Traditional versus self publishing: official death match 2014

On twitter the other day, Smart Bitch Sarah remarked that it’s sad that the discussion about ways to publish has turned into an official death cage match where each side has to sneer at the other. There are enough people on both sides of this debate who do that. I try not to. Sometimes I fail, because I don’t give enough disclaimers.

For a number of reasons, a lot of authors who are traditionally-published and curious about self-publishing talk to me about their careers when they’re up for contract renewal. Over the last 2 months, that number has been extraordinarily high—I think I’m up to 11 right now—but if I count over the last…three to four years, I’ve probably talked to dozens and dozens of authors. These range from people with print runs big enough to send a book to everyone in entire cities, to people with mass market print runs that are under 10K.

Believe it or not, I really do not push any of those people to self-publish. There really are benefits to both sides. (Although, fair warning, I have been known to say things like, “Holy crap, that advance is ridiculous, you’re worth more than that.”)

This blog post is for people who are traditionally published and who are thinking about self-publishing. It’s not intended for people who have not published yet. (That’s not to say it’s irrelevant to the unpublished; just that that is a slightly different ballgame, and one I’ve never had to play.*)

I want to note at the outset that a lot of this sounds like I’m assuming it’s an either/or question. It isn’t.  I know and respect plenty of people who do both, and more power to them! I personally don’t write fast enough to do both effectively. I could traditionally publish a little on the side or self-publish a little on the side…or I could just go for broke. So while there is no theoretical reason why anyone has to make a choice, writing speed and career demands pose a practical limitation on me, and other authors as well.

This is a really, really massive blog post. Some caveats: my experience skews towards romance. I have made a personal choice about what I do, and it’s gone really well for me. Even though I try to be evenhanded I’m sure where I come from colors what I say. Take this all with a grain of salt.

With that being said, if you find yourself in an official death match between traditional and self-publishing, here are 11 points you should consider.

1. The money equation is not as simple as some suggest.

People usually want to know how much more money they might be able to make self-publishing versus traditionally publishing. I’ve talked some about net present value on this blog, but even that calculation has giant holes in it, because nobody knows how much you’ll make on your books 35 years from now.

There are more holes in the calculation, because you might be bad at self-publishing. Or you might be really good at it. These things matter. (More on this later.)

But on a more practical matter, if your income is advance-heavy—that is, you expect that it’ll take you years to earn out your advances, if you ever do—it is probable that you will make less money in the first year, or perhaps few years, of self-publishing, depending on how fast you write, how big your advances are, and how well you do.

That’s because as a self-published author, you’ll have more expenses up front and you won’t be getting income for earnings months (or years, depending on your contract) in advance. In order to really maximize your income at self-publishing you need to have multiple titles available so that you can best funnel sales from one title to the next. And self-publishing has a learning curve, and it will take you time to get to the top of your game (whatever that may be).

As a matter of personal experience, if I look at my taxable earnings from FY 2010 through FY 2013, I made less money in 2011 (when I first self-published) than in 2010 by a factor of 2.5, and that was with Unlocked taking off and hitting the New York Times list. In 2012, I earned about as much as I earned in 2010. In 2013, I earned about 4 times more than I earned in 2010. And my earnings in 2014 have been higher than 2013.

So if your income is advance-heavy, you are likely to experience at least a short-term (1-4 years) income hit if you self-publishing. You should know that, expect that, and prepare for it.

2. All things are not equal.

I sometimes hear people saying that all things being equal, an author will sell as many ebooks through self-publishing as she would if she were traditionally published.

All things are not equal.

This article talks (among other things; I don’t wholly recommend all conclusions of the article, but the behind-the-scenes discussions are interesting) about how Amazon gets publishers to pay for placement. A while back, I heard an Amazon rep describe the advantages some publishers get (for instance, traditionally published books are more likely to come up in searches—something the rep called a “sparkle search” and there are other visibility advantages as well).

You can’t (easily) get these things as a self-publisher, so if you want to equal your digital sales as a traditionally published author, you need to win the game on a straight algorithmic basis.

If your book is as professionally presented as your previous traditionally published books and is priced the same, you are likely to sell fewer copies. Most self-published authors get around this by pricing their books lower.

If you want your self-published books to sell more copies than your traditionally published books, you have to have a competitive marketing advantage over your traditionally published books.

