In my last blog post, I spoke about my completely new outlook on self-publishing with the advent of e-readers and whatnot. Click here for the refresher.
I’ve been reading more and more about other self-publishers who have either used self-publishing as a springboard into the traditional publishing world and those who are content with continuing to sell their books via self-publishing.
Where do I fall in this area? Not sure yet. On one hand, my first brush with self-publishing really kind of tanked, despite getting mostly good reviews on my novel. But again, that was at least 4-5 years before e-readers like Kindle, B&N Nook and the iPad really took off.
And before that, my goal was to go strictly traditional. Not so much anymore.
Traditional
On one hand, traditional publishers offer access to book stores, which is where many still buy books. It also offers professional publicity flacks who can take some of the burden off an author when it comes to marketing said book as well as topnotch editors to catch any typos or grammatical mistakes.
And those big advances don’t hurt either if your book or rep warrant it.
Not only that, a traditional publisher gets authors in front of those renowned reviewers whom millions of book readers subscribe to when looking for their next reading material. You know, those reviewers who do not touch self-published books with a 20 foot poll.
However, with traditional publishers, authors have to sell their rights to the publisher in order to get published. Meaning that the editors and designers can tweak a book title or plot and an unknown author can have little say.
Even worse, you can be kicked off a book series that you created, just because your vision of the series conflicts with that of the publishers. It happened to L.J. Smith who had been writing The Vampire Diaries book series since its beginnings.
Add to the fact that royalties for starting authors are paltry, plus an author doesn’t get to see any additional royalties until their book’s sales match that of their advance.
Self-Published
With self-published books, an author has complete ownership and control over their novels. They own the rights and minus overhead, reap all the revenue.
However, an author also has to worry about the marketing, cover art, editing, distribution on various channels like Amazon.com and shipping among other duties.
A variation of Self-Publishing called Print-On-Demand takes care of all the shipping and distribution. The biggest problem is that POD has an extremely high overhead cost, meaning that in order for an author to make any revenue the book price has to be higher. This was what happened with my book and one of the reasons why it never sold more than a few dozen copies.
Nowadays, sites like Amazon have made it easier for self-published authors by creating publishing services that take care of sales and distribution but give the writer larger royalties. And with the rise of ebooks, authors can now receive much larger royalties thanks to the zero costs it takes to create e-book versions of their works.
Plus, with self-publishing, authors don’t have to wait the year to two years it takes at times for traditional publishers to put out new books. Along with that, authors can control their price and do discounts if needs be.
But more often than not, all the juggling of non-writing tasks can overwhelm an author and turn them off toward writing altogether. A lot of us just want to write, and don’t have the time ore patience for any other task that distracts from that.
And a very big issue with self-publishing is the general perception from other parts of the publishing industry. A good deal of self-published books are poorly edited and have less than professional covers (yep, that was me too), and are non-returnable, all which are why book stores refuse to carry most self-published books.
With all that being said, I’m still going with self-publishing for now, keeping my sales emphasis on selling e-books. It will be fun to put out another book, with the lessons I’ve learned from my first launch firmly in hand.
But lets say a traditional publisher approached me with an offer that I might not be able to refuse. Would I take it?
Well, I certainly wouldn’t refuse it outright. I’d at least hear their pitch and see if it fits my goals and plans as a writer. Plus, I have other ideas besides just the Star Brigade that I want to write about in the future. A traditional publisher might be a good fit for them.
All I’m saying is that I would consider doing both, even for Star Brigade should there be interest from a big NYC publisher. Seeing Star Brigade in a brick and mortar book story would be surreal and amazing! The journey’s just starting. I’ll keep updating as I go along.
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