Indie author Rachel McLean on the steep learning curve of self-publishing

The pandemic had a profound and disruptive effect on many people’s lives; for Rachel McLean it entirely changed the course of her career.

The author had been self-publishing since 2017, mostly political and dystopian thrillers with “nice reviews and poor sales” and when 2020 rolled around she still had her day job. McLean says: “I was a freelance technical writer and getting bored with it. I wanted to double down on learning how to really make a success of publishing so I looked at other indie authors, including LJ Ross and JD Kirk, looked at what the overall market was like. And there was a huge appetite for crime. I was already writing suspense so there wasn’t too much of a shift. And when I started writing crime I really enjoyed it, but needed to be more focused on what reader expectations were and have a better understanding of the genre.”

So she buckled down and studied through lockdown, reading other crime writers voraciously and writing in her makeshift office (a campervan parked in the front drive of her Birmingham home). In July 2020, she self-published Deadly Wishes, her first procedural starring West Midlands Police DI Zoe Finch. And it took off: two more Finch titles followed in the autumn and by Christmas 2020 McLean was making enough money to concentrate full-time on books.

That tipping point of success was down to craft and graft, McLean says: “Those years spent writing books that people didn’t read weren’t wasted – I was learning, I was getting better, it was a good training ground. But the [pre-Zoe Finch] titles had a ceiling. When my procedurals started reaching a bigger audience, I was able to invest more in advertising. What I did was target my ads to teach Amazon what kind of reader would want to read my books. So Amazon then started recommending my books to people – and that’s when it really took off. Ninety percent of my sales weren’t attributable to my own advertising or marketing: it was Amazon.”

Kindle lights a fire

Once McLean got to that full-time indie author level she did not plateau, she stepped up. She launched two new series under her own steam, with Dorset Crime and Glasgow-set McBride & Tanner. McLean further expanded her output under a James Patterson-esque model with two co-authors: Joel Hames in Cumbria Crime (Hames also edits her other titles) and Millie Ravensworth, with whom McLean writes the London Cosy and Lyme Regis Women’s Swimming Club books. All the titles are linked in a sort of Rachel McLean Cinematic Universe: the Dorset series’ lead is DI Finch’s ex-boss DCI Lesley Clarke, Finch’s sidekick DS Mo Uddin moves to Scotland at the beginning of the McBride & Tanner titles, and so on.

The Dorset Crime books jump-started this next phase. The impetus for the setting was mainly that McLean loves the area and her family have been visiting it since she was a child.

Those years spent writing books that people didn’t read weren’t wasted – I was learning, I was getting better, it was a good training ground.

(When we talk, McLean is in the middle of a research trip near the Jurassic Coast.) “I was worried about the Dorset series, it felt like a really big risk to move to a new set of characters in a new location, when my [Birmingham-set] Finch books were doing really well. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made – so many people know and love Dorset, they pick up the books when they are on holiday down here.”

It also helped immeasurably that the series opener, The Corfe Castle Murders, won the 2021 Kindle Storyteller Award. McLean says: “It was a huge publicity boost, but you also get an Amazon marketing campaign, which as an indie author gives you access to parts of the store that you normally can’t really get into unless you’re a large publisher. Amazon ran that campaign, which doubled my sales the month after the award; it gave me some real momentum.”

The Storyteller gong was life-changing in another way: she met her wife there. At the ceremony, a mutual friend introduced McLean to another Birmingham-based writer, and the two would marry more than a year later.

Roger that

With the increased output, McLean ramped up Ackroyd Publishing, her self-publishing imprint (the name is a nod to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), which she set up immediately after she became an indie author. Ackroyd started with one assistant – “I initially asked my wife if she wanted to come into the business with me and she refused; that probably saved our marriage” – and a few years later there is a core of 10 people, along with other freelancers and contributors.

McLean says: “Like a lot of indie authors I’ve always hired external people for things like editing, proofreading and design. But I went to an event with a very successful self-publisher, who was making six or seven-figures, about how she had split her business into all of the different skills and activities, and then hired for each of those. That got me thinking about things that caused me the most headaches – one was managing the publishing schedule; I have a terrible memory and was always missing due dates. And I simply thought: ‘I can do this. I can build a team.’”

One of the team, Simon Fairbanks, is tasked to be Ackroyd’s bricks-and-mortar shop liaison, both with titles Ackroyd supplies directly via wholesaler Gardners and the print deal for the Dorset Crime series McLean has with Canelo’s Hera imprint. McLean says: “It is funny we have someone who talks directly with shops at a time big publishers are getting rid of those jobs. But bookshop sales have become a much more important part of our business. LJ Ross did a lot to really change the attitudes about indie authors getting into shops and Hera has been brilliant in introducing us to booksellers. And we have a great relationship with Gardners but it took some convincing at first. When I intially met them a couple of years ago they said they really didn’t deal directly with indie authors. Then I showed them my Kindle sales and they said: ‘Maybe we can work something out.’”

It does beg the question whether the conglomerates have come calling, and would she ever consider a full traditional deal. “I’ve had some conversations,” McLean says. “But generally, I would always want to hold on to my e-book and audiobooks rights, because I know how to get into those markets. And I do like dealing more directly with readers for print. It’s not about the money, really, it’s about the autonomy. It’s about being able to write the characters that I write and the locations that I write, in the way that I want to.”