3. Speaking of marketing…

A lot of times authors use the word “marketing” to refer to promotion. This is because, for a very long time, promotion was the only part of marketing (outside of the content of the book itself) that authors could control. But that’s only one part of what goes into marketing. Marketing typically consists of the following: product, placement, promotion, and price.

In order to be successful as a self-publisher, you need to be able to deliver a compelling product with you in the driver’s seat. That means you need to find a good freelance editor to work with you (and if you’ve worked with multiple editors over the years, you’ll know how hard it is to find a good fit). You’ll need to get good covers. If you’re doing your covers right, you’ll need to talk to a cover artist about establishing a unique brand and look that both captures your subgenre and still sets you subtly apart so that people can recognize your books at a glance. And since you have a prior career, you want to subtly (or, hey, not so subtly) evoke your previous books as well.

When you start out as a self-published author, compared to being a traditionally published author, you’re probably going to lose on the placement game. You won’t have print books that people pass in the grocery store aisle, reminding them to buy. Your publisher won’t have its thumb on Amazon’s algorithm button for you.

You may even lose on the promotion side of things. If, for instance, you’re an Avon author and have been for years, keep in mind that Avon has been hawking Author Tracker at the back of their books as you’ve built your career. If you walk away from Avon, you’re walking away from that database of readers who want to hear about your next book.

The only thing you can give yourself a guaranteed win on is price, and if you can’t do bang-up jobs on the product/promotion side of things, that is not enough of an advantage to carry the day.

Now, you can do worse than your publisher and still make more money—that’s the simple truth in the 25% of net royalty math—but I think few authors contemplate giving up print distribution and taking on extra responsibilities because they’re fine with losing digital market share.

That brings me to…

4. Successful self-publishing has one hard requirement

I’ll talk about the skills that you need to have later, but the most important skill that every successful self-publisher needs is this: good judgment.

As a single individual, you are extremely unlikely to start with all the skills you need to self-publish repeatedly at the highest levels of success. You might have a lot of the skills you need. You might have some really great advantages. But you, as an individual, do not have the skills you need to do everything you need to do to beat your publisher.

Luckily, you don’t have to have all those skills.

For instance, I’m not a marketing person. It probably took me six months or so to figure out that I wasn’t doing what I needed to do. At that point, I went and looked for authors where, every time they released a book, that book shot up in the rankings and hovered there for a while. I studied their books, what they were doing.

I’ve spent hours and hours analyzing back matter, websites, and cover copy from Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, Tina Folsom, Liliana Hart, H.M. Ward, Marie Force, Hugh Howey, and Debora Geary. I recognized that I was not performing optimally, that other people were doing better, and that I needed to change.

In order for that to happen, I needed to: (1) recognize that I could be doing better; (2) identify positive steps that would help improve my bottom line; (3) act on them; and (4) identify if those steps were working, and if not, why not.

But there are a lot of people spouting shit out there. If you don’t have the ability to discern what makes sense and what doesn’t, if you aren’t good at implementing changes and looking at the results and knowing when you’re confident that something has helped and when it’s just noise, if you believe everything you hear (or conversely, believe nothing you hear)… all that’s going to limit your success.

As a self-publisher, you really, really need to be able to know who is talking out of their ass, and when. You need to be open to changing what you do. When a new, good idea comes along, the first people to implement it get a huge first-mover advantage.

If you don’t have good judgment, you’re not going to do the best you can.

5. I brought a lot of skills with me, and they’ve helped enormously.

I put myself through college (in part) by building websites for people back in the Dark Ages of the Internet. I have a handful of programming classes under my belt, and years of programming computer simulations. The tech skill-set is extremely useful.

As part of this, I had to develop some rudimentary graphics skills, because after the first rush of “OMG a website!” people actually wanted something that was both functional and followed good design principles. Most of what I do graphics-wise is self-taught, but I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours teaching myself.

I know a little bit about production because I spent some time on a student-run print publication where errors were anathema, and so I have some idea of proper processes. I know about statistics because I spent years doing statistical mechanics simulations.

These are useful things to know, and the fact that I know all that without having to think about it was a huge help to me when I started out, and continues to be a help to me.

You should be able to assess your skills, to know what you’re good at, and what you need to be better at.

