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The following is a transcript of a free podcast interview with April Hamiltoninterviewed by Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn

.Click here to access the free audio. The Creative Penn podcast has over 50 free audio interviewson writing, publishing options, internet marketing andpromotion for your book. It is aimed at authors, writers andpeople interested in books and publishing.You can see the fullbacklist of podcasts by clicking here. You can also Click here to subscribe on iTunes. Hi everyone. This is Joanna Penn for the Creative Penn

podcast and today I’m interviewing

April Hamilton. April is the author of several books including The Indie

Author Guide. She’s a blogger and an outspoken advocate

for the inde author movement. April was also the founderof Publetariat.com,a site for indie authors as well the Publetariat Vault matching self published authors withagents, and the Vault University. So, welcome April.AH: Thank you.JP:

Oh, it’s great to have yo

u here be

cause you’re so active on the blogosphere and

with your writing and everything.

So, for those that don’t know you can you

give a brief roundup of your writing and publishing experience because I

hear you’re soon to be published by Writer’s Digest a

s well as self publishing?

AH:

Yes. I’ve been writing pretty much since I’ve been old enough to hold a crayon.

I dreamed of being an author as a girl but

it didn’t seem like a very practical or

clear cut career path so I pursued other options for making a living. I was atechnical writer, then a software engineer and a web developer for many years and

that’s turned out to serve me very well now that authors are expected to develop a

platform and be web savvy. As for publishing, I have two self published novelsin print and e-book editions and also two non fiction books. One of the nonfiction books as you mentioned, The Indie Author Guide,is a comprehensive reference to self publishing and managing a career in indie authorship. The rightsto that book have been picked up by Writer

’

s Digest Books for publication in arevised and updated edition coming out this fall.

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JP:

That’s fantastic, and maybe you could just mention there about Publetariat a bitmore and what you’ve been doing with that side.

AH: Okay.Publetariat

was launched almost exactly a year ago. We’ll be celebrating

our one year anniversary February 11

and it was founded as a site specificallygeared to self publishing or as I call them indie authors and small imprints.Because while there are lot of sites out there geared to writers in general, in my

experience as an indie author I found that they’re tended to be quite a bit of bias

and stigma against the self published authors at some of the those other writersites which were really mostly populated by people interested in pursuing atraditional publication path. So, I started Publetariat as a site that would have all the same resources and features as any full featured writer community site butspecifically geared to indie authors and their specific needs and interest.JP:

And it’s a great site so I’ll put some links to that. So, I guess we hooked up about

a year ago and started chatting then, and self publishing has come a long way Iguess in the last year and in the last couple of years.

So, is that stigma stillapplicable for self publishing and how has, I guess, self publishing changed?

AH: Well things have changed so much just in the two years since I self published The

Indie Author Guide it’s kind of mind boggling. The stigma h

as been there intrade publishing against self publisher for decades, yet just in the past year thelevel of mainstream acceptance of self publishing at least here in the U.S., has

increased dramatically. We’re seeing very successful, mainstream published

authors such as Stephen R. Covey, he’s the Seven Habits guy,

author legend PiersAnthony and crime novelist J. A. Konrath, self publishing and being very openabout it. Konrath is a particularly surprising case because he was very vocal as ananti self publishing author as recently as 2008.[Konrath subsequently signedwith Amazon Encore for his latest novel].

So, he’s kind of turned around andthat’s

come as a big surprise to me. However, this is all happening in the U.S.and I understand from a contact in the Netherlands that the anti self publishingbias is still very strong in Europe and you would probably know better than I whatthe situation is in Australia.JP:

Yeah. I think with a much smaller market here there’s a lot of protectionism of

the industry but the rest of us just get on with it I think as

you’ve been doing.That’s interesting and you say about

Joe Konrath cause I read on this blog that heactually pays his mortgage from Kindle sales and makes more money from hisself published books.AH: Yes, and it seems that in the end it really comes down to dollars and cents and alot of these successful, established mainstream authors are starting to realise theycan earn significantly higher royalties releasing work on their own than they dogoing through a traditional publisher.

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JP: So,

do you thin

k we’re going to see like a Stephen King or a Dan Brown

releasing their own book, self publishing their own book any time soon?

AH:

It’s possible. Stephen King has experimented with self publishing on his web site

in the past, but he was trying to release a self published e-book edition through hisweb site, five years ago at a time when e-books were really in their infancy and itwas not a very successful attempt. I think if he were to do it again today it wouldbe a very different story, but i

t kind of depends on the individual author’s

willingness to experiment. And I think some authors are maybe just verycomfortable in the niche that they have and of course just staying with thepublisher that you have reduces the amount of your own outlay of effort and

energy and so on. So, it’s really a matter of what’s the level of entrepreneurial

spirit of the individual authors.JP:

And we should point out it’s nothing to do with their age because Stephen Covey

and Joe Konrath are not in their twenties

so it’s not just for…

AH: Or no and Piers Anthony is not a young man either. He is definitely a much moremature writer. I mean I was reading his books when I was in junior high school.JP:

No, that’s brilliant. So, these –

some of these questions are things that peoplehave asked me on my survey that I did last year and one of the questions thatcomes up over and over again is,

how does self publishing affect your chancesof getting a publishing contract?

AH: Well, the fact that Writer

’

s Digest Books has picked up my book should be proof enough that self publishing will not prevent an author from being able to land amainstream publishing contract, at least not here in the U.S. There has been a lotof concern over this term known as first publicati

on rights and that’s really kindof a dated concern. According to Jane Friedman who’s the editor

-in-chief at

Writer’s Digest Books, and also has a pretty high position on the magazine staff,

this is a concern that really has no place in the modern trade publishing world. Ithappens all the time that an author will self publish something, it picks up a little

bit of buzz or gets a little bit of sales and the next thing you know it’s being

snapped up by a Penguin or a Simon & Schuster. So, the rights of first

publication, authors really don’t need to worry about that.In the U.S. we’re beginning to see a dynamic here in which this happens pretty

frequently, and when I say that a successful book that has been self published will

be picked up, I don’t mean

selling millions of copies. There are books that havemade top ten lists in the Kindle store, on web sites like Podiobooks or on Smashwords and books which have garnered media attention for some reason thatcome to the attention of these publishers and the rights get picked up. Aspiring

authors see this happening with increasing frequency and they’re beginning to