Awesome Indies founder Tahlia Newland on challenges and opportunities for indie authors

Tahlia Newland

Author Tahlia Newland

I first met Tahlia Newland months after I had submitted my first novel to Awesome Indies. This organization seeks to curate the best indie works — not just for quality of writing, but for editing and production values, too. I remember that when I first stumbled across it, I was impressed that it evaluated submissions based on a book I think is terrific — Renni Browne and Dave King’s SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. It also demanded literary qualifications from reviewers. Perhaps best of all, it offered ways to submit that didn’t require payment — so it clearly wasn’t just another sketchy prize mill. Eventually, I became a volunteer myself. But I never really asked Tahlia how Awesome Indies got its start. So…

Tahlia, what prompted you to begin Awesome Indies?

ai_square-300x300When I first got an e-reader back in 2009 or so, I discovered cheap books and read them voraciously. They were all self-published, of course, and I soon discovered that even books with high star ratings on review sites like Amazon and Goodreads could be really badly written, even some that were selling thousands of copies.

Though I picked up many terrible books, I also discovered some real gems, and I really wanted to tell the world about these great books where self-publishing authors had beaten the odds and produced something excellent. I began writing reviews so I could tell readers which self-published books were well enough done that readers could be sure they were getting a good product.

Next I came up with the idea of listing them all on one website so interested readers could have a one-stop quality shop for indie books. I created that first Awesome Indies site on a WordPress.com free blog, and it grew from there. At the point I decided I needed to create a submission system and get some helpers, I made the decision that if a group of people were to set themselves up as determiners of quality, then they had better be people with the kind of qualifications that no one could argue with, so it had to be people with formal qualifications in writing, English literature, or editing.

What would you say are the greatest challenges and opportunities facing
Awesome Indies? What would your dream be?

The biggest challenges are getting the website’s existence and value widely known, finding sufficient assessors and volunteers to keep it running smoothly, and dealing with author egos, in particular those who refuse to accept our assessors’ opinions as valid and like to spread their opinions on the matter.

My dream for the Awesome Indies is that it becomes the first place readers go to find indie books, that in people’s minds Awesome Indies Approval equals the kudos of getting a mainstream deal, that it changes the perception of the world as regards to the quality of indie books (as least as far as books listed on the site goes), and that it becomes really popular with the kind of people who usually would only read mainstream books.

 How can readers and writers who value quality indie work support Awesome Indies?

By submitting their book with an administration fee, or by volunteering to help. We have a very good admin team at the moment, but I am always short of qualified assessors and people willing to help spread the word about our existence. What we need more than anything is people who can write blog posts about the Awesome Indies and get them published on influential blogs and newspapers. (I should note that I am a volunteer for Awesome Indies myself — primarily by writing occasional web copy and notification emails to authors.)

As an indie author yourself, what are some of the greatest challenges and opportunities you see facing such authors today?

The biggest challenge is selling your book. A good book does not equal a best-selling book (and vice versa), and great authors are often not natural salespeople. The very nature of indie books is that many of them are so not mainstream that they only have a small niche market — at least at present. Finding the readers for unusual books is not easy, and selling few books can be soul-destroying for authors of truly great works with enormous literary merit. But so long as a book has some kind of independent professional assessment like Awesome Indies Approval, then the author can at least know that the problem is not with the book. Without that, the indie author can never be sure.

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The greatest opportunity indie authors have is that we can publish what we want, when and how we want. There is nothing to stop our creativity going in whatever direction we want it to — so long as we aren’t concerned about making a living. But with that freedom comes a great responsibility: to do it in a professional way. If the majority of us can do that, then eventually the stigma attached to indie publishing will fade.

Tell us about your new release, THE LOCKSMITH’S SECRET, including what inspired it.

THE LOCKSMITH’S SECRET is a multi-narrative-strand novel about a woman who finds that her boyfriend is not who she thought he was, and she finds herself having to choose between him and her beloved property in the Australian rain forest — a situation that challenges her ability to live up to her Buddhist ideals. The story looks at sexual abuse, women’s rights, and the various aspects of a person that make up their sense of self, including dreams, memories, past lives, creative expression and metaphysical experiences. The themes are explored from these different angles, one of which is a steampunk murder mystery that the protagonist Ella, an author, is writing.

