A while back, E. Beck asked for a blog post on various publishing options, pros and cons, and how to decide among them. As always, I have Opinions, but I have to start by pointing out that I have next to no personal experience with any form of publishing besides the traditional sort. Those who do, please add your remarks in the comments section as to why you chose the route you did, what it’s been like, how well it worked for you, and so on.
The second thing I’m going to say is that this is a large topic, so I’m splitting it up into four general categories: Large house/traditional publishing; self-publishing ebooks; small press publishing; and self-publishing hard copy. I’m not dealing with how-to here, except in the most general “you have to send it in” sense. This week, I’m starting with the first two, because they seem to be the most popular options currently. Next week is the last two, and if there’s room, the “how to decide” part. Since I am long-winded, the deciding part will probably be Part 3.
So here’s my rather idiosyncratic breakdown, for your consideration:
- Traditional large-house publishing (also known as “trade”)
This is the one where you send your manuscript out over and over until you get an offer, and when a publisher buys it, they handle pretty much everything involved in creating and selling the physical book and e-book.
Pros: You don’t pay anyone anything; they pay you. You have more time to write, because you won’t need to spend as much time on various aspects of getting the book designed, printed, publicized, distributed, etc. You will probably sell a lot more copies, because hard-copy books are still 60% of the book market (2022 statistics) and large publishers already have distribution networks. This means a lot more people are likely to read your book. It may also mean more money (see discussion under #2). Your miniscule chance of getting a movie option is still much, much better than the micro-sub-atomic chance you’d have with any of the other options. Getting published by a “real” publisher (i.e., one that someone has heard of before) is often regarded as a greater accomplishment than any of the other routes. A trade publisher will take care of things like getting an ISBN and registering copyright.
Cons: These days, you nearly always need an agent to get your manuscript in the door, and even so it is a long, slow, agonizing process. You won’t have the right to control aspects of the book like the cover, where it gets publicized, how many copies are printed, whether it’s a hardback or paperback or ebook-only release (that last is somewhat unlikely, but not impossible). In most cases, your book won’t get into print until two to five years after the contract has been signed. You will get royalties of around 10-15% of the cover price if your book is a hardcover, sliding down depending on whether the book is trade paperback, mass market, etc. You will have to pay your agent at least 15% of this. You will be expected to do some degree of publicity on your own, and to cooperate with the publisher on whatever they decide to do. (For a beginner, what the publisher does for publicity is usually invisible, because they focus on trade publications and getting the book into bookstores, rather than on trying to get readers to buy it directly.) You are likely to be locked into your contract with that publisher for a long, long time, even if your lovely editor leaves and you and their replacement hate each other. Trade publishing contracts are tricky because they have lots of lawyers, hence the high desireability of a good agent even if you didn’t already need one to get the manuscript looked at.
- Self-publishing in ebook
This is second because it currently seems to include about 30% of the books published in 2022. (Note: that’s published, not sold.) It is what it says on the tin—you pick a platform (ranging from Amazon to putting a *.pdf file up on your website), make whatever arrangements you need (Amazon needs a contract; putting a file on your website doesn’t), and when the book goes up, it’s published.
Pros: It’s the fastest route to seeing your book “in print;” depending on your choices, Amazon or Google can have your manuscript up for sale within weeks or months, rather than years. Or, you can put a *.pdf up on your website and sell direct. There’s little up-front cost. You have control of most everything, from book design to cover price (though some places apparently do place limits on what they’ll let you do with formatting/fonts/etc.). Your book will not be subject to the whims of an editor who wants more action or more philosophy or more/less of something else in your book. You get a larger percent of the cover price. You can theoretically make the same amount of money as an author selling through a traditional publisher by selling less than a third as many copies (assuming you set the same cover price and royalties are the only income, see below). You don’t have to store (or ship) unsold copies yourself (because e-books!). Who is responsible for getting an ISBN varies by platform; I think Amazon will do it for you, but if you put up a *.pdf, it’s definitely on you. There are places that will take care of this for you—for a fee—but if you decide to use them, you pay for it, which removes a lot of the monetary incentive for self-publishing this way.
