029: How to support your author friends (5 ideas)

Learn how to support your author friends—besides buying and reading their books—with these 5 tips! Plus, a special announcement... today is book release day for Being Good (Book 5 in the Polyamorous Passions series!).   Being an author takes a huge amount of time and energy. But let’s take it a step further, to break it down and consider the numbers...   For indie authors, when you take into account that a typical e-book retails at $2.99, but that there could easily be upwards of 40 hours of work put into the book (not to mention at least a couple hundred dollars per book for cover design, book editing, etc.—which doesn’t even take into account marketing efforts), and when you consider that all e-book platforms take 30—70% royalties of each book sold, then you’ll see that it takes a whole lot of book sales in order to get close to breaking even, let alone earn a liveable wage.   That’s why every copy an author can sell truly does matter to them! If an author wants to make a living from their books, then they’re really committed to it for the long haul.  One of the beautiful things about how easy self-publishing can be, is that anyone can do it. Of course, this also makes it challenging to cut through the noise and for an author to make a name for themselves, and get noticed.   As a result, anything that you can do to support your author friends means the absolute world to them. When you do any of the tips in this episode, you are supporting your friend’s dream. You are showing them that you care about their dreams, and that you want them to succeed.   And the best part is that each of these ideas will only take you a few minutes or a couple of bucks. Yes, that’s right: you can support your author friend’s dream for the grand cost to you of $3 or 3 minutes.  So, with that in mind… what can you do to support your author friends?  First and foremost, buying their books is awesome! Buy—and, ideally also read—their books, whether those consist of e-versions or paperbacks.  But besides that, what are other ways you can support your author friends? Tune into this episode of the Indie Author Weekly podcast to get 5 suggestions for how to support your author friends...   Access sample chapters of Sagan's novels, transcripts of each episode, cheatsheets and spreadsheets relevant to the episode topics, and additional resources, at SaganMorrow.com/secretpodcast.  Resources & links mentioned in this episode:  Learn more about Sagan’s books at SaganMorrow.com/books  Read Being Good (Book 5 in the Polyamorous Passions series) at SaganMorrow.com/books   Episode 24 of the Indie Author Weekly podcast: excerpt of Being Good   Episode 12 of the Indie Author Weekly podcast: how to write (quick and painless) book reviews      Tune into the “secret” version of this podcast to access the (free!) sample chapter of Being Good at SaganMorrow.com/secretpodcast   Check out the Polyamorous Passions book merch and Indie Author Weekly podcast merch (mini notebooks, pens, shirts, and tote bags!) at SaganMorrow.com/shop   Submit your questions at SaganMorrow.com/question   Connect with Sagan (@Saganlives) on Twitter and Instagram. Feel free to use the hashtag #IndieAuthorWeekly to cSend fan mail! Click HERE to leave Sagan a voicemail & share your thoughts about this episode.Support the show