The Novel Is Dead. Long Live the Novel.

How independent authors are reinventing long-form fiction—and why you should too.

I was recently a guest on the Scifi4Me podcast, and we got into a conversation about something I see constantly among indie authors: we left traditional publishing, but traditional publishing hasn’t left us.

What I mean by that is so many independent authors are still asking for permission.

“Is it okay if I…” is a common sentence when I first talk to my editing clients. What do you mean, “is it okay?”

The sense of disempowerment is endemic, which is the opposite of what independence is meant to bring. You don’t need to beg Amazon’s algorithm for permission to be discovered or go down a checklist of genre conventions to tell the story you actually want to tell. You certainly don’t need to ask the ghost of some literary agent who rejected you years ago for permission to believe your work has value.

We internalized rules that were never ours.