wild ink

I’ll admit that once upon a time I was a snob about self-publishing. Back then I believed it was the ultimate hubris for self-published writers to call themselves authors. Self-published books seemed to be popping up every time I turned around, and I thought of them as wasted trees sacrificed to the egos of those unable to accept that they couldn’t write well enough to find a “real” publisher.

My prejudice was not unfounded. I’ve seen self-published books written at the level of “roses are red, violets are blue”—only without the roses or violets. They stink. Okay, so that’s the bad side.

There’s another side though. Sometimes dedicated, talented, skilled writers cannot get the attention of an agent or editor, or don’t want the hassles of getting published through traditional channels. For such writers, self-publishing is the way to go. More and more people are selecting this option, and there are now tens of thousands of new self-published titles every year.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Publishing

Advantages

You won’t have to wait years until your book is available. Whereas traditional publishers have a tight rotation of books scheduled years in advance, self-publishing can happen in a matter of weeks after the book is written. If it’s important to you to give your teenage son or niece or friend a book you’ve created—and before that person is 35—this can be quite a motivating factor.

You won’t have to worry about submitting and being rejected, submitting and being rejected, submitting . . .

You’ll be in charge of your own work from beginning to end.

If your book sells well, you get to keep the profits.

Disadvantages

Because the only screening process necessary for a book to be self-published is the writer’s wallet, plenty of self-published books are terrible. You will, therefore, have to find a way to set your work apart if you want to create a market for it.

You won’t have the advice and guidance of a professional editor, unless you hire someone. The person you hire might not have the expertise of someone working directly with current titles in an active marketplace.

Your book is unlikely to appear in retail stores. Distribution channels for self-published books are lousy. Traditional review services do not accept self-published titles.

You’ll have to pay for everything, and you may not recover your initial investment. This is fine if your ambition is not about cash.

You’ll be in charge of your own marketing plan. Without established distribution channels, this is much tougher than most people anticipate. You’ll have to go out and find your audience.

As a self-publisher, you will oversee all steps of the publishing process yourself, hiring help as needed while you prepare your book for print or e-readers. There are lots of resources to help you, including manuals (some of which are listed in Chapter 6) and self-publishing associations.

If you go with a print format, you’ll need to decide on a printer and a print quantity. In the past, both traditional publishers and self-publishers had to agree to fairly large print runs in order to get a reasonably priced book. (The larger the print run, the lower the price per book.) Printing just a few copies of a book was simply not cost effective. Now, however, print on demand (POD) technology allows you to order small quantities of books as you need them. The price of a book is still higher in small quantities than in large quantities, but it’s not so exorbitant that it’s completely out of range.

POD has caused many changes in the world of publishing, and those changes are still taking place. Many companies provide POD services, but there are important differences between them. Just because someone sets up as a POD company doesn’t meant that company knows how to put out a quality book. If your printed book has a lousy binding that falls apart after one reading, or if the ink on the pages is badly prepared, or if the cover is suboptimal, that book will send the wrong message about you as an author.

Some POD companies simply provide printing services. But some try to present themselves as actual publishers and persuade writers they’ve landed traditional contracts when signing up. (Traditional publishing companies don’t charge you a cent when they agree to publish your book.) Then these companies proceed to give you a “royalty”—which actually means that they take a royalty for a book that is entirely your own investment.

It is very important to research your options carefully and to know exactly what you are getting into before you sign on with a POD publisher. You may be able to find something that suits your situation perfectly, but please proceed with caution.

A copublisher furnishes you with editing, book design and distribution, and other services customarily provided by a publisher, but you split the costs. In other words, you foot part of the bill for developing and printing your book or formatting it for e-readers. How much of that bill you cover is negotiated by individual publishers. How much your royalty rate increases as a result of your investment is also a negotiable point.

Copublishing can be a great solution for small publishers and authors alike. But again, please do your homework here. There are many things to keep in mind, as this interview with Fiona Veitch Smith of Crafty Publishing explains.

Bio: Fiona Veitch Smith is a writer, editor, and university lecturer based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. She runs an editorial advice service through The Crafty Writer (http://www.thecraftywriter.com) and also offers free online courses in creative fiction and nonfiction writing. She recently branched out into publishing through the Crafty Publishing imprint.

What are the defining differences between traditional publishing, self-publishing, print-on-demand services, and copublishing?

A traditional publisher will foot the whole bill and take full responsibility for the editing and production of your book. The publisher will also market and distribute your book, although you will still be expected to participate in promoting it. You will be paid royalties on the sale of a book and in most cases will receive a monetary advance on your royalty once a contract has been signed. In other words, in the first instance, they pay you.

If you are a self-publisher you do everything yourself. You pay for and arrange the production of the book and are fully responsible for editing the text. You also take it upon yourself to market and distribute your book to bookshops or direct to the public. Distributing the book to bookshops is the most difficult aspect of self-publishing and what makes traditional publishing, along with its quality control, the first-choice option.

A POD company is essentially a printer who has an online presence. The only difference is that most POD companies give you an option to link up with a distribution wholesaler to make it easier for you to get your books into shops. However, the onus is still on you to contact the shop and ask them to stock it. A POD company will also virtually warehouse your stock so you don’t have boxes shoved under the bed and will post out copies to customers “on demand.” They do not do any marketing for you beyond perhaps featuring you on their website. You foot the whole bill and are responsible for editorial quality control.

Copublishing is when you and the publisher split the costs, but all of the “traditional” functions of a publisher are provided. Splitting the costs usually takes the form of an advance stock purchase, which you can then resell to recoup your costs. In other words, you commit to buy x-amount of copies of the book. This will guarantee that the publisher can cover the basic costs. Increasingly, formerly traditional publishers are offering copublishing deals to new authors whom otherwise they feel are too big a financial risk.

