This week, ALLi Director Orna Ross and Campaigns Manager Melissa Addey discuss ALLi's advocacy work, starting with the Open Up to Indie Authors campaign. This campaign encourages and aids (and occasionally calls out!) the publishing and literary industries to include self-publishing authors in their programs, events, festivals, prizes, listings, and reviews and educates indie authors on what we can do to help ourselves in approaching these opportunities. It's not all about what ALLi does: all indie authors can help with this campaign, find out what a difference three of ALLi's author members recently made by opening up a prestigious author-in-residence opportunity.

Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our self-publishing advice center. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.

Now, go write and publish!

About the Hosts

Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's "100 top people in publishing". She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

Melissa Addey has a PhD in creative writing and writes historical fiction set in first-century Rome, eleventh-century Morocco and eighteenth-century China. She runs writing workshops covering both craft and entrepreneurship, most frequently for the British Library. She's also ALLi's campaigns manager, a role in which she loves observing and supporting the vast diversity of self-published authors. Visit her at her website and pick up a free novella.