I am a failed writer in the sense that I have never had my fiction professionally published. These posts, which will run on most Fridays, are an attempt to keep myself creatively motivated and just generally discuss the creative process from someone trying to figure it out. I genuinely love the process of making things — any things, from writing to drawing to music to woodworking to baking. Maybe my own failures can be a source of amusement or interest to others.
Last week I talked about all of the reasons that I thought that self-publishing would not be the correct choice for me. Long story short, the cost and the fact that I have no real outside validation that anything I write is of sufficient quality to justify imposing it on the world keep me plugging away at the traditional publishing. But there are good arguments for self-publishing.
Publishing is close to a monopoly industry. There are fewer imprints than there were in the recent past, making it harder to sell to a traditional publisher. Some genres, such as romance and crime, do seem to do better as self-published works than traditionally published works. Most traditionally published works do not make a lot of money for the author. Unless you are a lead book, your advance will tend to be low, with royalties are around 10-25%, depending on the type of book and contract. Since self-published royalties tend to be around 45-75%, you tend to make less per book as a traditionally published author. Now, you don’t pay for editing, covers, or marketing if you are traditionally published. But if you aren’t a lead title, you don’t get a lot of marketing spend from your publisher, meaning you aren’t likely to sell many copies anyway. If you have to market yourself regardless, why not reap the higher rewards of self-publishing?
The contracts in traditional publishing, especially if you are not a lead author, tend to gobble as many rights as possible — foreign, audio books, etc. — and then not produce on those rights, costing you potential money. And of course, everything takes a very long time in traditional publishing, in part because it is so consolidated. One of the ways publishers make money is by squeezing the workforce. Everyone in a publishing house is being asked to do too much work for too little money and as a result everyone but the lead title authors get less attention than they deserve. And even they probably don’t get as much attention as they should.
If you can sell your books, then, the rewards of self-publishing are generally greater for most authors. And I have to admit it is tempting. I do have this small platform. I could do something as simple as serialize the books and offer them as rewards to paying subscribers or sell them once the serialization is complete. But the phrase “if you can sell your books” is doing a lot of work in this paragraph.
As I noted last week, it will cost at least two or three thousand dollars to put out a decent product, and there is no promise that my writing is good enough to sell. While the rewards of self-publishing are real compared to traditional publishing, so are the costs and the risks.
At the end of the day, publishing is a hard business, no matter what route you take. All the paths are difficult and none of them are clearly better than the rest. All you can do is keep writing and hope you are one day good enough, and lucky enough, to find an audience.
Weekly Word Count
About 300. I wrote more but ended up removing a lot of it. This scene is kicking my ass up and down the block.