Oli Jacobs

I’ve always been creative, but I started to seriously work on my prose fiction back in 2012. I had a number of short stories I didn’t know what to do with, and so threw them into a collection (Sunshine & Lollipops) and released them through Amazon’s KDP program. Since then I’ve made sure to release at least one work per year, simply because I love telling stories and people seem to like reading them.

I decided to self-publish simply because I didn’t – and still don’t – think I’m either good enough or audience-friendly enough to gain any traction through traditional publishing. Through self-publishing, I get to tell the stories I want to tell, the way I want to tell them. This means playing with formats, book length, and even narrative decisions. It’s a lot of work to produce something that can sit with the more professional tomes out there, but I like to think my books stand proudly there.

My favourite part is no doubt the freedom of expression that comes with self-publishing. Not only that, but the community that is out there is filled with creative minds that stretch across the whole range of stories and wild ideas that you rarely see in the mass market. There is a real sense of everyone working together to boost the others, and such positivity can only elevate everyone as a whole. However, the worst thing about self-publishing is definitely the marketing. To even get that spark of an audience interested in your work requires a lot of hustle, and even then to maintain that flame means working even harder to keep interest. I’ll be honest in that marketing is not my strong point, and some experiences have left me burnt out (to continue the analogy…) but when your work does catch someone’s eye, it is always a rewarding experience.

Best advice is the simplest advice: keep writing and don’t give up. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Even if only one or two people read your book, that’s still an achievement, especially if they loved it. You should aim to write for yourself and not an audience, or even this grand idea of becoming the Next Big Thing in whatever genre you choose. After all, they are your stories, not anyone else, so craft your tales how you wish them to be constructed. Oh, and don’t fire your books out of a cannon as a marketing strategy. While fun, the lawsuits are not worth the hassle.