Full title: Become a Successful Indie Author: Work Toward Your Writing Dream by Craig Martelle
The first thing you should note here, if you didn’t know already, is that Craig Martelle is an admin of the hugely popular and successful 20Booksto50k Facebook group and associated conferences. The group’s core tenet is the fast-release strategy, and it’s proven to genuinely work… IF you can sustain the pace of publishing 6+ books a year.
If that’s not something which is going to be possible for you, I don’t think the advice in this book is really going to be helpful, because it’s very much based around that strategy. Write long series, build up a backlist fast and keep building on it. Martelle openly admits that he writes pulp and he doesn’t put a huge emphasis on editing. Writing fast isn’t something everyone can do, and even those who can do it can’t sustain it all the time, so don’t beat yourself up if you give it a go and end up backing away. It’s not a strategy which will work for everyone.
I’m fairly sure that this book has been created by scraping advice posts Martelle has made in the Facebook group, in response to questions from members. He does repeat himself several times in paraphrased ways.
Overall, I didn’t find this particularly useful because the rapid release strategy isn’t something I can personally handle. If you think it might be the path for you, I still wouldn’t necessarily say buy the book, because I think all that info is right there available for free in the 20Booksto50k FB group. Just join the group and start asking questions, but if you want the advice all summarized in one place, you could do worse than read this one. I’ll give it three stars.
