books.

But maybe you already own their book, so what can you do then?

• Write a review

So you read the book, you loved it, now what? Well, write a review. not only will the author feel like they won the lottery, you will tell other potential buyers where to spend their money.

Now, if you’re not the kind of person that likes to use big words or speak publicly, just hit those stars. We authors aren’t picky, and we will take any help you can give us.

• Take pictures of the book and share them with everyone.

Remember old great aunt Tilda, who would spend hours showing her holiday pictures to the family, over and over, until everyone was ready to throw up just thinking about her in a bikini? We don’t need to go that far.

But do share pictures of the book on your social media, tell your bookish friends (both the bookworms and the book dragons), mention it to your hairdresser and maybe even the poor grocery lady since she’s trapped and can’t move from her spot. Going to public places and shouting, “I love [insert book’s name here], and you should all read it,” is also acceptable.

• Gift their book to all your book friends.

We all know finding good gifts can be hard, so choose the brilliant option and gift a book – that way, you support indie authors and can do the holiday shopping in one place.

But, you might think, I don’t have money to buy more books, so what do I do then?

• Like/share posts about their books.

Seriously, do you have any idea how disheartening it is to spend hours coming up with yet another social media post, then create it, edit it, and think about the best possible hashtags, only for the damn thing getting two likes and one of them is from your mother?

So, go follow all your favorite indie authors and share and like their posts – we all know you’re spending a few hours on there anyway, so might as well be a bit useful. That way, you won’t feel so guilty that you once again didn’t do the dishes.

• Make a human sacrifice to the eldritch beings in the hopes they will grant the author good sales.

Honestly, we will take any help we can get. Bonus points if you sacrifice someone who didn’t like our books.

• Join our newsletters.

So you don’t have money to buy new books, but how do you plan on keeping up to date with our publishing, so you can annoy everyone and make them buy it for you? Easy, join our newsletters.

And don’t worry if you don’t actually read the emails. We authors are simple creatures, and we just want to see the numbers of subscribers go up.

Hint hint… here’s my newsletter

Other things to do:

Do you know an indie author? Then make sure to bring them coffee and snack. Indie authors are notoriously strange creatures, often sitting for hours and days in their little caves, forgetting to take in any real substance other than cold coffee and left over cookie crumbs.