Self-publishing is best fiction wise for things that don't fit into an established genre box, which is where most of my work lies. Whereas what you write wouldn't be too much out of place in the lineup of DAW in the '70s...
I like good books, valuable stories, writers who move me. I don't care if a book is "branded", I don't think that's what makes or breaks quality. And if a reader judges books by the name of the publisher or the packaging, then that is not the reader for me. And as a reader, I want to find great stories wherever they are.
Self-publishing is tedious and stressfull, but it's also expensive. Expensive is, of course, relative, but if you want to sell books you have to advertise and that costs. It's the problem indie publishers face too, the sheer volume of books published every minute means to be seen at all, you have to market your 'product', and that's before you even promote it. I think the prejudice against self-published is less for some types of fiction than others. Most genre fiction (which the literary establishment rather despises anyway) doesn't suffer too much.
There were a lot of people selling self published books at the World Science Fiction Convention last August. As well as several small publishers. I bought from all of them! It helps to know the writer and their work. Or to chat to them at a stall and flick through the book. OR of course, to have read their work on Substack or Wordpress!!
Small presses don’t have marketing budgets so ( especially in poetry) the writer gets that job…..
The only problem I have with self-published work, is that there’s so much of it. It’s so hard to find the good stuff, (I’m talking about Amazon) especially as what’s pushed up front are the best-sellers and the books that have bought a slot among the best-sellers.
Technically, marketing is what the publisher does. Authors promote their books. But promotion can be done through social media, book signings, giving interviews. I would never pay for advertising if the publisher wasn’t shelling out for anything What marketing and promotion they’re prepared to do is a question to sort out with the publisher before signing up. If they’re not going to do anything, self-publish.
I concur with all of this. My entry into self publishing last year was premature as I have been plagued by revisions of all kinds. From the cover design to now, reediting the manuscript after I hired another proofreader to read it again for him to find glaring grammatical errors that my first editor missed. That and marketing is expensive. Something I will be getting back into again once I complete all of these new edits once again. Who knew? I certainly have learned a lot about what not to do on this first book so I don't repeat on the second book or third and so on.
Whether online or in print, self-publishing is the way forward. You'll get a lot more readers on Substack than you would sitting on a bottom shelf in Waterstones Croydon. You can keep costs low - most platforms don't charge, even Amazon only levies a charge on what you actually sell - and margins are therefore higher. That's why so many established journalists have switched from magazines and newspapers to platforms such as this one.
Outside of their best-sellers list, the heritage publishing industry is dying - the woke-DEI stranglehold has them in a death grip. Sure, if a publisher offers you a good deal or a decent advance, go for it, but in my experience (I've had three agents and two publishers), no-one in the industry has the passion, drive and creative vision that you do right now.
The tough part is promoting your own work, salesman be extremely slow at first, but there are podcasts and TV channels who will advertise for just a few hundred pounds, a lot of magazines who will give you interviews and feature your work for free, and of course, as your readership grows and word-of-mouth spreads, it becomes self-sustaining.
I have gone through the experience of self publishing my first book through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing last April. It was a tedious process for me. I'm now planning to publish my second book, an anthology of my poems.
But, I am not really satisfied with the sales.
I don't know an easy route to increase my sales as I do not have any marketing budget. Also since I live in India, Amazon.in do not have any printing facility in India to deliver to Indian customers. So they print the book abroad and ship to India making the book unnecessarily expensive for the Indian customers.
However, unknown authors like me, with ambition to see my writing in print have no other recourse.
I look at it this way. It’s real publishing. Publishing houses mess up all the time. How many passed on Harry Potter? Some of the worst books I’ve ever read were by publishing houses. And some of the best selling books out there (Colleen Hoover or Lucy Score and many others) are indie. Publishing houses take your creative control and most of your money for very little return. Indie is where it’s at.
As an indie author, even my closest friends don’t take me seriously when I mention I am indie. They almost act like they pity me. It’s frustrating to be sure
I was working with a legitimate publisher with my other penname, and I terminated proceedings. Going solo is a million times better for me. I love having my own business, employing the editors and designers I gel with, and working to my schedule. Plus, I make more money! I believe that as long as you produce a professional book, going down the indie or traditional route makes absolutely no difference. No one even needs to know.
