Indy is not a dirty word.

Think about it; indie rock and indie films are all seen as a concept of high art. Then people scoff at indie authors and call us losers who could not get published. I understand that many of our critics champion that belief. That all indy authors are authors who were too bad to get published therefore they are vanity published.

So let me get this straight, in order to be 'legitimate' I have to pay a publisher my money for them to be a middle man taking their percentage and taking creative control of my work all for my benefit? So yes I will concede that publishers have the massive power of promotion and their established monopolies with bookstores behind them, they will push what they believe will sell and the readers are consumers being told what to read. We do the same thing in smaller doses-but we keep our profits and our control.

Why I am such a stickler for authors protecting their copyright? Because I lost mine, and it happened at a low point in my life to top it all off. We signed a contract that signed our rights away on our intellectual property. We were convinced by our partner at the time that it was a solid deal and our ticket to fame in the comic book world. A year later no book was done; the artist breached the contract dragging us writers/creators into the breach, and I spent my last seventy-five dollars on a lawyer who slides the contract back to us and says "You can sue the artist but otherwise the publisher owns your work. It's airtight.". Meanwhile the artist is just as broke as we are, ran off with the eleven hundred dollars in advance money and supplies I'd paid him. We never received our advance and we have no rights to our comic book creation. Meanwhile we were homeless, I was in a ridiculously low paying job, J was donating plasma twice a week, while trying to survive as our dream just crashed and burned.

In hindsight, I would have gone with my gut feeling and stopped the deal before we signed. I had qualms about trusting the artist, but he was one of the best artists in the business, and had been a friend for years. He unfortunately lacked focus and was paranoid as soon as the book took off we'd fire him despite our pleas we would have kept a successful team together. He deliberately sabotaged us and the whole project. I will not reveal who this artist is, nor who the company was, suffice to say the publisher is still up and running and the artist is drawing for a much smaller company and working a part time job last time we saw each other.
What did I learn other than trust your gut reaction? I learned to protect my copyright like a Tasmanian devil! I harp on it, yes only because I don't want any of you to go through what I went through. It's the worse feeling in the world to have your dreams stolen because of a contract loophole. Read your contracts, have a lawyer read your contract, protect yourself. If it's too good to be true watch out.

This is why I am independent. I have a need for control of my art, good or bad. It is what I am doing to protect myself and still tell the stories I want to. I am not saying being published is a bad thing. There are some awesome indy publishers for instance; lets look at them as the Epitaph or Subpop label of publishing. I consider Amazon and other ebook self publishing platforms akin to Kobalt Label Services which allows established musical acts to be independent. George Lucas built his empire as an independent film maker as did Spielberg.

This is what I want: I want out critics to stop calling us losers because a few hacks with cringe-worthy self published. I want for us all to take a pledge to overachieve in our craft and never give our critics a reason to blanket us all with the outdated 'vanity press' stereotype.

We are Indies!

Aubrey