It was a curious day when Bill Thompson decided to start writing. When his wife of decades became terminally ill and Thompson transitioned into being her caregiver, he and his wife had a serious talk about the future, where his wife asked him why doesn’t he work again on that book from 20 years ago he was writing. Two years later, when Thompson’s wife passed away, he sold his business and began to write.
16 years later, Thompson has written 26 books, all published on Amazon through independent publishing. Independent authors struggled greatly with publishing until 2007, when Kindle was released, and later on the Kindle online publishing website, allowing authors to write and publish novels on their own. Additionally, most traditional publishing houses had strict rules about what they would publish, intimidating most authors away from suggesting their novels. For Thompson, this was key, with him describing independent publishing with the words “For better or for worse, it’s all mine.”
With this, Thompson began to write one to two books a year, describing a schedule of writing five days a week with 1200 total words per day. It wasn’t until 2013, though, that he hit a gold mine for writing. Up until that point Thompson focused on archeological mysteries for his fictional stories, mostly because that’s what he enjoyed.
On a whim, though, he began to write his book Callie, a ghost story set in Louisiana. Later, at a book fair discussing his new genre with a fellow author, he learned sage advice. Instead of writing for himself, which was archeological mysteries, he had to write for what the people wanted, which was ghost stories. Callie has been Thompson’s biggest hit thus far, winning him awards such as the Colorado Independent Publishers ENVY award.
With this guidance, Thompson continued writing ghost stories, and has now amassed twelve since, all of which either follow the Callie timeline, or are more independent stories. Because of Thompson’s time living in New Orleans, he allowed himself to be inspired by the ghost stories of the town, which were mainly used as the basis for his fiction novels.
In order to maintain an audience as an indie writer, Thompson says he has continued to utilize an email list, offering those who subscribe a free copy of his first book. It grew from 50 to 3000 people, and now when he is producing a new book he sends his email list a notification. This allows him about 800-900 preorders, which gives him good reviews and helps with rankings on Amazon.
While Thompson took some encouragement from his wife in order to begin, he urged all the students of the high school to just put pen to paper, saying “You don’t need permission to be an author.” As a presenter, Thompson had a very good story and fantastic advice for all the aspiring writers in the community, giving them the best guidance they could get from anyone: to just start writing.