Con: You have no editor and no staff, so you make all the decisions about cover art, book design, etc., you have to do the publicity yourself, and all screw-ups are on you. (Yes, I am putting this under both pros and cons. Some people hate the production-and-publicity part, other people love it. So.) Selling even 1/3 as many copies as a traditional publisher is hard (unless you are a well-known author with a large, established fan base) and will probably require a lot more time and energy than you expect, leaving less time to write. Also, you don’t get an advance—and since most traditionally published books don’t ever earn out their advance, comparing royalty income to royalty income (which is where the 1/3 as many copies comes from) is underestimating traditionally published income. You aren’t as likely to get subrights offers (but if you do, you don’t have to split them with a publisher). If you want editing or a nifty cover, you have to arrange for it (and if you want it done professionally, you’ll have to pay for it yourself).
Self-publisher here. It’s definitely not the easy route that some make it out to be because you have to not only write the good book but then understand or master all the other aspects like editing, formatting, cover design, book layout, and marketing. (I have seen more than one new self-pub author hire an editor who didn’t know what they were doing or pay for a cover that was NOT the right choice for that genre, so even paying for those things doesn’t mean you don’t have to master a basic understanding of each aspect.)
I did it because my first self-pub title was a non-fiction title I just wanted to get out into the world without establishing a platform or becoming an expert on the subject. I continued to do it because others were very successful at it and I thought I could be too.
And ultimately I’m pretty sure I made more than a lot of trade pub authors ever will. I was over six-figures in profit last I checked (but I’m also about 65% print sales because of non-fiction so this is not just an ebook figure).
I enjoyed it because I got to learn all those aspects of publishing. But it’s a slog and finding an audience is hard, especially if you aren’t someone who writes dead center on high-demand genres. And pirating and Amazon changes and AI and all of that make the idea of an upfront advance so you know you at least get something for your work appealing. But that’s a different kind of slog.
Just to add to what M.L. Humphrey said–
I’ve been self-publishing for ten years, and it’s only thanks to my extensive technical writing career before that that I’ve been able to produce quality. Without twenty-some years of editing experience, I wouldn’t have been able to edit my own material. (Much harder than editing someone else’s.)
I haven’t even tried to make a living at it, giving up on making money several years ago. Two pieces of advice I got, the first from a successful self-publisher, convinced me to just make it a pastime, not a profession:
1) She emphasized the need for self-promotion, for getting my name out anywhere I could as a good author worth reading. I find that’s not the way for me.
2) From another source, “Get thirty of your friends to agree to read an advance copy, then post reviews on Amazon as soon as the book is up.” I don’t know anywhere near enough people for that, and I don’t want to try.
But if you do, those are a couple of additional points worth considering.
A couple of comments from my recent experience putting up an actually self-published e-chapbook of family history, as contrasted with shoving all the technical chores upon my agent’s excellent e-wrangler, as I’ve been doing since first trying indie 2010. (We both climbed the learning curve together.)
The most valuable thing to farm out in my experience was the formatting. Paying someone (competent and experienced) to massage my materials into an upload-ready file would have been the biggest hassle-win; as it was I still ended up having to cry for help. Getting pro cover art comes second to that.
The rest of it proved easier, eventually. A well-worded web search will find lots of help on specific issues, variously useful – don’t stop at the first hit. The Kindle Direct Publishing site has loads of online tutorials on its procedures as well.
Kindle/Amazon will issue for free, in place of an ISBN, an in-house ASIN that works similarly, but if you want to e-pub elsewhere you need a real ISBN, which is (in the US) obtained from a clearinghouse called Bowker, which proved surprisingly user-friendly once I got into its website. They do want money, natch, but not that much.
So far, about 2/3 of my ebook sales have come from Amazon, the other third distributed among Apple Books, Kobo, and Nook. We haven’t tried Google Books placement. Anyone have experience with them?
