Let’s start with a disclaimer. I think self-publishing is a viable form of publishing. There have been many cases where self-published authors have done amazingly well, and those stories seem to be growing at an exponential rate. And, I think there are certain circumstances where self-publishing might not be just a good alternative but actually a better alternative to traditional publishing.
So, let’s get that out of the way. This blog is not an anti-self-publishing piece. Instead, it’s a word of caution.
Articles describing the glories of self-publishing are popping up every day. Technology and infrastructure has advanced to the point where it’s perfectly possible for someone to present a book to the world and have it selling hundreds of thousands of copies in just a few months. This has happened, and it will continue to happen.
Combine that success with the woes of the traditional publishing routes. Disruptive technologies and waning readership have hurt both publishers and booksellers. The poor economy has made publishers skittish about accepting new, untested authors. Agents are more and more in demand. Contracts are harder and harder to get.
Looking at those last two paragraphs it seems like self-publishing might be the best way to go, right?
Here’s my worry:
Publishing has always been hard. It’s always been a struggle to rise through the slushpile, whether that slush was with an agent or a publisher. It’s always taken a long time, and it’s been a fight the entire time. Authors write and rewrite that first chapter, paragraph and sentence to get their submission seen.
And then it gets rejected anyway, so you write another book and you send that one out. And it gets rejected. Authors wore rejections as a badge of honor. At one time there was even an award (riffing off the Writers of the Future award) called Writers With No Future, where the winner was whoever could produce the most rejection letters, by weight.
This isn’t to say that rejections are wonderful. But rejections make you work harder. They make you go back to your manuscript and revise, or rewrite, or throw it away entirely and write something even better. The submission and rejection process is the fiery furnace that refines your writing, removing the impurities and leaving the gold.
While there are always stories like Stephenie Meyer, who sold her first novel, there are many many more stories like my friend Brandon Sanderson, who sold his sixth novel (and at that point he was already working on his thirteenth). My brother, Dan Wells, sold his sixth novel. One new author whose story I love is Brodi Ashton: she sold a three-book deal to Balzer and Bray for lots of money after only two days on submission! Of course, that was only after being rejected by 92 agents, after her first book with that agent didn’t sell, and after she got a new agent.
The moral of the story: success almost always comes after a long, hard fight.
Aspiring authors will inevitably think: but that sounds terrible! Why would I ever want to go through that? The answer is just what I said above: the struggle is valuable, because it makes you work harder, and it makes your writing better.
So, what does this have to do with self-publishing?
When you finish your first manuscript, you probably think it’s pretty good. Maybe it is. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create something great on the first try (though I am saying it’s really, really rare).
So, you take that first manuscript and you shop it around. You submit to agents, and you get some rejections and it really sucks. And then you turn to the internet, and you read that some other author has sold five hundred thousand ebooks by self-publishing! You read that another author made $200,000 in a single month! Man, screw this traditional publishing crap! Self-publishing is both easier and more lucrative!
And maybe you’ll make a million dollars. It’s definitely possible.
But unless you have gone through all the years of work and refinement and revisioning and rewriting, then odds are you won’t. Because it’s the work that makes your writing good, and good writing is what sells.
Again, I’m not anti-self-publishing. But to me it has all the dangers of a get-rich-quick scheme: It’s very tempting, because you see other people who have done it and made a lot of money; it’s easy to get into; it seems like an appealing alternative to a very difficult path. And, just like a get-rich-quick scheme, 99% of people who try it won’t get rich. Some will lose money. Some will get their name forever plastered on a poorly written book, and spend the rest of their career hiding their past.
So this is not a blog to tell you not to self-publish. It’s just to warn you:Be wary of the hype. If you’re going into self-publishing, you have to be a great writer—as good and polished as if you’d worked your way through years of rejections and rewrites. And you have to be a great businessperson, because you don’t have professional editors, marketers, salespeople, accountants, graphic designers, distributors and retailers in your corner. It’s all you.
