Should You Self-Publish?
I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.
This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
I’m still deciding whether I want to try self-publishing for myself. For any other writers who are debating this question, I thought outlining some of the things I’m pondering could help you figure out the right path for your writing career.
What are the benefits of self-publishing?
1. There aren’t any gatekeepers.
Traditional publishers are selective by necessity. Even small presses often receive hundreds of submissions in a given year, out of which they’re able to publish maybe half a dozen titles (and often fewer). Larger publishing houses may put out 20 or more books a year, but the number of manuscripts submitted to them is proportionately higher, too.
That selectiveness is part of the value of traditional publication—an editor picked your book over the many others they could have chosen. But this also means more writers get told “no” than “yes”. This normally isn’t because all of those other books were bad. Publishers have to turn down a lot of well-written manuscripts simply because they don’t have space for them, and how they make these decisions can often seem very mysterious from the writer’s perspective.
When you self-publish, you don’t need to spend hours researching presses to find the one that fits your aesthetic, or preparing queries to explain why your book’s a perfect fit. There’s no one asking you to prove the book will have an audience—that proof comes when you sell copies, after it’s released. This makes self-publishing a popular choice for books for niche audiences, or those that defy traditional publishing expectations because of their length, form, or content.
2. Your book will be in front of readers much, much faster.
It’s a long process to get a book from finished draft into readers hands. If you want to go through a big publishing house, usually that means first finding an agent, who will then shop it around to publishers. For a small press you can often skip the agent step, but either way just finding a publisher can take months or years. Once you have a contract, it’s often another year or more before it actually comes out.
Self-publishing isn’t an overnight process either—you’ll still probably take a month or two editing and formatting the manuscript, designing the cover, and all the other behind-the-scenes details that come along with publishing a book. But it’s still a much faster process than traditional publishing—and you’re the one dictating that timeline, so you know what stage your book is in the entire time. Which leads nicely to…
3. You have full creative control.
Publishers will edit your manuscript before it’s released. This could stop at basic proofreads and line edits, or could include requests to cut, add, or rewrite portions of the story. The author’s control over things like the title, cover, and layout varies between presses, but typically the publisher is in the driver’s seat even if they don’t take full control.
Self-publishing keeps the whole process in the author’s hands. You might decide to outsource the cover, or may need to alter the format or design to meet the standards of your chosen publication format, but those are ultimately your decisions.
What are the downsides of self-publishing?
1. You have to sell your book yourself.
This might sound like an obvious statement, but a lot of writers who self-publish don’t think about the full implications of selling your own books. Larger publishers have staff dedicated solely to promoting and marketing the books they publish. Even a smaller press has connections with booksellers, knowledge of distribution channels, and a built-in audience that they bring to the table.
Now, most presses do still expect authors to be active in the promotion of their book—traditional publishing doesn’t mean you get to write novels then sit back and twiddle your thumbs. But it’s the difference between, say, organizing an entire book tour yourself and collaborating with the press staff to choose tour stops and contact venues. Presses also do things like arrange for book reviews, nominate books for prizes, and have readings, panels, and exhibitor space at conferences and book fairs. All of these are things that can be prohibitively expensive or simply inaccessible for an independent, self-published author.
2. You have to work harder to be taken seriously.
There’s something about having a publisher’s stamp on the spine of a book that automatically lends it a sense of legitimacy. Even if someone has never heard of the press, the fact that someone chose to publish this work gives readers more confidence that it’s worth reading. If you’re self-published, that authority isn’t inherent, and some readers will automatically assume that self-published books are lower in quality than those put out by presses.
This effect was harder to overcome in the early days of self-publishing. There have been enough successful self-published books by this point that the stigma is starting to fade, even in stodgier academic circles. This need to prove yourself is never going to go away completely, though, for the same reason that self-publishing is so appealing: You don’t need anyone’s approval before you release a book. The quality of self-published literature varies widely, and readers know this. Because of this, self-published authors need to work harder to convince readers their books are worth their time.
