I Wanted Creative Freedom and Then I Had to Make Every Decision Myself

What does “making it” even mean anymore?

For some creators, it’s building something meaningful in the indie space that’s going to help people. For others, it’s using it as a path toward growth, money, and maybe working for a big time publisher. Most of us fall somewhere in between. But regardless of where you’re trying to go or what you’re trying to do, look around for a moment.

Think about every creator standing beside you.

That’s your competition.

Not because they’re bad people. Not because they don’t really support you. But because all of you are competing for the same finite resource: attention.

That’s the hardest truth in all facets of indie publishing. Even in communities built around mutual support, everyone is still fighting to be seen in a relatively small market.

That makes it really easy to buy into the propaganda of what the “finish line” is.

Someone else to handle the marketing, visibility…
Someone else “gets your book out there”…

and you get to go back to working on what you love. Right!?

Then reality shows up with a quick punch to the gut, and we realize in this small industry you can’t just stop working on your own brand, even if you have someone doing everything else.

I’ll never forget a comment I read by a comics “journalist” who exclaimed that we (Band of Bards) didn’t actually promote our releases because the one shop they go to didn’t know about a book that was coming out.

Total valid opinion, but a wild concept. Marketing is hard, and I don’t mean to be judgmental when I say that this journalist has a Youtube channel that’s been active for over a decade, with only 150 subscribers.

Marketing is freaking difficult, but thanks for your opinion, I guess.

I’m not going to tell him that so much of indie marketing is word of mouth, he should know that… it’s his job, but then again these influencers are in it for the views and even once respected news sites are more interested in rage baiting for clicks than doing any real meaningful work.

Who can blame them? In 2026 that’s how you get paid.

The thing with Band of Bards is that we understood how difficult marketing was going to be and built this into the expectation. We made choices that would help the creators we work with. We treated marketing specifically as a “company expense” and we as a publisher considered that spend our responsibility. In turn we didn’t pass along those costs to the creator— in the hopes that their releases would climb out of the hole faster, and they’d get paid quicker.

Note: This was a mistake.

Marketing is hard. It’s like a machine where all of us are cogs, and there is something for everyone to do… you can’t sit idly on social media complaining non-stop about how your project’s sales are bad, if you’re not out there contributing to making the machine work.

And I get it, signing with a publisher should take a lot of work off your plate as a creator. That would be my expectation too, so lets talk about the things I’ve done over my course of time at Band of Bards (to use as nothing more than a cautionary tale).

A publisher like us often helps with:

• Distribution channels

• Printing logistics

• Retail relationships

• Production support

• Sometimes editorial input

Mind you, I did all of these things daily and on weekends for free. Another mistake.

You still need to:

• Build your audience

• Run your social presence

• Find a way to sustain YOUR long-term visibility (You need to and should exist beyond any publishing deal)

People should care about YOU and your project. That can’t just be manufactured, and creating that demand from scratch is hard work.

A publisher helps your book reach places. It does not automatically make people care when it gets there. This was an incredibly hard lesson to learn.

I think there is a fundamental mis-understanding about what it means to work with a publisher regardless of their size. You can only recommend people read “The Peoples Guide to Publishing” from Microcosm Publishing so many times. Its a crash course and the one thing we’ve consistently asked EVERYONE we’ve worked with to read. (Hell, we even made a digital version available in our own Bard Library that our creators could access themselves.)

Can you guess about how many people took the time to read it?

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We made a conscious effort to set expectations, but reality can often hit like a bag of bricks to the face. After all, Band of Bards was ultimately just Tim and myself doing the work of 10+ people, and making the truly difficult decisions day in and day out. Not every choice we were going to make was going to be accepted, and we kind of had to live with that.

We never really worked with big names, we invested our time, money, and energy to try and help build names. It was one of those decisions made early on in the process, that was that we’d invest in the unknown, and relatively unknown creators who we felt were the future of indie comics.

It was an investment in obscurity, not to Farm IP. It also forced us into taking big swings on a lot of creators who didn’t have the reputation to back it up. I don’t really know who else in publishing has ever taken that kind of shot before us, but I’m sure we weren’t the first, and likely won’t be the last.

