Sarah Neofield

I have wanted to be an author ever since I can remember. When I started school, my class was tasked with creating fabric representations of ourselves in the future for a quilt. I created a rather detailed rendition of myself as an author, painstakingly drawing in all of the individual pages in the stack of books my future self had apparently written. Unfortunately, one of the mums helping the class deemed it 'too fiddly' to cut out of cotton, and suggested something easier, like a checkout operator at Target instead.
As things go, I didn't end up working at Target (which is probably a good thing, considering the only Target in my hometown closed down!). But I did end up writing a book. Several, actually. After completing my PhD in Linguistics, I wrote and edited a number of academic books, book chapters, and journal articles. While I still love research, my heart still lie with fiction, which was why, after a number of years of hard-core saving and investing, when my husband and I finally quit our jobs to travel the world, I returned to my first love, creative writing.
As for why I became an indie author specifically... Like many authors, I began by sending my manuscript out to publishers. I knew I didn't want to send my work to a large publisher from the start, but I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of even a small publisher having control over my work as time went on. While I completely respect the work of those in the publishing industry, I wanted to write something a bit different. It was a feeling I'd experienced before, and I knew that I had to be brave and go down the indie path.

Coming across Smashwords and reading Mark Coker's books and blog posts about the philosophy behind the platform was like a breath of fresh air. The publishing industry has undergone a lot of change in the past couple of decades. Some of these transformations have been wonderful for both readers and writers, like the growing acceptance of ebooks. Others have been disastrous - like the price fixing of electronic editions, restrictive digital rights management that doesn't respect user's rights, and publishers penalising libraries that try to make books more accessible. Big names in big publishing have attacked the quality of indie work in the press, all the while cutting marketing and even editing budgets for the books they produce, which means either bigger costs for authors, or a worse product for readers.
Smashwords provides a way for authors to get their work into the big online stores in a way that doesn't require them to have a whole team of assistants, and which respects the rights of the readers, allowing authors to offer their books to libraries, and to make them DRM free.