We all have a different view on what we do, how and why… regardless of our profession or our personal path. Author Roger Colby shares his personal perspective on his writing…

As an independent author, I am often asked why I decided to become a writer, why I decided to be independent and how I promote myself without breaking the bank. The answers to these questions will hopefully be enlightening to Sue Vincent’s blog followers, as most of you are writers as well.

I have been a writer since my sophomore year of high school, a year when my life was fairly without direction, when I enrolled in a high school creative writing course. I wrote tons of horror stories at a time when my life was less spiritual and more full of teenage angst. Over time I have matured as a writer (I hope) and now write science fiction with a Christian bent, much as C.S. Lewis did with his Out of the Silent Planet trilogy. I am drawn to writing because I believe everyone is given some type of spiritual gift that they can use to further the kingdom. Mine is writing. My stories are not blatantly sharing the Gospel, but hopefully they are designed to create a framework by which a reader can search the scriptures. I am subtle, but not too subtle that the story is ruined. People like to read a good story, and that is what I try to provide. Writing is an art, and it is perfected with practice, practice, practice. I currently enjoy a small army of readers who are still buying my books. Some of them have seen the spiritual messages hiding between the lines of my novels, and for that I am grateful to God. I am thankful that I have a wife and four children who understand that an hour or so a day is “daddy’s writing time” and I love them for that.

I became an indie writer because I realized that the traditional model for publishing is a dinosaur. There is a glass ceiling which is guarded by agents who may or may not ever see your manuscript, especially if it is packed away on a mail cart where an intern is busy thumbing through the stack while texting their friends that “this job is so boring”. Getting picked up by an agent today is like winning the lottery, with over 300,000 new books published every year. I am a self-made guy. My books are published through Amazon and I own the ISBN’s, the copyright and the label. I enjoy the challenge of getting my books out there, and my books get good reviews. I do not ask friends or family to review my books. The reviews are by honest folks who thankfully read my books and reviewed them. I am not in any way a best seller, but those writers are lottery winners. I have little victories, and these sustain me.

The truth is, I actually enjoy a decent readership, but this has taken much hard work and thankfully very little money. I am, by trade, an English teacher in a public high school in Oklahoma (49th in teacher pay), so obviously I cannot afford much in the way of paid advertising. I utilize Twitter not for spamming my books, but for engagement. Since I have been doing this (engaging others) my Twitter followers have steadily increased. I use CrowdFire to weed out the Twitter followers who are not active, who are spammers, who are trying to sell me “a million followers”, and to send a nice message to new followers to check out my blog where they can find my books. I have used Wattpad for my latest work in progress, publishing the first three chapters for critique from those who read it. Apparently I’m doing pretty well with it because I have some very constructive comments, and I listen to them. The way we increase our readership is through making the readers feel like they are part of something. If they get to criticize a work before it is published, then see those changes in the text, they are more apt to buy it and to tell their friends about it…who will then buy it.

I am due to release a new series of novels set in a future where the human race is nearly extinct. It is a morality play of sorts, and is also symbolic. It is about the last human in the universe and his quest to find hope. It has crazy action, strange sci-fi ships and weapons, funny banter, broken tropes, and a hero who is flawed and at first hard to love. The series is called The Five Rims and the first book The Last Terran is due out in June. I’ll do the usual book signings, the usual blogging, the usual meet-and-greet as a guest speaker/panelist at the local science fiction convention. The point is that I will keep at it, as you should keep at it.

Don’t quit writing. Don’t give up. Don’t stop trusting God. It is only by His grace that I have come this far, and I know He has great plans for the future.

Roger Colby is an independent novelist, author of the science-fiction novels The Transgression Box, This Broken Earth, and Come Apart. He writes a weekly blog over at http://writingishardwork.com. You can follow him on Twitter @RogerDColby. You can find his Amazon author page here: http://www.amazon.com/Roger-Colby/e/B006MOLSTA/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1429975271&sr=1-1