If you can handle that, then dive right in. The changes to the industry really are amazing, and the right person with the right book can be very successful. Just know what you’re getting into, and make sure you’re ready before you do it.
Feedback, sequel to Variant, will be available October 2012. Click here for more information.
Why don’t popular authors (ala Steven King or Dan Brown) turn to self publishing after having built a loyal fan base as a way to take a bigger share of the pie? Is all the business stuff just too complicated?
Cameron, I think if they’re popular they don’t really have the need to turn to self publishing. That said, a small but vocal group of mid-listers are leaving traditional publishing and going to self publishing. (The most prominent example is JA Konrath who published several books with Hyperion before going it alone–he’s really become the evangelist of self publishing.)
Agree for the most part Rob. Success usually obtained after a lot of hard work and failure. It seems that those authors who make it big in self publishing are not only talented (and turn out clean, well edited copy) but they put a lot of time and effort into marketing their own work. So, yes, you can make it as a self published author but it takes a lot of work as far as marketing and whatnot and even then there’s no guarantee that your hard work is going to pay off.
Finally, your comments seemed to be directed to fiction authors. Self publishing can actually be a good thing for authors of non-fiction—those who already have an audience and know how to market to them. I know several Self-Help, Finance, and How To authors who have bypassed traditional publishing and self published books and done remarkably well simply because they already had an audience and were already selling their services to them.
I think the choice is less “self-publishing vs. finding an agent and getting a book deal” and more do you want to be an indie micro-publisher or do you want to find an agent and try to get a book deal?
There are major hassles and risks with both approaches. And the self-publishing approach is not a real approach unless you can be an indie micro-publisher.
Abel, I totally agree. There are a lot of cases where it just makes more sense to self-publish regardless–and that’s more likely in non-fiction than fiction. My comments were definitely more geared toward fiction.
And Wm, I think that’s absolutely true as well. Self-publishing used to be a lot more daunting, because you had to print paper copies and distribute them yourself. But now that ebooks are on the rise, I worry that aspiring authors think that all of the business aspects of self-publishing are gone, too–and that’s just not true. Distribution might be easier, but you’re still taking on a lot more responsibility.
I’ve read a lot of really bad self-published SFF a few years back. But they weren’t in the form of books, at least not in the traditional sense of the word “books.” They came in the from of self-published books out of Lulu. It was 2005. What the heck did I know about the publishing business back then.
Let me fast-forward a bit . . .
It wasn’t until I discovered John Scalzi’s Whatever and later Brandon Sanderson et al’s Writing Excuses that I began learning the dark truth about the publishing business. Scalzi has a tendency to kvetch about self-publishing, which I’ve posted many a comment (in fact, I learned the word kvetch from Whatever). But it was the term “slush pile” that really spoke volumes to me. Now I had a word to describe where all my manuscripts were. They were in purgatory, literary limbo; just wished I’d known where they were decomposing back in the early 00s. I would have rescued them . . . and given them a proper burial.
Back . . .
Like many other slushers, I went ahead and self-published two novels with Lulu. I designed the covers with one of my Photoshop-savvy students and did the layout myself in, brace yourselves, Word. I didn’t know how to use InDesign then, not that it mattered. Much. You can’t polish a turd(s). They were rough manuscripts, really rough. I remember Brandon Sanderson saying something about not having an ending in his first novels, same with Dan Wells; same with me. The only thing was, I’d gone ahead and “published” them anyway.
Argh!
Anyway, long story short, I ordered a good 200 copies of those books through Lulu’s bulk orders and ended up tossing them in an industrial dumpster behind my building in North Vancouver, where, funny enough, another Lulu writer was living. He appeared to be heavily medicated, though, and not into the idea of creating a critique group on the North Shore. I think, in retrospect, that he was a high-functioning cave troll from the Rockies.
