#indie publishing

[promptcalender]

Piece of advice to all writers who need a cover but don’t have the money to hire an artist: use the public domain.

Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!

When you use such images, always make sure that 1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but not the photograph you are using!), and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.

Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.

[Prompt Calender: April 23rd, World Book and Copyright Day]

[camelidae]

We’re 60% there, but there’s still a ways to go! The Custom Art tier sold out before I could even make a post about it, so I’ve decided to open up another 5 slots. All the art above is from past kickstarter requests, and each one was a delight to create! This is the only time of the year I offer custom commissions, so if you’ve been longing for some custom art, now is the time to pounce - the theme this year is just “animals”, so plenty of room to run wild!

Sail of the Menagerie

An illustrated novel.

[saprophilous]

Covers for Emery Blaine's books at Wild Door Publishing

Wild Door Publishing | B2B editorial and publishing services | independent publisher

[bebewrites]

PSA for anyone who uses ingramspark, or anyone you know who does, you now need to opt out to prevent them from selling your books to AI tech companies to train their AI. 🤦‍♀️

[malcolmschmitz]

So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.

There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.

A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.

They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.

When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.

If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.

[transfixmagazine]

Issue 10 | Summer 2026 of Transfix Magazine is HERE! Get your free digital copy of the new issue (and all the other ones) here!

On the cover: Testosterone Injection, 2026, oil and acrylic on canvas by Quinn Thomas.

The team:

Achilles Toledo - Staff Writer Azuli Rodriguez - Social Media Graphic Designer Korbin Richards - Social Media Copywriter Leo Oliveras - Layout Designer silas denver melvin - Social Media Graphic Designer Wren Coulter - Editor-in-Chief/Creative Director

[fixyourwritinghabits]

I keep thinking about the Audra Winter BookTok drama (in summary, young author self-published a very hyped book she has been working on for ten years that readers were very disappointed with, Reads With Rachel has a long video about it here.) I think the drama is a tad overblown and I've no desire to jump into adding to it, I think there are some good takeaways from the whole thing.

Trope-based vibes cannot be the only thing you have. Traditional publishing is currently plagued with this, so it's not surprising it's an issue with indie publishing too, but listen. You gotta have more than tropes. You need real characters and a story to move the story forward. This truly is the danger of marketing books based on tropes - you get books that aren't anything but that, and that rarely works.

The longer you work on a book has nothing to do with book quality. I do understand having a story you've thought about for ages and worked on for so long, but time spent on a story alone does not make it worth reading. We really overhype the idea of a work of genius decades in the making, and that is just not true. The ability to tell a good story, no matter how long you've been working on it, requires continual improvement of your writing skills. Which leads to the next point...

If you can't compromise, you shouldn't sell it. Winter apparently did have an agent, who she left, presumedly because that agent told her she needed to make major changes she did not want to make. I cannot stress this enough, that story in your head, the one that is beautiful and perfect and amazing, will not translate to the page in one piece. The ability to take feedback and adjust, even if it means cutting out parts of the story that mean a lot to you, is one of the essential skills of writing that you must learn.

I'm a huge believer in being able to write what you want. Fear of being a 'bad' writer shouldn't hold you back. Post that fun little drabble! Send that silly poem to your friends! But no amount of nice art, popular tropes, and hype can make up for a poorly-written story, especially if you are charging money for it.