What inspired it? My stories just appear vividly in my mind, playing out like movies. I can’t pinpoint any particular inspiration, though the image of a locksmith creating keys for inter-dimensional doors in an otherwise deserted ethereal city of transparent buildings floating in space was the image that drove me to fill in the story around it.

01The_Locksmiths_SecretwebAbout THE LOCKSMITH’S SECRET

Ella’s locksmith boyfriend Jamie seems to be her perfect match, at least until a death in the family calls him back to England. While he’s gone, Ella discovers he’s hiding something so astounding that it completely changes her perception of him and his place in her world.

While Jamie struggles with family responsibilities, Ella’s steampunk murder mystery develops a life of its own, raising disturbing memories of her time as a striptease artist and a past life as a sexually abused Italian nun. She also dreams of an ephemeral city, where she seeks to unravel the locksmith’s secret and find the key that opens a door to other realities.

All these, together with a lost brother, a desperate mother, a demanding cat, and a struggle to live up to Buddhist ideals, weave together in a rich tapestry that creates an extraordinary work of magical realism.

Intrigued? Learn more about THE LOCKSMITH’S SECRET at:

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Being white, writing black: An interview with Cori Tadrus

Cori Tadrus

Cori Tadrus

Sandra Hutchison interviews Cori Tadrus, author of “Flawed Happiness,” a novel about a biracial woman’s struggles to get past perfectionism and find happiness.

Cori, I remember when I first met you over email, via a third party, it was about an editing project we didn’t end up working on together. You described the work to me, and I felt compelled to tell you that I hadn’t actually read much urban fiction, and I wasn’t black. You then surprised me by telling me you were not black either, although you certainly did read a lot of fiction with multicultural characters. What specifically led you to want to write from this point of view?

I’ve been exposed to a great deal of diversity from the time I was a child. The neighborhood and inner city school system in which I was raised was comprised of people from various races, cultures, and economic classes. My friends all looked different, talked different, and lived in different circumstances. I witnessed, and became conscious of, all kinds of false stereotypes long before I graduated high school. And because of this, I believe, I’ve always gravitated to multiculturalism, from friendships to education (my degree is in cultural anthropology and African-American studies) and employment (I worked for many years as a refugee case worker).

There’s also this inherent part of me that seeks to question the status quo, to look at things like history, popular culture, and current events from differing perspectives. So, when I started writing my manuscript, it didn’t feel natural to write my protagonist, or any of my characters for that matter, from simply a “white perspective.” It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision either; I saw Athena as a biracial woman in my mind, so that’s the cultural identity I gave her.

Given how the country reacted to the outing of Rachel Dolezal, an NAACP chapter leader, as white – and her subsequent resignation — do you worry about readers being offended that you are not African American?

The thought didn’t occur to me at all during the first draft of the book, as my intention in the beginning was simply to lose myself in the writing process and live vicariously through Athena and her experiences. I was seeking the answers to my own happiness through this character’s journey, and it unfolded in such a way that I didn’t know where the story was going to end until it did just that.

When I finished the first draft and started considering publishing is when I began to think about whether my story would strike the reader as inauthentic because my main character is half-black, and I’m not.

FlawedHappinessI kept coming back to the fact, though, that unless an author is penning a memoir, there will always be some element of distance and fictionalization when creating a character (even when speaking to such basic characteristics such as gender, age, etc).

With this, many of the characters in the book are based on my own friends and acquaintances, on how we communicate with each other and our tastes in fashion and music, so I was conscious throughout the editing process of ensuring that their qualities were reflected and not stereotyped.

Sometimes, there is a fine line there, especially when writing dialogue, so I recruited beta readers of different ethnicities, as well as a professional editor/author who is a woman of color, to read the manuscript and provide feedback to exactly this point.

