Sure you can, but no one will read them. My novel "Darwin's Theorem" (available on Amazon for a nominal price in e-book format, a less-nominal price in paperbac

Sure you can, but no one will read them. My novel "Darwin's Theorem" (available on Amazon for a nominal price in e-book format, a less-nominal price in paperback) is published under a CC license but that doesn't mean anyone will read it. The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby. The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part. I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure. So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.