Next Year’s Halloween Costume Will Make a Statement

Halloween is past us now and that’s a shame. Not because I want more leftover trick-or-treater candy to munch on, but because I just thought of the perfect costume. Really, it’s a truly inspired costume, based on my experience over the past year as an indie author.

This Halloween I should have dressed as an ATM. But I should have told everyone I was dressed as an indie author. Because that’s how being an indie author makes you feel—like a walking ATM. Who knew?

Well, probably other indie authors knew, but no one shared that information with me, so I had to learn it the hard way. I knew that creating, publishing, and marketing a book was gonna be hard. (Oddly enough, the creating of the book is not the hardest part, although it should be, but that’s a subject for another blog post.) I knew publishing was a very competitive industry—one where you face extraordinary odds. And I knew that being an indie author meant I was going it alone. I suspected I would feel vulnerable.

What I didn’t know was that there’s a whole cottage industry out there of people who prey on indie authors precisely because we are vulnerable. And, they probably presume, we are desperate.

Unfortunately, being vulnerable and potentially desperate makes you a target for all sorts of sharks who see you (and the extraordinary odds you are up against) as a very convenient way to withdraw money. Your money.

They come at you from a variety of alleged positions—they are everything from marketing professionals to folks who run book clubs to adamant readers, even other authors. And they offer you a plethora of services—from search engine optimization to advertising to getting you “authentic” reader reviews. And, thanks to the magic of AI, they have the ability to sound like they know what they are talking about even when, later, it becomes very apparent that they don’t know squat. Except, perhaps, how to withdraw from the indie-author ATM.

The worst ones, by far, are those who claim to be interested in your book. Some of them even pose as successful authors who happened upon your book and just want to know about your “author journey.” If I had sold a book every time someone messaged me on social media asking about my “author journey” I’d actually be able to afford to take a trip. But you don’t have to converse with these alleged authors for long before it becomes clear that what they’re really interested in is your money. It’s humbling, to say the least.

Since we have just celebrated Thanksgiving, I guess I can say that one of the things I’m thankful for this year is that I wasn’t taken in by any of these scams. Annoyed, yes. But not taken in.

I guess I’ll save my inspired Halloween costume idea until next year. That’s for the best, because an ATM costume will require a big cardboard box, and it’ll probably take me a while to find one. Maybe I’ll need to buy a large kitchen appliance over the next year. Our fridge sometimes sounds like it’s constipated, so maybe it’s on its way out. Our clothes washer backed up recently, so maybe it will die too. We’ll see. And once I’m dressed as an ATM, I can hand out those little chocolate candies that are wrapped in gold foil to look like coins.

Yeah, an indie author dressed as an ATM handing out little chocolate candy coins will make a real statement. Not one that any trick-or-treaters will get, but at least it’ll make me feel better.

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