The Bookseller - Author Interviews - 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."