The Full-Stack Writer
Taking stock of everything an indie author needs to succeed.
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Two years ago, I decided to stop waiting for the approval of gatekeepers to put my writing directly out into the world. This came after eight or nine years of aspirational and professional writing, including four years in a university screenwriting program and several sales in comics and TV. I’m so, so happy, and I would never go back to pure querying. I really would recommend it, with a few conditions.
The toughest part is deciding when to start, because you don't want to jump your own gun. You need both broad skills and fundamental chops to make it worthwhile. You need a voice. Personally, I think I chose to make this switch to being a ‘full-stack writer’ at exactly the correct time in my own development. I was twenty-six, a few years out of school, and had been employed as a writer full-time for a couple of years. I had developed and honed my style over a few million words of completed manuscripts and screenplays. I was no longer at the beginning. Instead, I was at the beginning of the middle, and it was time to connect with an audience at a higher bandwidth than the gatekeepers would allow. As
says, “Go direct.”Of the three novel manuscripts I wrote and queried before I made this transition, I’ve now published one, Komodo, and I’m very proud of it. The other two I don’t plan on publishing, at least not for now. They are both young adult fiction. One was my very first novel, and I’m glad to not have it out there, because it was a fledgling effort full of bold ideas but lacking in some of the technique I’ve picked up along the way. The other I fully stand behind as representative of my skill. In screenplay form, it’s actually won a number of awards, and the external validation of these awards is part of what convinced me that my voice and level of craftsmanship were mature enough for me to be able to publish without a gatekeeper and not completely embarrass myself.
That said, I don’t really believe in publishing children’s fiction without a publishing house as gatekeeper. This is for the same reason I don’t believe children should have unfettered access to the internet. There’s a rawness, a danger, to reading independent work. I think children deserve to be raised on a curated canon, safe for their minds, chosen either by the test of time or by guardians or educators. For that reason, I’m not interested in publishing children’s literature as a full-stack writer at this moment.
I say ‘full-stack writer’ as in full-stack developer, a software engineer who can handle the entirety of a website or app’s development, both front-end and back-end, by himself. If you are going to be truly independent, you have no team beyond the team you build. You must either outsource or learn how to perform for yourself every support role that traditional publishing provides.
The roles you must fill, broadly, are: manager, agent, author, editor, typesetter, graphic designer, publicist, and personality. If you publish independently or plan to in the future, take a look at yourself and see how you measure up. Each one is worth its own evaluation. Each one is costly to neglect.
Manager
A manager guides you on what to write and whether it’s a wise idea. In full-stack terms, this could just be the voice of your own superego telling you to do or not do something. The manager is receptive to outside feedback and aware of your brand and guides you in the right direction. If you’re not up to doing this yourself, you could substitute a friend or a fellow author who’s willing to kindly give you the time of day.
Agent
An agent negotiates deals. Platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing or IngramSpark, though, do not leave much room for negotiation. They set terms you can either accept or deny. The same thing is true of Substack. You accept the terms and conditions and you post. Still, one must have enough of a head on one’s shoulders to negotiate deals when need be, and to follow platform terms of service. If you don’t feel capable of doing this, and a deal is put forth, you should probably hire an entertainment lawyer to help you.
Author
The author is one of two of these roles you can’t outsource. If you’re not going to be the author, what’s the point? You would be creating some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a brand. The whole virtue of grinding away in this trade would be rendered null. There are no shortcuts here, not AI, not ghostwriters. If you want to be the writer, you have to actually write.
Editor
Editors can be split into many different types. There are developmental editors who help you fix story structure. There are copy editors and line editors who help you with minutiae, grammar, and syntax. You need all of this, either from yourself or from an outsider. For me, I know I’m not going to be perfect, but my goal is to get 99% of the way there by my own hand. To that end, I’ve read the entire Chicago Manual of Style 17, and keep it close by as I go through my own work. It helps that I have an inordinate hobbyist interest in grammar rules for their own sake. If you don’t have this passion or the discipline to be your own editor, whether high-level or low-level, you need to find someone else to do this for you.