Presently, I’m prepping my current novel for the Angry Robot novel contest next month. I’m going to submit just past the witching hour, first day. My novella, which this novel was borne from, was almost accepted by Panverse Publishing a few years back. Kind of glad it wasn’t accepted, actually, gave me time to write the ending. Because that’s what my novella was: an unfinished novel.
I now know that there is no secret key for the publishing houses, at least for me. If this novel doesn’t do well with Angry Robot, then I’m going to write a space opera in first person, a 80,000-word Saturn’s Children meets American Gods. Thanks for the advice, Brandon. Then I’m going to go back to writing third person limited SFF novels and start pitching them at Cons in later 2012.
The road to the publishing houses is long and littered with the corpses of dead writers. Think Stephen King’s The Long Walk. Heck, there aren’t even highway signs most times. It’s a desolated road set in a dystopian zombie-infested world, the zombies being first-time self-published writers with three glowing (radiating?) reviews on Amazon, and an eight-million ranking.
PS Thanks for choosing to be a writer, and not a doctor, Brandon. The world of publishing is much more utopian with you in it.
En route . . .
PS I listened to your podcast on Writing Excuses the other day. I’m looking forward to reading Variant. Congrats, man!
And I apologize for the blathering on like an idiot!
So it’s like those weight-loss infomercials that play all night:
*Results not typical!
Great info, Rob. Unless you are writing non-fiction with an established clientele that will buy your book, self-publishing a novel is a huge time investment with very little ROI for the first-time author.
Good points, Rob. You nailed it.
Thanks, Rob. I appreciated this post.
I think the results *are* typical, Joel. Well, maybe not Ms. Hocking level results, but some level of success with self publishing is typical.
IF the book was good in the first place.
Good books sell. Bad books don’t. That’s not 100%, but in general, that’s the way it goes. So if your book isn’t selling after six months and some marketing effort, it’s probably a badly written book.
Luckily, with ebooks I really don’t think that will hurt you.
It won’t hurt you because no one is going to read it, which means no one is going to review it, which means the internet will NOT be filled with hundreds of posts about your silly bit of horrible craft in a sea of similar silly bits of horrible craft. You can always take it down later, when you’ve written enough books that your work has become salable (and should take down bad books, then, because you don’t want to alienate readers).
Self publishing is perhaps the truest litmus test of writing. If you submit to a publisher, a wonderful work might be rejected tons of times (hey, Harry Potter was) because the publisher didn’t think it would sell, or already had their quota of books in that genre, or whatever. If you submit directly to the public, you’re going to get to find out in no uncertain terms if your writing is any good or not.
If it’s good, wonderful! Now write the next book so you can continue in your success.
If it’s not good, well, it was good training. Write another book and repeat the process until your writing has reached a level of skill that attracts readers.
I really think it’s about that simple.
Loved this! Thanks for the shout out, and it was good to hear from you at LTUE. Excellent work!
I’m a huge advocate of self-publishing, but I’m also a huge advocate of critique groups and sharpening up your writing before going ahead with it. If you’re going to be successful, traditionally or on your own, you’re going to have to have a good product.
I also know that “good” is very subjective. I can’t tell you how many writers I know who think JK Rowling and Stephenie Myer can’t write. Pull up your favorite author on Amazon and read their bad reviews. For every 20 people that love them, you’ll find someone who can’t stand their books.
Here’s my take on it. If you self-publish and it stinks, you’ll probably not be able to sell very many books. So you really didn’t ruin your career, no one knows you exist. No big deal. You learn to improve or you fade into obscurity.
If you’ve got a good book, you’re much more likely to be able to actually earn some decent money self-publishing, rather then spending years trying to get an agent. I know a lot of self-published authors who are earning a living selling their ebooks. No, not everyone is making a million dollars like Amanda, but many of them are earning enough to support their families.
For me, self-publishing was a way out of the query-go-round. I knew my book had potential, but no agent would even look at it. Is it poor writing? Some people think so. (Just read my bad reviews!) But a lot of people have really enjoyed it, and I’m earning more money now than I’ve ever seen before.