I keep hearing the question, “Why bother with a publisher? After all, authors are doing a lot of the marketing, and their work is the core of the book.”
My answer: Money, distribution, time and quality.
Money: You’re not risking your own money, and a publisher will invest a lot more than you want to risk. A trade book will usually cost more than $20,000 to launch. Yes, self-publishers can substitute time for money, and there are other ways to economize, but any commercial publishing venture takes a big old wad of cash.
Distribution: Even a modest-sized house will have better distribution than you’ll be able to secure on your own. Yes, anyone can sell online, even through the biggest sites, like Amazon. But that leaves a lot of potential sales and readers that you’re not reaching. You can trade volume for margin, but it’s a move that needs to be carefully examined.
Time: Publishing well is a lot more complicated than it seems. You can certainly learn to do it. There are even books on most parts of the process, and if you read three or four overviews, one or two on design, a couple on editing, three to five books on publicity and book marketing, and a couple on the general business aspects of running a publishing company, you’ll learn a lot of the basics, but that’s eleven to fifteen books, plus time to try the techniques and practice. By the time you’ve learned to publish at all well, you could have written another couple of manuscripts.
Quality: Most “civilians” don’t consciously see the difference between a pedestrian cover design and a good one, let alone the difference between a pro’s text layout and an amateurish job. But these “trivial” differences do matter in the end. They can make someone decide to buy or not to buy your book, on an unconscious level.
All the people who decide what gets onto the bookshelves can tell the difference at a glance. These standards are the way they are because they work.
So, yes, Virginia, you can self-publish successfully. There are even a few people who use one of the so-called “self-publishing companies” successfully. But your chances of getting a larger readership, or of getting a decent living, from the effort are much better if you sign up with an experienced publishing team.
So, that’s a very short answer to a very complicated question. Which points did I gloss over, or even get completely backwards? If you’re still with me after that last hiatus, you must have an opinion. Let’s hear it!
Tags: ebooks, future, POD, publishing
Hi Marion, I agree with the points of your post but want to take things a step further if I may.
I knew I wanted to write more than one book, so I made a plan: get my first book published with a large publisher and learn as much as possible along the way and then break into self publishing.
I’d read enough, and personally knew and worked with many self-published authors in my genre, to understand the financial investment as well as the dedication it takes to self-pub.
Just getting my first book published (with a publisher) was a chore that taught me a lot, and three years after being published I am still learning!
There’s no way that the money I spent promoting my book (even though the publisher had a built in market presence I did a TON of work) has matched the royalties I’ve received. However, the name recognition, that little bit of “international publishing house” credibility, the entire learning experience, was well worth everything I’ve spent as well as what I “gave up” to the publishers.
Now I am taking all of that and moving into self-publishing. It’s a plan I’d recommend to anyone who thinks that they have more than one successful book in them and the determination to do all the research you recommend and to discover along the way what their strengths are and to pay for help with their weaknesses in the process.
You’ve got some great posts on your blog, I’ve enjoyed reading it. Thank you for that and for this post
Marguerita
I agree that it helps an author to have built a platform, as you have been doing, before launching into self-publishing.
I believe very strongly that it’s better to make your mistakes on paper before you launch your company. In your case, I’d advise doing not only a single title P&L, but also a business plan.
If you’ve read much of my information here, or in the IBPA Independent, or even on the Yahoo Self-Publishing group and other lists, you’ll have a good idea where to start: with sales estimates (see earlier posts), marketing plans, and distribution channels/terms of trade.
Best of luck with your plan.
Marion: I agree wholeheartedly. But, I think the editing services a good publisher provides cannot be valued enough. Even experienced authors who think they’ve carefully prepared their manuscripts still need another eye looking at their work–whether it’s simple copyediting, continuity issues, fact-checking, etc. Obviously, a self-publishing author can hire an independent editor, but I suspect many don’t think this is necessary.
Editors cannot be valued highly enough. And NO book should ever be published, IMNHO, until it has had the attentions of a good line editor and a good copyeditor, at a bare minimum. For that matter, I would also suggest a good overall structural edit, too.
(NB: I didn’t do this with my own short ebook, but ONLY because I don’t think that it has the potential to sell enough copies to pay for the attention, no matter how good it is. Its market is publishing folks who want to learn how to use basic sales estimation techniques, and other numeric analysis tools. That group is pretty small. — But this is a case of do what I say and not what I do!)
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