The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe, Jeff Bennington

I ran across this book through ereaderiq.com, which has numerous free Amazon ebooks to browse through every day. It's my ritual now: wake up, hit the bathroom, get breakfast, and browse through the day's new free books offering. The title of the book caught my attention, as indie authoring and publishing are two topics on the top of my mind. I have a book. I want to take it out and start selling it. That's my motivation for reading this book.

First with my superficial impression of the book (I have read the first 1/3 before starting this post): there are 220 pages. It is relatively easy to navigate through, with the ability to tab through sections, and a good table of contents linked to chapters and sub-chapters throughout. Spelling mistakes are rare, grammar and syntax is easy to get through.

Going a little deeper, beyond the artificial (yet important) aspects of the book has not yet met my expectation. I find myself having to look at the title of the book from time to time to make sure I'm reading "The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe" rather than "My Life as an Indie Author with a few Suggestions for the Aspiring Indie Author." The second title would be more accurate. This book is much more about the author's personal experience of becoming an indie author. I suppose he is trying to illustrate his points, but I find the anecdotes to be a bit slow. I also don't find this book to be particularly helpful.

For instance, he does recommend that the prospective author go to his specific individuals for necessary services: he has an editor (he keeps stressing how important a professional editor is. I suppose that would be important for folks who have issues with spelling and grammar, but this is not everyone. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. For me, this is not one of them. The marketing and social media aspects would be more along my weak points. He points to a formatter who can help format the book that you want to publish. I found this completely useless information. Any Google search can disclose this kind of information. More helpful would be a detailed guide to formatting for Kindle and ePub.

Another avenue he goes down is how to write a story. In fact, that's where I'm at right now as I write these thoughts and impressions. I don't think this is appropriate for a book like this. That is to say, there are many books about how to write short fiction and novels. He will not be able to cover the topic very well at all.

I had thought as I read this book that it seemed like one of those blogs-become-book books. And, it turns out, I was right. The material did come from his blog, or at least a lot of it seems to have. Blogs are a little different than books in terms of focus, I believe. I think a blog, in the ideal world, invites readers and a community to have a discussion around the topic that the blogger posts. I had hoped that that's what would have happened with my blog, even if in reality that seems to happen about once a year.

OK, so the thoughts and impressions from hereon-in are composed after I finished reading this book.

The book is far less an Indie Author's Guide to the Universe, which implies a broad guide that will be filled with information like some kind of technical manual, and much more the story about how Jeff Bennington became a successful Indie writer. He talks about marketing, editing, and even how his Indie career folds into the other elements of his life.

I do believe that there are a number of lessons that he has learned over time that would be valuable to the tentative or prospective author. However, I would have liked more 'science' and less 'anecdote.' What I mean by that might be something to the effect of doing solid research, finding hard numbers, and showing how he manages to construct his own publishing niche out of that information. I don't really know how I would go about doing that, since I'm not experienced in it. And, perhaps such a thing would be less useful. I don't really know at this point.

What works for him isn't exactly going to work for everyone. That will be true for any author. His weaknesses are different than mine, as are his strengths. So, some pieces of advice are applicable, whereas others may not be. For instance, I am a terrible marketer. Offloading that responsibility would be great. But, maybe I can't really do that. I have managed to offload the responsibility of editing and proofing the work to a technical writer, and he will find issues and bring up questions and quips that are a lot more useful than what I'd get from a casual reader (oh, I like it. Or, I don't like it. You spelt this wrong: all of which would be fairly useless for someone who can spell). He could have used a proofreader himself at the end of it all. Back to my point: having a second pair of eyes to scour the text is a good thing to do.

Now I'm rambling. I would have to say some of the most interesting things that I found from his book was his analysis of the market, his game of playing the prices to go fishing on the Amazon top 100, while I found his advice on formatting and writing to be rather useless and a waste of space that he could have used to expound on something more pertinent to the topic of being an Indie writer. As I said earlier: you're not going to teach someone how to write in twenty pages (or whatever it worked out to.)

He included a chapter from his book at the end. It's not really my thing. He tries hard to sensationalize too much. However, he's clearly got an audience for it. And, you can't please everyone all the time. Style is like that: sometimes you like it, sometimes you don't. The title is ambitious, and the content doesn't follow through with that promise. However, it still might have information or an anecdote within its pages to justify the trivial cost of the book.