Self-Publishing

• Editing.
  
  If you’re published by mainstream publishers you’ll be allocated an editor who will go through your novel and challenge you on its flaws, inconsistencies, poor characterisation etc; get you to re-write it and so you’ll end up with a much stronger novel.
  
  If you self-publish you’ll either have to hire in a professional editor, or end up with a poorer novel. Some print-on-demand publishers offer an editing service at an extra cost, but the bottom line is the same: whether you go through them, or hire independently, you're paying for it.
  
• Typesetting.
  
  Again, your publisher will do this if you’re going that route. If use you print-on-demand then this will be taken care of by them. If you’re self-publishing totally by yourself you’ll have to hire the services of a professional typesetter, or buy typesetting software and spend the time learning to use it. Neither of these options are hugely expensive, but still they should be factored in.
  
  
• Getting a good cover.
  
  Publishers have graphic artists allocated to get the best cover for your book. If you self-publish, you’ll have to hire a graphic artist (either yourself, our through print-on-demand publisher you’re using.
  
  You might be tempted to save money by doing it yourself or getting a talented friend to do it - but make no mistake, people do judge a book by its cover, so it’s hugely important to get right.
  
  Getting the right cover really is an art - I was shocked to learn when my own first novel was published, for example, that there are fashions in book covers and you need to be up-to-date with the fashion but yet different enough to stand out. Not easy, I’m sure you’ll agree, and this is hugely important.
  
• Getting the novel printed.
  
  This is actually probably the least difficult aspect of self-publishing. Obviously if you’re using print-on-demand publishers this is totally sorted for you. But even if you’re publishing yourself, it’s relatively easy to get a good printer to do the print run for you.

  The big downside of this is money. You have to pay for this yourself. The print-on-demand option doesn't require any up-front costs (or very few, depending on the company) but there's a very high unit cost.
  
  If you're publishing using your own printer the unit cost will be much lower anyway, and even lower still if you do a big print-run. But you have to incur all the costs up-front, and provide storage for all the books. 
  
  For more information check out  www.write-and-publish-fiction.com. (This website opens in a new window.)

• Distribution.
  
  Now, this is the big one. This is the big, big challenge for those authors who are self-publishing.

  How do you get your novel into the hands of readers?

  I acknowledge that print-on-demand publishers have sales pages on their websites, and links to online bookshops like Amazon. But in all reality, how many people will go browsing these websites and buy your novel?
  
  You can’t really sit back and wait for readers to find your novel online.

• You’ll have to promote it.

• But then you’re into the field of internet marketing. You’ll need to set up a website probably. Or at the least a blog.
  
  But how will traffic find you? And once people do find you, what will make them buy your novel? Giving the first chapter free would be a suggestion, and if people like that they can buy the whole novel. You’ll spend a lot of time on readers’ forums and so on, so people know you’re out there. But when you’re doing that, you’re not writing.
  
  And you still have the problem of selling your book in the offline world, where most novels are sold.
  
  You can of course talk to wholesalers and individual bookshops and ask them to stock your novel.
  
  But this probably won’t be very easy.
  
  The thing is that having your novel published by a mainstream publisher gives it an automatic endorsement that simply cannot be got any other way.
  
  The problem is - and this leads us to one of the biggest advantages of having your novel traditionally published - is that a novel’s worth is so subjective. Who’s to say it’s any good?
  
  If it has been traditionally published then the publishers - whom the wholesaler/bookshops know and trust - have said it’s good, and they’ll stock it on that basis.
  
  Indeed, this bit is challenging even for the publishers. There is a frighteningly finite amount of space on bookshop shelves, and a lot of competition for it. If a particular publisher was to consistently pick novels that wouldn’t sell, it wouldn’t be long before the wholesalers and bookshops refused to take books from that particular publisher.
  
  Do you see how difficult this bit is? Can you see now how challenging it would be for you, as an unknown individual, to persuade those wholesalers/bookshops to stock your novel? They don’t know you, and they have no way of knowing if your novel is any good or not - but they do know that you are probably not the best judge of its quality. Many bookshops and wholesalers refuse on principle to accept self-published books.
  
  Yes, they could read your novel to see if it’s any good, but they won’t really have the time or inclination to do that. They’re all busy people, and they have available to them lots of books they know (because they’re recommended by the publishers) are good.
  
  And whatever chance you have, can you see how that small chance would be made even smaller if you cut corners on the production, e.g. did your own cover?
  
  One option is to avoid bookshops altogether and sell directly to the public yourself. One woman I know of self-published her novel and she has spent years bringing it to fairs and festivals and selling it from a table there. And indeed, she has sold many hundreds of copies. But this has taken so much of her time. She has not written another novel. I think she’s happy enough with that; she has achieved her dream. And that might be your dream too - and if so, go for it!

Self-publishing: Show Me The Money

 Another issue is that of money. When you publish your novel yourself you’re effectively an entrepreneur. You’re investing the money and taking the risks, with no guarantee of any return.

If the novel sells well (however you do it), then of course you’re getting a double return - that of author and of publisher.

But still, you need to know that publishers’ margins are tight enough. People outside the writing/publishing industry are always horrified when I tell them that I’m getting only 10% of the sale price. But the publisher’s margin is only that too. So if you self-publish you can look to get maybe 20% of the cover price per novel, and it could take a large number of sales for that to add up to even meeting your costs.

So, should you self-publish?

Am I trying to put you off self-publishing? No. But I am trying to give you a reality check.

You might be tempted to self-publish if all possible agents and publishers have turned you down. I understand that for sure. But again - there’s a reason they turned it down. And they are the industry experts. Think long and hard before assuming you know better than they do.

You might know better than they do, of course. Experts don’t get it right all the time, far from it. I’m reminded of the Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman. He wrote an excellent, entertaining and informative book called Adventures in the Screen Trade. In that book he kept telling us that: Nobody knows anything. By this he means that the top Studio executives don’t really know what they’re doing. They don’t know why a particular film is successful, and so they are not basing decisions on future films on any quality information or experience. (This is why sequels are so popular with the Studios.)

Goldman was talking about the film industry rather than the publishing industry, but there are parallels. Publishers sometimes get things wrong and turn down a novel which turns out to be a best-seller. Often when an author self-publishes and the novel does well, the mainstream publishers will pick up on it then. Check here for an inspiring list of people who self-published and did very well on it.

But really, really think seriously about going the self-publishing route. There are so many reasons against it. I think you’re far, far better off spending your time writing an uputdownable novel, polishing your query letter, sending out submissions and writing your next novel.

Check out The Odds of Getting Published for some reassurance as the odds of getting published are pretty good for excellent novels.

If you're feeling despair and that's what's making you think of self-publishing, use EFT to regroup your thoughts and help you keep the faith.

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