How to support indie authors

As an independently published author, I find it important to engage with other indie authors and support them where I can. I prefer not to use the term self-published because of the unfortunate stigma surrounding it.

Supporting indie authors can look like:

• interacting with their social media accounts, which they dedicate a lot of their time to in order to retain an audience
• buying their books
• reading and reviewing their books
• reaching out to the author to tell them how their book made me personally feel
• sharing their books with people you know

These are important things you can do to support indie authors. And it’s crucial that we are supporting them, because indie authors don’t have the same advantages as traditionally published authors, such as funding, market analysis and having a larger, skilled team helping the author at every stage of the publishing process.

Not to mention that damned stigma. A lot of people seem to think independent authors aren’t real authors. Which is just absurd at the highest level, and I could go on a long rant about that, but I’ve decided not to.