Let me say first CONGRATS! Before you even finish this process and put it out for consumption, you've done a great job. Celebrate it. When I released my first novel, and it was a passion project, I realized that I achieved something. And while the formatting was a bear, the revisions endless (and you will still have typos), and the marketing grueling and uncomfortable, you will have an ISBN. If you submit it for a US Copyright, your book will be the same as the latest John Grisham book. In the stacks of the Library of Congress, it is the same. There is no designation between international bestsellers and your book. So yes, you are an author. You have a book. Celebrate. Then begin the next book and make yourself a consistent author. Good job.
Fingers crossed!🩶 I’m hoping for the best. If I cover the money I paid for professional editing, I’ll consider it a win. I’ll invest that money into more pro editing, to publish another book.😊
You raise an interesting point. We've all accepted that indie music recording is legitimate, so why do we have this notion that traditional, or more accurately establishment book publishing is the only legitimate option. I would imagine an artist would like to have their name under a big label no less than an author would like theirs under a big publisher. It's plain that indie records have a FAR higher standard of art, both in musicality and poetry, and you get that wonderful diverse array of instrumentation, technique, and song structures which comes when art is free. Can literature, too, offer a higher level of art, creativity, and technical brilliance if indie publishing becomes as universally accepted as indie recording?
The slower the better! The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took about 30 years altogether, if memory serves. Add the Silmarillion and Tolkien's three major published works took around 45 years altogether to complete.
If Substack ever gets into the self publishing game, I swear on all things holy, I'm switching to Substack Publishing in a heartbeat. Quality over quantity.
“self-publishing was the equivalent of cosy home-birth experience…,” this has me laughing out loud! I love the analogy.
I also chose to self-publish because I love the flexibility and control. I stopped thinking of myself as being “less than” a trad publisher the minute I began marketing, selling, formatting, social media’ing…all the things. I imagined the work would be similar if I was trad published with regard to the web creation, marketing and selling part, and to me, that’s the most difficult part of the job and I have to do it anyway. I thought, why not just do it myself? And so I did…
Self-publishing is best fiction wise for things that don't fit into an established genre box, which is where most of my work lies. Whereas what you write wouldn't be too much out of place in the lineup of DAW in the '70s...
I like good books, valuable stories, writers who move me. I don't care if a book is "branded", I don't think that's what makes or breaks quality. And if a reader judges books by the name of the publisher or the packaging, then that is not the reader for me. And as a reader, I want to find great stories wherever they are.
Self-publishing is tedious and stressfull, but it's also expensive. Expensive is, of course, relative, but if you want to sell books you have to advertise and that costs. It's the problem indie publishers face too, the sheer volume of books published every minute means to be seen at all, you have to market your 'product', and that's before you even promote it. I think the prejudice against self-published is less for some types of fiction than others. Most genre fiction (which the literary establishment rather despises anyway) doesn't suffer too much.
There were a lot of people selling self published books at the World Science Fiction Convention last August. As well as several small publishers. I bought from all of them! It helps to know the writer and their work. Or to chat to them at a stall and flick through the book. OR of course, to have read their work on Substack or Wordpress!!
Small presses don’t have marketing budgets so ( especially in poetry) the writer gets that job…..
https://palewellpress.co.uk/bookstore/lost-wellbeing/mftr/
😎 🙃🤣
The only problem I have with self-published work, is that there’s so much of it. It’s so hard to find the good stuff, (I’m talking about Amazon) especially as what’s pushed up front are the best-sellers and the books that have bought a slot among the best-sellers.
Too true!
Authors have to market their traditionally published books too. Only they get a smaller cut of the royalties
Technically, marketing is what the publisher does. Authors promote their books. But promotion can be done through social media, book signings, giving interviews. I would never pay for advertising if the publisher wasn’t shelling out for anything What marketing and promotion they’re prepared to do is a question to sort out with the publisher before signing up. If they’re not going to do anything, self-publish.
I concur with all of this. My entry into self publishing last year was premature as I have been plagued by revisions of all kinds. From the cover design to now, reediting the manuscript after I hired another proofreader to read it again for him to find glaring grammatical errors that my first editor missed. That and marketing is expensive. Something I will be getting back into again once I complete all of these new edits once again. Who knew? I certainly have learned a lot about what not to do on this first book so I don't repeat on the second book or third and so on.
Whether online or in print, self-publishing is the way forward. You'll get a lot more readers on Substack than you would sitting on a bottom shelf in Waterstones Croydon. You can keep costs low - most platforms don't charge, even Amazon only levies a charge on what you actually sell - and margins are therefore higher. That's why so many established journalists have switched from magazines and newspapers to platforms such as this one.
