Publishing options, Part III-Making the Decision

This is Part 3 of a three-part series on things to consider when deciding how to publish one’s novel. All parts come with a warning: I have next to no personal experience with any form of publishing besides the traditional sort. So read the comments on the earlier posts; there are a bunch of people there who have actually done some of these things.

Part 1 of the series covered the current two most popular options: Trade publication and e-book self-publishing. Part 2 covered small presses and hardcopy self-publishing. Today I’m going to talk about how writers go about deciding among all the options.

The first thing I need to point out is that the decision is not solely up to the writer, at least as far as the non-self-publishing options are concerned. The writer can decide against selling their work to a trade house or small press, but they can’t ensure that a trade house or small press will buy their work. The grind of submitting a manuscript is wearing, and sometime soul-destroying. “My mental health demands this” is a valid reason for choosing to self-publish.

That said, the main consideration in which choices to make revolve around the author, what the author is hoping for, what the author is willing to spend, what the author is willing to do, and the chances the author is willing to take.

The more an author knows about the business-and-production side of book publication, the more likely they are to make intelligent choices about what path to choose. By “intelligent choices,” I mean the ones most likely to get a particular author whatever that particular author wants, not some universally ideal “best path.” Even in this, there is no One True Way.

So step one is research. Most would-be writers, in my experience, are leaning toward one path or another from the start (whether that’s ebook, trade, or self-published/small press hard copy). There are quite a few books out there on self-publishing via ebook now, and some older titles on the business side of traditional trade publication (which usually gives a reasonable picture of small press, too). If you’re going the self-published-hard-copy route, I’d suggest looking into books on starting and running a small press.

If that sounds overwhelming, well, there’s always jumping in at the deep end and learning as you go. There is no writing career that is so perfect and golden that the author hasn’t made at least one major misstep somewhere along the line. Accept the idea that some decisions will have unexpected downsides, and move on.

The second non-optional step is looking at the intersection of what you want to have happen and what different options are likeliest to provide. Everything has pluses and minuses, and nothing is a sure thing. The main considerations are usually:

1. Speed—How fast does the manuscript go from sitting on the writer’s hard drive to being something that people can and will buy? (And how patient is the writer in question?)
2. Time and effort—How much effort do you have to put into getting from manuscript to book-for-sale, how much time will it take, and how much post-publication effort and time can be expected? (All publication methods require some amount of writer time and effort, whether that’s spent going over the editorial revisions and copyediting, getting competitive quotes from printers and binders, or scheduling an autographing at a local bookstore.)
3. Cost—How much is this going to cost the writer, implicitly or explicitly? (“Implicit” being things like an agent’s commission or the opportunity cost of time spent doing publicity, and “explicit” being things like paying for postage or for printing and binding. Trade and small press publication usually has little to no explicit cost [postage is no longer an issue at any house that takes electronic submissions, which is most of them these days], but higher implicit costs.)
4. Control—How much control will the writer have over the finished product, handling, and/or subsequent subrights sales? (This covers all decisions, from whether the book will be a hardcover with later ebook and mass market release, to editing decisions, to how and to whom the book will be marketed/publicized and for how long. Obviously, self-publishing allows for the highest level of control, but also requires the most time/effort.)
5. Sales/income—Which method is going to provide the most satisfactory sales and total income? (Satisfactory to the particular writer and for the particular book. Satisfactory sales of Aunt Flo’s personal genealogy, “A Family History,” is likely to be a couple of hundred copies, total; satisfactory sales of a bestselling writer’s new megabook are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of copies. “Satisfactory” also depends on whether the writer is trying to make a living as a writer and/or has other sources of income. “Sales” can be viewed as a proxy for readership, which matters a great deal to some writers.)
6. Long-term implications—How will the publication method impact the writer’s plans for the future? A writer who is putting out the first book in what they intend as a trilogy or long series, a writer trying to establish a writing career, and a writer who intends to be a hobbyist, will each answer this question differently.
7. Prestige/Status—How much “legitimacy” does each method provide for the writer’s work, and how much do they care? Some writers care enough about literary legitimacy that they will automatically choose a highly-prestigious small literary press over a trade publisher or any form of self-publication. Others don’t care at all. Others didn’t care when they made the decisions about their first book, but come to care later on, as their careers progress. So it’s worth at least a deliberate, conscious look.

If one is trying to decide where to start, I recommend ranking the above considerations from complete deal-breakers to don’t-give-a-rip. Then look at the different publication options discussed in the last two posts, and see which ones fit the ranked profile best. It is unlikely that anything is going to be a perfect fit, and it is entirely possible for a writer to realize, while trying to make a decision about where to start, that probable high sales numbers are much more important for them than control (or vice versa). If one has more than one manuscript to market, it is perfectly possible (and may be advisable) to pursue different publication strategies for each book. And it is also possible to switch up your approach if submitting to a trade house is taking enough time to be frustrating, or if the quoted cost-per-book of self-publishing in hard copy turns out to be beyond your budget, or if you discover that offering a *.pdf file for sale on your web site just doesn’t feel like it’s published, even if you are getting a steady stream of sales that way.