Resources for Authors
On January 19, 2025, Tiktok will be going dark for US Creators. The impact of TikTok on the publishing industry, on indy publishers, has been astounding. It has left authors and readers scrambling to rebuild their communities.
One thing this is illuminating is that to be a business owner, which you are as an independent author, is you can't have all your eggs in one basket and you MUST own your audience with as few third party middle men in the way.
I know, it sounds daunting, and it is. I'm going to start collecting resources here and explain what you need, and how you can start to build that.
In the simplest form, you need a home base to send people and then a way to communicate with those people. Basically, a website and a news letter list.
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS.
I'll be making some recommendations, but this is just to point you in different directions to help you eliminate decision fatigue. This will NOT be an exhaustive list AND it is not intended to be a definitive guide.
You need a piece of property on the internet that you own completely. The best option for that is a web site. And it really doesn't have to be too fancy. You need a place to park your identity that you can direct people to that cannot easily be taken away from you. And it does not have to be expensive.
BARE MIN EFFORT
Link Tree or some other book marking service will at the very least give you a place to send people to. It is not the most elegant solution, but it can work for a while.
Google Sites - did you know you can build a website on Google for free? Google Sites as a pretty basic drag and drop editor that will give you a pretty decent, if low functioning website in mintues. You can even set up a custon domain (more about that in a second.)
Carrd - Carrd is very similar to the concept of Link Tree. It will give you a simple one page website.
SLIGHTLY MORE EFFORT
There are a ton of different website builders out there like Square Space and Wix. You buy a plan, you pick a template and bada boom you have a website. These in general cost money and are relatively simple to set up.
THE MOST EFFORT
A custom website using Wordpress. I'm going to leave this section blank for the time being, because it is not really a plug and play set up.
Then you need a way to communicate with your audience, that YOU own and control. Basically a newsletter list.
There are a billion and a half newsletter services. I have really strong opinions on this so I'm going to be brief here. I use Malierlite and I'm not saying that is the service you should pick. I will give you a pros and cons on that in the future, but you need someway to push information out to your audience that is not at the whims of a social media platform. Start thinking about you communication in two different flavors - a Billboard and a hand delivered letter. We'll tackle the "billbord" aspect in a bit.
probably the easiest newsletter to start is Substack. There are pros and cons to this, obvs. but if you want a simple, quick to start solution, do that.
If you want something with a little more power behind it, consider a newsleter service like Mailerlite, ConvertKit (now Kit) or similar.