6. None of the words for self-publishing adequately describe what is happening today.

Not knowing the things I described above is not necessarily detrimental.  Some things, you can just pay money for. But knowing who to pay money to is difficult. If you have no eye for graphics work yourself, you need to hire someone who is good at it. But how do you know they’re good if you have no eye for it? How do you direct someone to build you a branded look if you don’t have a sense for branding?

The only answer I know to being able to overcome weaknesses is that you need to have friends. And acquaintances. And, hell, people who annoy the crap out of you but who you pay attention to anyway because they’re ridiculously good at what they do, and you’d be an idiot not to pay attention to them.

Some people call it “self” publishing. Some people call it “independent” publishing. I don’t think either of those terms describe what is happening. The other day, I described self-publishers as more like bacteria: most will never register above a blip, but because we’re capable of swapping ideas with each other and evolving at a high rate, the ones that do well can do really well.

It’s why the point that Mike Shatzkin expresses in the comments on this post here—that “it is hugely counterintuitive to me that a single actor whose main capability MUST BE writing could be a more effective marketer than a publisher who would have good reason to develop capabilities at scale across a list”—is both completely right and totally wrong. He’s totally right in that one individual, standing on his or her own, is always going to lose versus publishers. I suspect that is true, on average, by a margin larger than the 4x royalty difference.

But he’s not taking into account the intelligence of the self-publishing collective. The fact that writers have been so poorly paid for years is actually a huge bonus. Most authors by necessity have more skills than just writing. Do the math: There are more self-publishers with marketing backgrounds than there are marketers working in New York publishing. There are more self-publishers with backgrounds in statistics and data collection than New York has on their payroll. There are more computer experts, more graphics designers, more photographers. There are just so darned many of us, and so darned few (relatively speaking) of New York.

As an added bonus, we don’t have to pass ideas by a committee before we try them, so collectively, we have more information on crazy-ass shit that some person tried just because, hell, why not see what happens?

None of that would matter one damned bit—one person who has data expertise still might not understand what makes a good cover–except we talk to each other all the time. Participating in that conversation to some degree, staying nimble, seeing results, listening, learning as a constant matter—is where 70% of the value-added of being a self-publisher lies. The royalty rate is good, but it’s not the winner. The best self-publishers are doing things much, much better than the best publishers do. That may be hard to imagine, but it’s because taken as a whole, we have more data (most publishers don’t get the regular fine-grained data that self-publishers do, and don’t pore over it as we do) and more expertise than publishers do.

We can’t pay Amazon to put its thumb on the algorithms—but on the other hand, those who live and die by the algorithm know it better than anyone else. If you’ve followed Phoenix Sullivan’s blog series about the things she’s learned managing Steel Magnolia Press, you’d know that self-publishers collect enough information to pinpoint the exact week when Amazon shifted its algorithms to start taking book pricing into account on its lists.

I suspect that if you asked the digital sales managers at the major publishers, half of them wouldn’t know the difference between the bestsellers list and the popularity list. They might not even know that there was a popularity list. They probably wouldn’t know which list takes book price into account—not without googling.

I don’t think we’ve had a survey that accurately captures the gamut of income distribution of self-publishing**, but all the surveys we’ve seen convey some interesting information. The Taleist survey (cost: $4.99) probably has one of the most extensive crosstabs of all the available surveys, but it’s one of the older ones. The most important thing I took from that survey was this: that the people who make the most self-publishing get their information from other authors, rather than books or pundits or conferences or individual websites.

And that brings me to…

7. Being in the top percent of self-published authors takes time.

I’m not one of the very top self-published authors. I haven’t sold a million books.

But I’m firmly in the tier just below that, and I think that given the number of books I have available for sale (four full-length books plus a handful of novellas, which is ridiculously small for a self-published author), I’m doing about as well as I can with what I have.

Keeping my head in the game takes time. It means that I read a lot of blogs, and a lot of comments. I spend a good amount of time reading stuff that annoys the crap out of me. I spend time on Kboards every day to make sure I’m not missing out on anything useful. I am okay with this, because it is fun for me.

It might not be fun for you. It might be a huge drag. It might take a ton of time away from your writing. You might not do it at all, in which case, you might end up selling worse than you’d hoped.

I think you are unlikely to be one of the top self-published authors, no matter where you start traditionally, if you don’t pay attention and work on your game. That has a very real time cost.

8. Even if you are not at the very tippy top of the game, you can still make good money.

If you’re at the top of the advance heap in traditional publishing, if you’re typically a lead title, you need to know what you’re walking away from. There’s a lot of time and attention that goes into your books that is invisible to you. It won’t be invisible once you start self-publishing.

