Monday thoughts!

I am in a large group of established indie and traditional published authors and yesterday one of them wrote a detailed post about how many indie authors shouldn’t publish the first thing that comes to them because they haven’t honed their craft yet. About 100 comments followed and it was an interesting thread (not nasty, but some very well thought out comments on both sides of the issue). At first, yes, I felt rather insulted. And then I read one authors comments and it made me pause.
She said that she had been writing, studying her craft, and revising for 14 years before finally getting a publisher to take her on. Now she has been published for about 12 years. She agreed that those years of forcing herself to become a better writer served her now, but also said that she admired indie authors who have been able to find their own voice instead of having it edited out of them by the publishing houses.
All in all, an interested comment/thread to read.
When I got over my initial blush of “trad pub authors dissing our work”, I did think about it some. I love being indie, but I do need to continue to grow as an author. I need to work on revising a little more (or a lot more). Many of those authors who are traditional published (and making 25%) will never make the kind of money that some indie authors make who throw out poorly written books. Another trad pub author said that she loves how indie authors have opened the door for the trads to be able to push for more than 25%! Another comment that kept cropping up was that all authors can look back at their earlier work and see how it needs to be better but at least indies can go back, make corrections and re-release whereas trad pub are stuck with published “not so good work! It was an interesting lesson for me to (1) not be insulted when an established trad pub author expresses some concern over indies and (2) I really do want to work on my craft, (3) I am definitely going back to the Fairfield Series and re-edit then re-release. I’m better now and would like to make sure my first work out there is better also.
Thoughts for a Monday!