3. You’re responsible for publishing (and all the associated costs).
No reputable publisher asks authors for money to publish their book. They may charge reading fees for unsolicited manuscripts but once they’ve accepted a work for their catalogue, the publisher pays to make it a finished product and release it to the world. The flip side of this is that they take a cut of the book’s profits, often a sizeable cut. They also control the publishing process, including how many copies are made and in what formats (though this can be an advantage, too, when they do things like audiobooks and translations that are often beyond a writer’s skill sets).
When you self-publish, you’re the one handling the entire publishing process, and that will take either time, money, or both. You can cut down on costs by handling things like the formatting and cover design yourself, though if you don’t have these skills you’re probably better off hiring an expert than trying to learn them (at least, if you care about the quality of the book you release). In a similar vein, even the greatest writer doesn’t get everything perfect on their own. Publishers have in-house editors that give manuscripts that final polish, but self-published authors need to hire someone to do this.
If you want to release a physical book, you’ll also need to find and pay a printer. Print-on-demand cuts down on the upfront costs, but those publishers also take a bit off the top, so it’s not “free”—you’re just paying on installment with each copy you sell.
So how should you decide if you should self-publish?
Obviously, I can’t answer this for you. But as I’m trying to decide if I want to take the self-publishing leap, these are the questions I’m asking myself, based on what I’ve seen and heard from my friends who have self-published:
1. What are your goals for this book?
People publish books for different reasons. Some people just want to get their story in front of readers beyond their social circle. For other people, it’s part of a broader brand or business venture—a business leader who publishes a book on effective leadership, for example, or a chef who releases a cookbook. And sometimes, people just want to be able to say they wrote a book and have an Amazon link to pass along to friends to prove it.
None of these are bad goals but they all require a different publishing approach, and some of those are better-suited to self-publishing than others. Generally, if the main thing you want from publication is a large audience, that will be easlier to achieve with traditional publishing. The traditional route is also best for those building professional or academic cred, such as professors publishing books to get tenure.
2. Do you have marketing skills or a large online presence?
To sell books, you need readers who want to buy them—and your buddies and relatives are only going to get you so far. This won’t be such a struggle for people who already have an audience, like well-known bloggers, podcasters, or YouTubers, or for people who have an existing professional network, like if you’re a professional speaker, business leader, professor, etc.
If you don’t have this kind of audience, you’ll need to build it if you want your book to sell more than a handful of copies. That means having strong sales and marketing skills, or the willingness and ability to learn them.
3. Do you have the time, energy, and budget to publish and promote your book?
The answers to the first two questions will be a factor here. If you already have an audience or established marketing channels, then the work-add of promoting a book will be minimal compared to someone who needs to build an audience from scratch. For most authors, selling books requres a combination of in-person events like signings, readings, and lectures, with online sales generated through advertising, content marketing, and reviews. All of these things take either time, money, or a combination of the two. That’s on top of whatever you invest to produce the book itself.
Writing is an art but publishing is a business, and successful self-published authors treat it as such. They devote the necessary time and money to building their brand and generating sales—and, even with this, success is not a guarantee. Admittedly, you’ll still need to work to sell your book if someone else publishes it, but you’ll share that load with a team that has experience and knowledge most first-time authors lack.
For me personally, self-publishing doesn’t fit my ultimate goal for two of the projects I’m shopping. I think the sci-fi novel deserves a larger audience than I have the marketing skills to reach on my own—maybe that’s arrogance, but it’s the honest truth. With the short story collection, most of the individual stories have already found an audience in journals and anthologies. My goal for that manuscript now is to get a book-length publication that might help me attract an agent or publisher for my other projects—to get that editorial seal of approval that I’m a “legitimate” author. Self-publishing won’t do that.
I am still flirting with the idea of self-publishing the chapbook, though. Realistically, it’s going to have a pretty small, niche audience no matter how it’s released. I do think there’s a viable audience for it and I’m willing to build that slowly, and to put in the work to set up readings, go to conferences, and learn the marketing skills I’m currently lacking. Who knows—maybe after I’ve gotten some experience in the self-publishing world, it’ll feel like a more viable option for my other projects. I think that’s what it comes down to when you’re deciding whether to self-publish: Figuring out your skills and comfort zone, along with the needs of the project and your goals for it.
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