That sort of author is rare. More typical is the author who isn’t getting that kind of time and attention from her publisher. If you can manage yourself to a decent mid-list self-publishing career, you’re going to be doing pretty darned well.

Along those lines, Beverley Kendall’s survey of authors (biases: romance heavy; success-heavy) is one of the best reports on what the midlist of self-publishing can do that I’ve seen.

Where you end up depends on luck, positioning, and what you bring to the game.

9. Why I made the choice that I did.

I think the above describes what I get from self-publishing and what I put into it.

For all practical purposes, I have to make a choice about whether to self-publish. I’ve chosen the option that allows me to innovate, to pay attention, and to reap all the rewards. If I didn’t self-publish, I’d still be paying attention, but gnashing my teeth at the things my publisher wasn’t doing. At this point, I have enough feedback from reality that I know that my judgment about how to handle my books is generally good, and that I can do what it takes to move with the times and improve my market share.

But I wasn’t walking away from robust print sales, and unless and until I can regularly hit the NYT list as a self-published author—enough to give the bookselling industry enough of a jolt to push me past the anchor that is my past Bookscan numbers—it would be foolish of me to sign a contract expecting robust print sales in the future.

For me, at this point, self-publishing is less of a risk than traditional publishing. I write slowly enough, and have enough of a buffer, that the size of advance is irrelevant to me. I can’t afford is to write a book and have it not grow my audience. My choice is very much determined by who I am and where I come from.

10. Money isn’t everything.

Your books are more likely to be in libraries if you don’t self-publish. The digital divide is real and growing; if you care about accessibility of your books, you care about print. You might have independent goals aside from and in addition to making money.

On the other side of things, you may find that not having control annoys you and it’s worth leaving money on the table just so you can do it yourself.

And you know what? It’s all good. You’re not a corporate CEO, and random people on the internet aren’t stockholders in your success. They don’t get a vote. They don’t even have standing to complain. Nobody should tell you you’re making bad decisions because you’re failing to maximize your profits, and if they do, (a) they’re assholes, and (b) they should probably mention that writing books is a crappy way to make money in the first place, so give it all up and go get a real job, sucker.

You get to figure out what your priorities are. If your goal is to insert the word “goat” in as many books as you can, go for it. Fuck anyone who doesn’t like it and makes you justify your choice about what to do with your life.

11.  You are in the best position to make your own decisions.

In writing this, I’m trying to convey an adequate picture of what I bring to the table. If you’re trying to make a decision, you need to know what I’m putting in, and what other self-publishers are putting in. It’s not as simple as 70% > 70%/4.

If you’re thinking of turning down a subsequent contract, you don’t need any survey, no matter how good it is, to tell you about industry averages, because that’s largely irrelevant.

You know what your digital sales are. You know what your offered advance is. You have a newsletter and a Facebook page and a twitter account (I presume you have all this, yes?) and you can get analytics from those things (and if you can’t, learn how!) and you have a rough idea how many sales you personally are bringing to the table on day one. You know what your print sales and print distribution come out to. You know if those sales are holding steady, growing, or falling. You can best judge whether you would enjoy additional tasks or resent them. You’re in the best position to judge your own skill set.

You are very likely to be the best person to make a decision about what you should do.

In some few cases, that isn’t true. Some people are not good at making business decisions. But if that’s you (and if it is, you probably don’t know it and won’t recognize it), I’m the last person who will ever tell you to self publish. See number 4: If you lack good business judgment, you’re probably going to be particularly bad at self-publishing, because now instead of making one business decision, you have to make thirty of them.

So the general rule remains: You are likely to be the best person to make good decisions for your career, and if you aren’t, you lack major markers for self-publishing success.

That’s all I have, but I know there are tons of people who have points to add. Please feel free, but try not to be an asshole.

 ——–

footnotes:

* I can’t write the version of this blog post for the not-yet published author, or for the published-but-not-really-discovered author. That’s because I don’t know the answer to the question of how an author starts to build an audience. As a self-publisher, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering how to best grow a small audience into a bigger one. All I know is that it’s a lot easier to make 1000 out of 50 than it is to make 5 out of 0. I have no experience with the latter.