In regard to Rachel Dolezal: Unlike her, I’m not purposefully misrepresenting my ethnicity. My photograph, in which I am clearly Caucasian, appears on my book cover, website, and all of my social media pages. I hope that no one would be offended that, as a white woman, I chose to have diverse characters in my novel, or that my main character’s biracial identity does not mirror my own. If I were touting the book as nonfiction, or addressed issues such as racism and white privilege in the plot, then of course that would be a different story.

A UK author named Nikesh Shukla recently posted what he called a “provocation” that says “…if we want true diversity in books, white people need to write about non-white people. It’s not just my responsibility, as an author of colour, to write about my people…” He had already pointed out that “every character in every film and novel was white unless they had to do something ethnic.” He wants to see white people writing about ethnic people as just normal instead of “the other,” instead of exotic. I take it you agree with him? Would have you have any other insights here?

Yes, I absolutely agree with Mr. Shukla’s points, especially in reference to the notion of tokenism in contemporary literature and film. It seems that many times, a person of color isn’t simply another character in the story; rather their “Blackness” or “Indianness,” etc., is somehow relevant to the plot as a whole. I’d really love to see more authors, especially in the mainstream, incorporate more diversity into their writing, without feeling the need to justify doing so.

Personally, I’ve always been drawn to fiction that is classified as either multicultural (like “The Joy Luck Club”) or African-American (like “Waiting to Exhale”) for the very reason that so much of the entertainment we consume in the US is from a majority perspective. I find it interesting to read a story written from a different viewpoint. Yet even reading within these genres, I don’t think I’ve ever found a book that speaks to my experience as an individual who came up in a multicultural, urban environment.I mean, in 2015, how unique could this perspective possibly be?

Where are all the novels, especially in women’s fiction, with girlfriend characters that are not all of the same color, or sexual orientation, or physical ability, without their being an explicit reason or message behind their differences? Even though it wasn’t a conscious decision on my part to write a culturally diverse novel, I think that deep down I sought to write the book that I couldn’t find on the mainstream shelves.

I notice that your debut novel was published by a small press. How did that happen, and what would you say are the pros and cons of that experience?

When I decided to pursue publishing, I did as many new authors with stars in their eyes do and queried only the top literary agents and publishing companies. Then, after rejection letters and reality began to roll in, I shifted my approach to researching small presses that would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown such as myself. That’s when I came across a local, indie company accepting manuscripts from previously unpublished authors. After a few months of emailing back and forth, I had a publishing contract in hand.

In my experience, the benefit of working with a small press is primarily the structure and education they bring to the table. Their team edits, designs, and distributes the book on your behalf, and as someone with no prior knowledge of the publishing industry, this was the most appealing factor in my decision to go this route.

When considering self-publishing, I was overwhelmed by the choices I would have to make as far as who to hire for each step in the process, as well as the financial liability this would incur. Although traditional publishing (at least by a small press) has proven to not be inexpensive, as the cost of marketing (for which, most of time, the author assumes primary responsibility) has not been offset by the royalties earned on book sales.

This is to be expected, especially with a debut novel, but honestly, it can be trying to relinquish both a lack of control and cash flow with a project you have put so much of yourself into. Overall, I wouldn’t encourage or discourage an author from traditional over self-publishing; it comes down to which path best suites your needs, goals, and personality.

A big thank you to Cori for taking the time to do this, especially when she’s expecting her second child literally any moment now! You can find her book at most online retailers.

Buy “Flawed Happiness,” a National Indies Award finalist, at these retailers:
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More about Cori Tadrus

Born and raised in Syracuse, NY, Cori Tadrus spent most of her twenties working as a refugee case worker by day and a bartender by night. Eventually she decided it was time to get a 9-5 job that paid the bills and pursued a career in finance, but it left her feeling uninspired. She found respite in writing a story about a character named Athena who, like her, was seeking a more fulfilled life. Then Cori married an active duty army officer. When she was nine months pregnant with her first child, she left her job to join him in his travels. With change came perspective, and the ability to look inside of herself to discover what she truly wanted to be: an author. Cori is expecting her second child any day now, and continues to write.

Addition 9/6/15: Want some tools to help you reflect diversity in your fiction in a respectful manner? Check out this great round-up from literary Agent Carly Watters.