These interactions and all the work finally builds up to an emotional turning point. From announcement, to the pre-order window shenanigans… it’s a long process that takes over entire months of your life. The excitement builds and builds, and then unceremoniously the sales numbers drip in.

Disappointment, excuses, finger-pointing, and shit talking. Nothing really changes, the “arrival moment” you expected never materializes… and the industry moves on.

It’s easy to blame someone else.

We made mistakes, and some of them were expensive. But if we’re being honest, we also need to acknowledge a larger reality: this industry still struggles to support truly independent creators.

A publisher can amplify existing awareness, audiences, momentum, identity, loyalty, and recognition. What they can’t reliably do is create those things from nothing.

Creators still need to be building a recognizable voice, a consistent presence, and some level of audience trust. In modern indie publishing, you’re not just selling a book, you’re lighting a beacon to signal that the book is worth noticing. A traditional publisher can help your book reach stores, retailers, reviewers, and readers, but they can’t manufacture demand where none exists (I sound like a broken record now). That’s a failure of the industry; and it’s simply the reality of a crowded market where everyone is competing for that little bit of attention.

Our biggest mistake in this instance was thinking that we could do it differently and create change, while everyone fought back against it. (We’ll talk about that more in the future.)

The gap that exists between visibility and demand is where most indie projects die, and closing that gap remains one of the hardest challenges in indie anything.

Band of Bards was built around the belief that unknown creators deserved these opportunities. We intentionally invested in people without large audiences, established reputations, or industry recognition. That is the challenge we took on.

Not your publisher. Not the distributor. Not the retailer. You.

Most readers don’t wake up wondering what Band of Bards, Ahoy!, Dark Horse, or any other publisher released this week. They discover a creator sharing their work online, remember a convention conversation, a recommendation from a friend, or a post on instagram that happened to catch their attention.

The path usually starts with a person and only later arrives at the book.

That’s why creators need to exist beyond their publisher.

A publishing deal should be a tool that helps accelerate your journey, not the foundation your entire existence is built upon.

Unfortunately, some creators never use that opportunity. They hand off the book, assume someone else will handle all the marketing and visibility, and they stop investing in themselves. Then when the publisher relationship ends (or the publisher closes, changes direction, or simply can’t provide the level of support they expected) they discover they never really built a connection with readers in the first place.

The creators who survive long-term are the ones who understand that their audience belongs to neither a platform nor a publisher. It belongs to the trust they’ve built over time.

Your book may be a product, but long before that, and hopefully long after you are the thing people choose to pay attention to.

Getting a publisher doesn’t mean you stop building your own audience. The book doesn’t sell itself simply because it exists, and the publisher is just one of the bridges between the two.

You try to create opportunities, open doors, provide infrastructure, and help put work in front of people. But somebody still has to give readers a reason to care enough to walk through that door.

I think that’s the rub. Every contract we offered carried an expectation that we were going to work just as hard as the creator to help make that project successful. I’ve read plenty of complaints about indie publishers not caring as much as creators do, and I’m sure that experience exists. There are bad actors in every corner of publishing.

But I can also point to projects where we invested thousands of dollars, countless hours, convention weekends, marketing campaigns, retailer outreach, and personal energy trying to help books find an audience, and the creative teams didn’t want to be a part of it at all.

The reality is that both sides enter into a relationship that is supposed to be mutually beneficial, but not everyone arrives with the same expectations, resources, or understanding of what success actually requires you to do.

I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s the established reality of publishing, especially at the independent level. The doors can open and create possibilities, but we cannot replace the work of becoming someone readers want to follow.

Good publishers create opportunities. They reduce friction, but that publishing deal was never supposed to replace our individual work as creators of becoming discoverable.

We spent years trying to prove that the right publisher could bridge that gap for unknown creators. Maybe we helped a few.

Maybe we helped more than we realize.

But if there’s one thing this experience has taught me, it’s that no publisher can build a lasting audience for you.

That’s still your job. And while I don’t entirely agree with it, it probably always will be.

- Chris