** In fact, I suspect that every survey we have overestimates average self-publishing income by a substantial margin. That is because the long tail of the distribution is dominated by people whose salient feature is that nobody knows who they are. They’re not on any loops, they’re not paying attention, and they don’t know there’s a survey on.

This does not bother me. I don’t care whether the average self-published author makes $50/year, $500/year, or $5,000/year. Those are all numbers that are not a living wage. I don’t want any of those numbers, so I do my best not to be average.

30 thoughts on “Traditional versus self publishing: official death match 2014

  1. This is really great advice, Courtney. I would love to know which are the blogs and forums you’ve found most useful for gaining self-publishing wisdom. I do lurk at KBoards and AW, but other than that, I haven’t found much. How do you get on self-publishing loops, for instance?

  2. You’re just so danged smart. From the successful independent author-publishers I know and have talked to about this, your numbers 4, 5 and 6 above are dead on. Smart people, with good judgment, awareness of their own (fairly broad) skill set, and a willingness to find the best advice and help out there. This includes the willingness to pay a decent rate when contracting out the things you aren’t skilled at or don’t have the time to do yourself — you don’t always get what you pay for with editors, proofreaders, etc., but thinking you can get a great product on the cheap is probably not a good call.

  3. Oh, the caveats. I totally understand. It’s so easy to MISunderstand in discussing this topic that you have to list caveat after caveat to get your point across. You do a good job here sharing your experience and emphasizing that your background makes your perspective unique and applicable to others in varying degrees. That said, everyone considering SP should dig through your blog for info. I did.

    After nearly a month of being a SP author who had been traditionally pubbed with a small press, I blogged yesterday on what I’ve learned, why I decided to go SP, and what I made my first month as an SP author compared to my first month as a traditional small press author.

    My viewpoint is pro-publishing for those who want the validity/marketing machine/advances, etc. of traditional publishing and pro SP for those who want more control, aren’t afraid of hard work, and have good judgment combined with teachability.

    I cover several of the same points you make here and refer folks to your blog because, uh, well, you say stuff better than me, LOL. You also have a TON of experience. I’ve got a month of experience, so I point folks to you if they’re looking to gather some excellent info.

    Thanks for your openness, for being a proponent of SP and for not slamming traditional publishing. As someone who was pretty satisfied with traditional publishing, I appreciate that.

  4. @Ros:

    Marie Force’s self-publishing loop is great. Info here: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/selfpublish/info

    And then…it’s just what you list (although I skip AW, honestly)–the usual suspects. The big skill to develop is to get a sense of who and what to skim for in all that dreck. Keep your nose to the ground and see who is doing really well and what they’re doing and what they say. Does what they say match what they do? What have they tried? Who is about your level? Who was at your level, and did they break out, and if so, what did they do?

    Talk to people. Ask questions. Pay attention.

  5. As someone who has been self-publishing for two years now (with moderate but very satisfactory success), I’d just like to add that this is the best overview I’ve read. So many ‘Yessss!!!!’ moments. Wish everyone could read it – then they might be more realistic about their expectations. It’s hard, but it CAN be done.

  6. Let me add one thing that perhaps should be obvious, but I don’t think has been stressed enough. All this takes time. Hours. Many (most?) authors who already have a day job PLUS the writing job, are, frankly, short on the time to become skilled at self-publishing. I don’t have the 10,000 hours (or even 2,000!) it is likely to take to become savvy in managing my self-publishing so that it becomes a lucrative enterprise.
    (I may not be the sort of writer who writes books that lend themselves to it, either, but that’s a separate issue.) I totally agree that the surveys over-estimate self-publishing income. Right now, my self-published book is at the end of a vanishingly small tail. And the demands on my time are such that I’m not in a position to do much about that, even though I have an M.B.A. and am a marketer by trade. Realistically, at the beginning, your income will dip and so will the time you have to write…or do anything else.

  7. Long, exhaustive (and exhausting)but one thing is missing – the need to write a bloody good book that people will want to read and will urge others to read. If the writing (and story) is crap, all the wisdom in the world about self-publishing matters not one iota.