How do writers distinguish between quality POD companies and vanity publishers masquerading as traditional publishers?

A POD company should be up front in what it is offering. “Big name” companies such as Lulu, Lightning Source, and Smashwords do not claim to be publishers. If you put any of these company names into a search engine, the company blurb will feature key words such as “self-publishing,” “printing,” and “distribution.”

If you are unsure about a company, try this simple test: If you cannot tell in under 10 seconds whether or not it’s a POD company or a publisher (whether reputable or not), then there’s a problem; they should be that up front about it.

There are a host of online writing communities where fellow writers share their horror stories about vanity publishers. Again, do a search with the key words: “Company Name” and “vanity publishers.” If you are looking for a traditional publisher rather than a POD company or copublisher, beware of anyone who advertises that they are looking for new writers. A traditional publisher does not have to do this. You should also look at the royalty percentages on offer: a traditional publisher will not offer anything beyond 15% (more likely 7%–10%).

See if the publisher also offers traditional publishing contracts. If not, this limits your career progression from copublishing into mainstream publishing. If the publisher’s traditional wing is listed in one of the reputable market yearbooks (such as Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, Writers’ Handbook, or Writers’ Market), you have a better chance of getting good service, as they will have a reputation to protect.

Look for evidence that they can and will distribute your book into bookshops, not just “making it available” to bookshops on request. Anyone can do that if they have a registered ISBN, and it is no more than you would do yourself as a self-publisher.

Check out the publicity surrounding previous titles (again, ask your favorite search engine). If there is nothing beyond the company and author’s own websites, I would question their marketing effectiveness.

Consider the bottom line. How many books do they expect you to purchase? Can you honestly sell that many through your own contacts? I would think twice about anything over 700. In addition, make sure you are being offered a minimum of 35% in royalties to compensate for your financial risk.

If you’ve decided to self-publish, it makes a lot of sense to put your book up for sale in online bookstores. This involves getting it professionally formatted for e-readers. There are companies out there that will charge you to do this—and then charge you a perpetual royalty rate as high as 50%, just for having done the formatting. Other companies will simply format your book for an hourly fee. (It does take time and meticulous attention to do it well.) For more information, read this interview with self-publishing expert Brian Schwartz.

Bio: “Authorpreneur” Brian Schwartz is an award-winning author and creator of the 50 Interviews series, which has published more than 20 titles in the last 2 years. He launched ePubConversions.com in 2010 to assist other authors and publishers to take advantage of the shift in technology and get their own books published to the major eBook marketplaces.

You have self-published both print and eBooks with success. What can you tell us about the difference between print and eBooks? Is it important to offer both options?

I advise authors that an eBook should be their first priority. As small publishers without a major distributor to get us into bookstores, our eBooks outsell our print books. Although an eBook has start-up costs for layout and cover design, once those costs are earned out in sales, there is no further overhead to contend with. Print books have upfront costs of layout and design, and also require the ongoing expenses of printing. So I encourage anyone considering publishing to first get their book online as soon as they can. If they can manage to provide readers with a print option as well, they will tend to sell more of both. It’s about gaining visibility in as many places as possible. Word of mouth is still the most effective form of marketing, and the more places and formats available, the better. For the print option, I recommend print-on-demand so they aren’t stuck with a garage full of books.

What’s the importance of a platform for e-publishers? What are some examples of a successful platform?

If you’re a nonfiction author, a platform is vital, but it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. It’s easier to build a platform on a topic once you have written a book on that topic. However, the more you can do to establish yourself as a leader in your field, even before your book comes out, the further along you’ll be once the book is launched.

For a fiction author, having a platform and online presence helps you stay in front of your readers if you use that platform to give them more of what they want—your story and your characters.

There’s no shortage of people who will offer to help you build your platform and will be eager to take your money. But I would caution writers that no matter how much time and money you put into building your platform, it won’t matter much unless you’ve chosen a reachable niche that isn’t already saturated.

Do you advise self-published writers to hire an editor before offering their work for sale?

Absolutely. You’ll get bad reviews if you release a book that isn’t well edited. Nothing will kill your sales faster than negative reviews.

What do writers need to know about formatting an eBook? What are their options, and what are the drawbacks and benefits of each?

It depends if you’re still writing a book or you’ve already written a book and now want to get it converted to e-format. If you have used a common word processor program such as MS Word or Open Office, it’ll be much easier to get it ready for the eBook formats, which are essentially straight text with some simple html coding to define the styling.

The challenge with a book that has already been published in print is that all the formatting needs to be redone for the e-reader format. This process involves stripping out the headers, footers, page numbers, and images, and making sure all the text in each paragraph is continuous so it’ll reflow properly on an e-reader. When my company does this conversion, we create a hyperlinked table of contents and redo any footnotes or endnotes so they are hyperlinked as well. It’s a fairly involved process, which is one of the reasons why the adoption of eBooks by publishers hasn’t been faster—it’s essentially the same as creating a new layout for an existing book. There are some tools that conversion specialists use to help speed up the process, but for the most part, it’s still painstaking.

Anyone who has used any of the “auto-conversion” tools will tell you the end result is far from pretty and doesn’t remotely resemble the print edition. When eBooks first came out, readers were willing to put up with the lack of formatting, but now they won’t buy a book that is improperly formatted.

Still wondering whether self-publishing would suit you? Here’s something else to put into the mix. Following are interviews with self-published authors of YA fiction who have agreed to share their experience and expertise with you.

Chapter 10

Self-Publishing
Your Book

Chapter 10

Self-Publishing Your Book

Self-Publishing
Your Book