Outside of their best-sellers list, the heritage publishing industry is dying - the woke-DEI stranglehold has them in a death grip. Sure, if a publisher offers you a good deal or a decent advance, go for it, but in my experience (I've had three agents and two publishers), no-one in the industry has the passion, drive and creative vision that you do right now.
The tough part is promoting your own work, salesman be extremely slow at first, but there are podcasts and TV channels who will advertise for just a few hundred pounds, a lot of magazines who will give you interviews and feature your work for free, and of course, as your readership grows and word-of-mouth spreads, it becomes self-sustaining.
As long as the money’s real, the haters can go climb their thumbs.
Kathrine,
I have gone through the experience of self publishing my first book through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing last April. It was a tedious process for me. I'm now planning to publish my second book, an anthology of my poems.
But, I am not really satisfied with the sales.
I don't know an easy route to increase my sales as I do not have any marketing budget. Also since I live in India, Amazon.in do not have any printing facility in India to deliver to Indian customers. So they print the book abroad and ship to India making the book unnecessarily expensive for the Indian customers.
However, unknown authors like me, with ambition to see my writing in print have no other recourse.
Thanks.
I look at it this way. It’s real publishing. Publishing houses mess up all the time. How many passed on Harry Potter? Some of the worst books I’ve ever read were by publishing houses. And some of the best selling books out there (Colleen Hoover or Lucy Score and many others) are indie. Publishing houses take your creative control and most of your money for very little return. Indie is where it’s at.
As an indie author, even my closest friends don’t take me seriously when I mention I am indie. They almost act like they pity me. It’s frustrating to be sure
I was working with a legitimate publisher with my other penname, and I terminated proceedings. Going solo is a million times better for me. I love having my own business, employing the editors and designers I gel with, and working to my schedule. Plus, I make more money! I believe that as long as you produce a professional book, going down the indie or traditional route makes absolutely no difference. No one even needs to know.
Let me say first CONGRATS! Before you even finish this process and put it out for consumption, you've done a great job. Celebrate it. When I released my first novel, and it was a passion project, I realized that I achieved something. And while the formatting was a bear, the revisions endless (and you will still have typos), and the marketing grueling and uncomfortable, you will have an ISBN. If you submit it for a US Copyright, your book will be the same as the latest John Grisham book. In the stacks of the Library of Congress, it is the same. There is no designation between international bestsellers and your book. So yes, you are an author. You have a book. Celebrate. Then begin the next book and make yourself a consistent author. Good job.
.... lets cross our fingers a few readers discover us, I dare say, even buy a book?
Fingers crossed!🩶 I’m hoping for the best. If I cover the money I paid for professional editing, I’ll consider it a win. I’ll invest that money into more pro editing, to publish another book.😊
You raise an interesting point. We've all accepted that indie music recording is legitimate, so why do we have this notion that traditional, or more accurately establishment book publishing is the only legitimate option. I would imagine an artist would like to have their name under a big label no less than an author would like theirs under a big publisher. It's plain that indie records have a FAR higher standard of art, both in musicality and poetry, and you get that wonderful diverse array of instrumentation, technique, and song structures which comes when art is free. Can literature, too, offer a higher level of art, creativity, and technical brilliance if indie publishing becomes as universally accepted as indie recording?
Thank you! Exactly! Maybe it will be accepted as equal to trad pub one day, but the process for literature is slower? We’ll see…
The slower the better! The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took about 30 years altogether, if memory serves. Add the Silmarillion and Tolkien's three major published works took around 45 years altogether to complete.
Actually correction: the Silmarillion was edited and published by Christopher Tolkien after his father had died.
If Substack ever gets into the self publishing game, I swear on all things holy, I'm switching to Substack Publishing in a heartbeat. Quality over quantity.
Book babies, love it. I’ve done it four times. Very satisfying.
“self-publishing was the equivalent of cosy home-birth experience…,” this has me laughing out loud! I love the analogy.
I also chose to self-publish because I love the flexibility and control. I stopped thinking of myself as being “less than” a trad publisher the minute I began marketing, selling, formatting, social media’ing…all the things. I imagined the work would be similar if I was trad published with regard to the web creation, marketing and selling part, and to me, that’s the most difficult part of the job and I have to do it anyway. I thought, why not just do it myself? And so I did…