  8. Thank you so much for such a thoughtful blog. One thing that really impresses me about self-pub authors – all authors, really – the willingness to help others by providing information such as this. I will print this out and study it 🙂

  9. This is really well written and I like that it’s objective. I chose to self-publish because I’m a huge supporter of the indie market in all art forms (movies, games, comics, etc.). However, I also sold one novel to a traditional publisher and I would happily sign with the right agent/publisher. The thing for me is that I DO believe in my stories and my books. On the other hand, I read books that aren’t necessarily popular. My favorite writers are NOT the ones you see on end caps in bookstores. They’re generally traditionally published, but they’re often still midlisters at best. When I write, I know I’m not really marketable. I have a hard time working within genre guidelines and I’m sort of a mess of old school writing programs and a lit degree combined with YA teaching and library experience. That’s not really a platform. 🙂

    What bothers me is, as you noted, the divisiveness. I don’t look down on anyone who chooses what is best for himself or herself. I know amazing traditionally published writers and I’ve seen some books that just do not appeal to me take off in the traditional market. On the other hand, I’ve watched great indie writers find success. When a traditionally published writer looks down on me for self-publishing, it kind of sucks because I probably talked to him or her because I respected his/her opinion. And when an indie rails against the gatekeepers or the NY elite, I tune him/her out.

    Each of us writes. The business part of it should be a thoughtful decision and you make some important points. In my case, it wasn’t a matter of feeling the traditional industry couldn’t help me. It was a matter of trusting myself and knowing that I wasn’t writing what was being sought after at the moment. However, at the heart of it is the story and that, to me, is what all of this noise and division is distracting us from.

  10. I love how practical your advice is. It’s not wrapped in an emotional response, but it’s objective and thoughtful.

    One of my biggest concerns about taking the leap from traditional publishing to self-publishing is my writing speed, which is currently a book a year. My goal is to write two a year, which is still extremely slow in the current publishing environment. My speed is better suited for traditional publishing, but the rights I’d have to give up, the term of copyright, the control over pricing, etc. make it hard to even consider signing another NY contract. If I’m reading your post correctly, though, it sounds like you are a successful, slow writing, self-publishing author. I have set my expectations extremely low for when I eventually self-publish, but this gives me hope that I might meet my goals over time.

    Thanks for this post. I have it bookmarked and will link others here.

  11. Two books a year! That’s production line stuff. When do you revise, edit and revise again? Or are these mini books and not full-length novels? Intriguing – or are you a total insomniac with no other calls on your time. Please reveal your secret as the industry norm/target for most experienced writers is around 1000 words a day. And there are still the revisions, edits and proofreading to follow..

  12. @tony berry:

    They’re full length novels, landing somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000 words. It takes me about 2-3 months to write a book, and about 3-4 months to revise and edit. I know people who do 1,000 words a day. I know people who do about 9,000 words a day. Speed varies substantially.

    There is no industry norm or target, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t met a large number of authors.

    Two books a year is about as slow as you can be as a relatively new author writing genre romance, and still expect to break out. Once you’ve hit a certain break-out stage, I think you can be a little slower. But two is slow in the self-publishing world.

  13. As usual, Courtney, this is awesome stuff! Thank you for being so detailed. I’m going to share with my trade published friends who ask about SPing, because I don’t know what it’s like to make that decision – I’m the other side of the coin, the writer who SPed from the very beginning.

    Ros, in addition to Marie Force’s loop, I’ve also found Facebook and Romance Divas a great way to connect with other authors. Actually, Divas first, which led to a slew of new Facebook friends. And kboards, absolutely.

  14. I think I’m the reason the whole commentary came to a head this week. 🙂 But I wanted to say THANK YOU. This is such a great, well-balanced post. I’m straddling both lines and there are some days that I want to self-publish ALL THE BOOKS and there are days that I want to hand it all over to someone else, money be damned. But I’m super happy straddling the line and I hate that it turns into West Side Story with sides and dance-offs and such.

    I constantly say that not all paths are equal, but I’m glad to see it said here, too! Everyone brings different skills to the table, and like you said, you have to know what’s best for YOU. 🙂

  15. Courtney,

    Thanks as always for laying it out there, and in such an erudite, yet no bullshit fashion. So appreciate that about you.

    One comment I will add for the new to self-published is that choosing to pub in an easily searchable genre helps A LOT. I’ve started self-pubbing in the niche of sci fi rom, and also pubbed a long novella to beguile new readers into my sci fi world. It’s not only working to sell my new sci fi rom series, but my back list at Samhain.

    And yes, I did already have traction as a best-selling sfr author, so I don’t mean to sound like my way is the simple way to success. I just know it’s working for me.