Typesetter
Typesetting, if you’re publishing for web, is pretty basic. Substack makes it foolproof, and it corrects a lot of sins when you import a document over. When it comes to print or Kindle, it’s a little trickier. I’ve read a handful of wonderful independent books that were marred by a bad physical experience, whether that be improper margins or awkward type or something else. If you’re going to be publishing long-form work, you need to make sure it’s typeset properly, or again hire someone to do it.
If you’re doing it yourself, some recommend software like Vellum to foolproof the process, and while I personally prefer Microsoft Word it is probably worth it for you to do some exploration.
Graphic Designer
Graphic design is all the branding of your work. This could be the profile picture of your Substack, or it could be the front, back, and spine of your novel. I call it graphic design instead of art or illustration because I want to stress that you don’t actually need imagery of things in the conventional sense to have a successful brand. You just need a visual identity, and this can be completely typographic.
Once again, it comes down to your priorities. Do you want to learn this yourself, or do you want to hire out? A big factor comes down to how much you think you’ll enjoy the process. If it’s going to be like pulling teeth, you’re better off sticking to the writing and outsourcing the graphics (ideally not to ChatGPT or anything else with a disdained giveaway ‘look’). If you think you have a knack, learning it yourself could be rewarding and economical.
Publicist
Publicity is a tricky one. It’s mercurial and it’s not very public. Basically, it comes down to formal communication designed to get people reading and talking about your book. This involves optimizing blurbs and soliciting author quotes and going through the motions to send out advance reader copies. It also involves being polite to the right people to get whatever trades are relevant to review your work, ideally favorably.
I would be wary of hiring out for this at an independent level, because it’s hard to make sure whoever you pay is actually worth their salt—although I will say that Vera PR has done a good job with my upcoming novel, Scenebux. While good publicists like those at Vera exist, they can be costly, and my suggestion at the indie level would be to put in at least a little effort to do it yourself.
Personality
The last one, personality, is the other one of two you can’t possibly fake. There’s no point in hiring someone to run your social media or pretend to be you at a bookstore. You actually just have to engage with your public.
It’s best not to overthink this. Just do it in the way that comes naturally to you. You want to be where the people who read books like yours hang out. You don’t want to violate the rules, either spoken or unspoken, of the space you’re occupying. You don’t want to be ‘that guy’ and come off too promotional, like the dude who slid his ugly mug into my Substack DMs this morning with a form letter about how ‘my audience’ would surely love his story. Just be present, and be yourself, and let the passive marketing that comes out of being well-known do the work.
So, we have our roles. The scope is clear. We're not just writing anymore, we're running a whole team, either of actual people or of our own split personalities. It's a ton of work! So why did I decide to start bypassing the gatekeepers and get into this uphill grind, if I really do respect the idea of a gatekeeper in the first place? For me, it comes down to feedback pace and cultural urgency.
Traditional publishing often takes years to bring a novel to market. This is bad for the author’s development, because it lengthens the size of the feedback loop of writing and response. If you’ve got a direction you want to go in and you’re not sure whether it’s going to be a hit, doing it through traditional publishing is going to take years of your life. With quicker, more agile independent publishing, you can get much more relevant feedback in a much shorter amount of time.
As for cultural urgency, being on social media the past couple of years has led me to realize the discourse moves quite quickly. This may be less important if you write work that’s primarily evergreen, but, for me, I consider both my short- and long-form work to be a response to the state of the conversation. I’m looking at the world and what my peers are saying, and I want to throw in my opinion. With independent publishing, I can do this in a way that’s timely. I can reply to current events in a matter of months, not years. That can be the difference between a zeitgeist moment and a dud.
The biggest downside to all this is that you risk embarrassing yourself, putting out amateur work you one day won't be proud of. For that reason, I urge you to be cautious. Really candidly think through your own level of ability before proceeding with independent publishing. Be honest with yourself about how your writing is typically received. Then proceed accordingly.
The gatekeeper is there to curate work for the reader, but they’re also there to save you from yourself. If you think you can ride without the guardrails, then by all means come out and let’s ride together. There's a lot of fun to be had when you're good and brave.
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