The Other Jobs You Take When You Go Indie

There’s a version of the writing life people imagine when they hear “author.” A quiet desk. A hot drink. A few clean hours of uninterrupted focus. Words on the page, the story takes shape, the book comes out, readers find it, and you move on to the next one.

Indie publishing is not that version.

Indie publishing is choosing to be an author, and then accidentally hiring yourself for six other jobs.

And the funny part is, you don’t sign up for them in one big decision. They arrive one at a time, each one feeling reasonable on its own. Then one day you look at your calendar and realize you’re running a small company in the cracks between a full-time day job and a family life that already deserves your best energy.

You become a designer, or at least a project manager for design. Covers. Typography. Trim sizes. Audible-friendly square crops. The subtle differences between “looks cool” and “reads instantly at thumbnail size.” You learn more about fonts than you ever expected to learn in this lifetime.

You become a marketing executive, which is a glamorous phrase for trying to answer a question that never really goes away. How do people who would love this book actually find it. That turns into ad experiments, audience guesses, copy tweaks, landing pages, link tracking, and a steady diet of “is this working or am I just feeding the algorithm.”

You become an interviewer, especially if you do audiobooks. You listen for tone, timing, emotional range, and whether a narrator can carry tension without turning every line into a performance. You learn how to talk about a book in the language of voice, pacing, breath, and restraint. You learn that “good voice” and “right voice” are not the same thing.

You become a content creator, which is another phrase that sounds clean until you’re living it. Website updates. Blog posts. Newsletter drafts. Social posts that don’t feel like you’re yelling into the void. Graphics. Pull quotes. Audio snippets. Third-party sites that all want slightly different things and none of them care that you’re doing this after work.

You become tech support. Something always breaks. A link dies. A widget stops rendering. A retailer changes a page layout. An embed script updates. The kind of little problems that can eat an entire evening while your brain keeps whispering, you could be writing right now.

And somehow, through all of this, you still have to be the author.

You still have to protect the part of your life where you sit down and make something out of nothing, because that’s the only part that can’t be outsourced by sheer stubbornness and late nights. The cover can be improved later. The ad copy can be rewritten. The website can be patched. The story, the actual next book, only exists if you give it hours.

That’s the tension indie authors live inside. The work that gets you readers competes with the work that makes the next thing worth reading.

When you’re doing this with a family and a full-time job, it gets even sharper. Your time isn’t “free time.” It’s time you’re borrowing. From sleep. From weekends. From the quiet parts of the day that should probably belong to the people you love, or to your own sanity.

So you learn to get practical.

You learn which tasks actually move the needle, and which ones just feel productive. You learn to build systems so you don’t have to reinvent everything every launch. You learn that some days the best win is writing 300 words and not letting the business side swallow the whole evening.

You also learn something else, and this is the part I didn’t expect.

You learn pride in the messy, unglamorous parts.

Because indie publishing is a lot of extra work, yes. But it’s also ownership. It’s agency. It’s choosing the cover that fits the book, not the cover that fits a committee’s guess. It’s finding the narrator who understands the tone. It’s building a direct path between you and the reader. It’s being close enough to the whole machine that you can change it when it isn’t serving the story.

Some nights it’s exhausting. Some nights it’s thrilling. Most nights it’s both.

And if you’re in the middle of it, juggling the day job, the family, the life, and the quiet insistence that you still want to write, I’ll say the thing that helped me most.

You’re not failing because it feels like a lot.

It is a lot.

You’re doing the author job and the publishing job at the same time. The only way it works is by deciding, again and again, that the story still gets a seat at the table.

And I wouldn’t change a thing. These stories are in my bones now. The thought of not completing the journey doesn’t exist.

—J.A. Raithe