    As the Kit Rocha writing team mentioned recently on their blog, there are many quiet successes who don’t make ‘the lists’ but are doing well.

  16. Actually, Jill Myles, if we could settle this with a quick few choruses of ‘I want to be in America’, it would be AWESOME! I’ll bring the frilly skirts! Seriously, thank you Courtney for this thoughtful and sensible contribution to the discussion. One thing I know for sure is that shouting at each other and digging bigger trenches isn’t going to help anybody.

  17. Even as a reader I find this topic fascinating, and there seems to be a parallel in my own life. My husband and I began managing our own investments (individual stocks, no mutual funds) about 20 years ago. It was also facilitated by technology changes (lower cost, web-based brokerages, financial information available online, etc). We were also told that the professionals’ fees were justified by the fact that they would always outperform the individual, because of their vast experience and the immense resources available to them. We also have had to continually educate ourselves, and rely on our own good judgement. Is this path for everyone? No, you really have to work at it, and everyone wants to – they have other priorities in their lives. But we were motivated by the thought that nobody else cares about our finances and our future as much as we do.

    Even if we eventually decide to scale back the time we put in, and go with an advisor or put all our investments in index funds, we’d still be better educated and more involved because of our experiences.

  18. At this point, I’m published under another name, but trying to decide which way to go–and for what pieces–for my forthcoming romance work. As someone who doesn’t feel the call of historicals, the numbers are less clear.

  19. Thanks for the excellent advice. So far I’ve learned by going out there. First book–fantasy with horror elements. Wonderful cover, but not reaching its true audience. Second book–Regency, sold a few hundred copies, but the cover actually shows a scene from the book! Learned how *not* to do print formatting with that one. Third book–sword and sorcery, selling rather better than I’d thought. Fourth book–in rewrite, fantasy romance, but I expect it to sell even better.

    Note: all but the Regency are the first books of different series(es). Apparently the six book series is one of my natural lengths. Now, to ditch the day job and whale on the rest of them.

    But I’m getting up there (will be 60 this year). I don’t have *time* to spend years in agent and publisher hunting, I keep spreadsheets on all the projects, have a really good eye for covers (have seen some Truly Ghastly commercially printed covers, though obviously not yours), and um, a rather large number of books to write.

    Thanks for the encouragement, as well.

  20. This post could not have come at a better time for me. I recently let all my NY contracts run out so I could get out of my non-compete clauses and try self publishing my new series. This was a big risk for me, but one I felt comfortable taking given my own professional situation and talents (I was also a graphic designer and programmer before becoming a writer!). That was my absolutely favorite part of your post – that self publishing is a decision that needs to be made based on your own talents and situation.

    I’ve been reading a lot of self publishing blogs in preparation for making the jump, and there’s a lot of “if you choose NY, you are stupid” kind of talk floating around. I don’t think that’s always the case, and I really appreciate that you laid your reasons out so clearly and evenhandedly. Thank you so very much for this. I’ll be linking to it often!!

    – Rachel

  21. Quite possibly the best blog post on this topic that I’ve ever seen. And yeah, I know that sounds like a spambot response, but I mean it. Brilliant stuff here. And very even-handed.

  22. The most intelligent, calm, studied response I’ve read to the food fight we’ve witnessed by ‘professionals’ in the industry. Thanks for restoring my faith in authors, and for your wisdom.

  23. Great insights. You do a good job pointing out that there are pros and cons to each. Everybody has different preferences and different goals. Moving to self-publishing can work out great for some and leave others wondering what they did. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.

  24. You’re an absolute STAR Courtney. You’re posts are always so informative and helpful – some of the best I’ve seen. I’m traditionally published and I do like the support and interaction I get from my editor(s) but that’s not to say I wouldn’t consider self-publishing down the track. I’ve got an awful lot to learn though – I’m a mere babe in arms when it comes to the internet and find myself feeling overwhelmed at times by all the information. Your blog is a way of cutting through a lot of what’s out there and I really appreciate your candour and approach to writing and publishing. I wish you all success and thank you.

  25. I really appreciate the time you took to write this, Courtney. And you’re so right about comments. I’ve picked up so much from the comments people write.

    Susanne

  26. Standing on the edge of the publishing canyon, trying to decide whether to self publish or start sending queries. Still a zillion questions but this is all extremely helpful input as I’m deciding which way to leap! Thanks.

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