The Truth About Self Publishing

The face of publishing is changing. Many traditional publishers are including self-publishing options and some have completely switched. This quote from the Wall Street Journal, Dec 9th, 2011 show where the trend is headed.

Self-published titles have been buoyed by an explosion in digital book sales. E-book sales totaled $878 million in 2010, compared to $287 million in 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers. Some analysts project that e-book sales will pass $2 billion in 2013.

The march of self-published authors has put publishers and literary agents on guard. Publishing houses like Penguin and Perseus have recently launched their own digital self-publishing programs in an effort to capture a slice of the mushrooming market. Some agents, including Scott Waxman, have started their own digital imprints.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082303350815824.html

Self publishing comes in three different flavors.

• Pure Self Publishing - You do all the work. You get an editor (or not) to review and clean up your work. You make or purchase the graphic work for the cover. You get ISBNs for your books. You contract with printers and binders to produce your book.
• Vanity Publishing - You pay someone else to do all the above work.
• Subsidy or Hybrid Publishing - You pay for some of the features described above and the publisher pays for some.

What’s right about self publishing?

• You can get your book published relatively quickly. This may be important if you want your book available for conferences or seminars. If your are an established speaker you may want to self publish. You already have an established basis for selling your books and you aren’t interested in becoming a recognized author. You can sell your books at your speaking engagements and get all the profits.
• You are unknown and have not had success with traditional publishers. You can get your book in print this way.
• If you are already a recognized author and you are tired of giving most of your profits to the publisher, you may want to investigate self publishing.
• Royalties are often higher

What's wrong with self publishing? That depends on your goals. If you want to be a recognized author then you will face an up hill battle to be recognized.

• Because you have paid someone to publish your book, people believe your manuscript was not reviewed and selected for publication based on any consideration of your writing excellence or the importance of your topic. Your book was published because you had enough money to pay someone to do it. Your book may be excellent and worth of a Pulitzer prize but it carries  the stigma that you had to pay someone to get it published.
• Most newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations will not review your book. They believe that your book wasn’t good enough to be published by a traditional publisher so why should they review it. They already have plenty of books to review that have been weeded out by the publishing industry.
• If you join writer’s forums you will find that there is a prejudice against self publishers. They may have a message board to announce your publication success but clearly state that you can’t post to it if you have self published in any way. They will let you post on the message board that is labeled for advertising.
• If you submit your book for possible selection for awards such as best new author, it will be rejected.
• For all most all purposes in the publication industry you are not a “real” author if your books are self published.

Tex Ware has been is a traditional publisher. Because we do little in the way of publicity it falls on the author to do all the publicity. Because we have not charged our tradition authors and because of the difficulty of unknown authors to do significant publicity, we are now evaluating each author to determine if we will take them on as a traditional author or partner with them to as they subsidize part of the work.

Or advice is to not give up and self publish until you have exhausted all your traditional publishing leads.

For more information about the pitfalls of self publishing and advice about literary fraud, scams and schemes, please see http://www.sfwa.org/beware/.

Last updated: 12/21/11 08:48 PM

 

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