If you haven’t done so already, check out Draft2Digial (draft2digital.com) if you’re going to be wide with your ebooks. I like to think of them as publishing wide in easy mode. They reach a lot of the library options that self-publishers can’t reach on their own and also cover the bigger stores if you want a one-stop shop. If you’re already published direct somewhere, you just uncheck that box on the final page before you hit publish.
I do publish direct to Google and find it relatively easy to use. I think a while back there was a delay in getting new accounts approved but I think that issue is gone now. (If it isn’t, then D2D is the answer.) I don’t like the high preview percent they impose so tend not to put collections up there, but that’s just me. They’re probably also the most limited in terms of promo opportunities. (If you don’t already have promo set up with Nook, Apple, and Kobo definitely reach out and see about getting it set up but there’s really nothing special to set up with Google last I checked.)
And if you’re going to do a decent amount of self-publishing I think Vellum is a great investment for formatting ebook and basic print titles. I’m not even a Mac user but it was worth it for me to buy a $250 Mac and then the software. I haven’t used it myself, but supposedly Atticus is the PC equivalent. And, honestly, a Word document with Styles worked just fine for me for the first few years.
Also, there’s been a lot of debate in self-pub world over the years about whether an ISBN is needed for ebooks or not. I think the general consensus has been not to bother. And, of course, some places like D2D provide them free so it’s not an issue. With print, yes, there are reasons to have your own. But ebook, especially if you have to pay for it like U.S. folks do…eh. The thought is no one is going to search for your ebook using an ISBN and none of the stores require that you provide one, so who cares if the ISBN is different on each store. But with a bigger name and more possibility someone will pirate you, that might be a different decision at that point.
Not getting an ISBN for an e-book is also problematic if you want to sell just-in-time hardcopy versions, because it can cause problems for distributors and booksellers who have digital inventory tracking systems based on ISBNs. (Digital inventory tracking is a big part of why Amazon and other epublishers issue a substitute identifying number if you don’t get an ISBN.)
I think the question is if you want an ISBN that encodes you rather than getting the cheap ones issued by Amazon and company during pub. It’s not sensible to go through Bowker in most cases.
Thank you, everyone! This is helpful information for sure!
Also, Pat, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you’re long-winded in this case. I’ve been doing a whole lot of research into this and found very little information at all (which is perhaps more a testament to my poor Google-searching abilities than it is to the availability of the information), and I’ll take every scrap I can get.
Currently, I’m leaning more toward the self-publishing route. I haven’t fully decided, but that’s the way I’d prefer to go if I can make it work. I’d love to keep as many of my book rights as possible. OTOH, I could end up with a better book by going for traditional publishing. Professional editing and cover art could prove extremely useful.
Hmm. Must think. And collect more information. Thank you all again, and I’ll see you next week!
This is very helpful! I am planning on going with Draft 2 Digital. Although I’ve published books before with conventional publishers, my experiences were probably not typical. Two were with a very small publisher who was personally “independently wealthy” and more interested in the personal prestige of being a publisher than in actually selling books – plus his editor was a nice young lady just out of school (A levels). With the third, the artist was famous and I wasn’t, and the publisher wanted someone else but the artist insisted on me — which meant no one was interested in what I said. The agent was an artist’s agent who ran a gallery rather than a writer’s agent for book. He was also a total jerk and we wound up hiring another agent to get the contract done so we paid two sets of agents. Also the first agent went to the wrong department of the publisher so our editor was clueless about dealing with a book and card deck or anything “new age” at all. So, I’m really not experienced with the conventional system at all and wouldn’t know what to expect in the process of dealing with normal publication. Another thing is that I’m now 85 – to be 86 in the coming month, and don’t want to bet on outlasting the publishing process. I’m in a hurry to see things in print. The result of all this is that I’m terribly grateful for anything I can learn about the process and how I might make it work for me. Thanks you all so very much!