Self Publishing is Real! (Now what?)

At some point in the last two years self-publishing became accepted as a real, and even preferable, route over the traditional path. That’s great news, but it’s only the first step. What we need now is for a self-publishing ecosystem to evolve that makes self-publishing a more efficient, enjoyable and effective route for authors of all types.

How best to describe what I mean by that? Well, let’s start by describing what the traditional route looked like during the golden years, and compare it to what the self-publishing experience is like today. Back then, here’s what an author could look forward to in a successful publishing partnership:

1.  An advance to tide the author over while the book was written

2. An editor to help her improve her book

3.  A proofreader to polish it up

4.  A designer to package it appropriately

5. A marketing team to put together and execute an effective marketing plan, including , planning book tours

6. A marketing team to promote the book at trade shows and sign up book stores to take books

7. Reimbursement for book tour expenses

8. A printer

9. A business department to manage the printing, get an ISBN number, do the paperwork to get the product into all the right distribution channels, and then manage the delivery, sales, and returns

10. A book-keeper to plot sales against the advance, and forward royalties on regular, if lengthy, intervals

Now let’s look at the current state of the self publishing world and see how an author would go about handling the same needs. The following services are readily available in the marketplace:

2. An editor to help her improve her book

3.  A proofreader to polish it up

4.  A designer to package it appropriately

If you’d like to buy these services a la carte, the problem here isn’t supply, but how to go about it. The internet is crowded with people ready, willing and (sometimes) able to provide these services, and many of them can provide great results. But like all other aspects of self-publishing, it can be time-consuming and overwhelming to figure out where and how to go about signing up people who will do timely, professional work, and you may find that you’re not happy with the results (I had a great experience with my cover designer, but a terrible experience with an editor/proofreader).

5. A marketing team to put together and execute an effective marketing plan, plan book tours and more

There are endless numbers of firms and people selling services in this area, although many of them will only be helpful with on-line marketing. But it’s very difficult for an author to figure out what services they really need, which ones are likely to actually be effective, and most of all, whether the person offering the services is very good at marketing, or whether they’re just selling a package of expensive and pointless services.

8. A printer

9. A business department to manage the printing, get an ISBN number, do the paperwork to get the product into all the right distribution channels, and then manage the delivery, sales, and returns

10. A book keeper to plot sales against the advance, and forward royalties on regular, if long, intervals

At one end of the spectrum, you can decide to limit yourself to an eBook and low-end quality paperback format using CreateSpace and Amazon and accomplish the whole shebang in about an hour (if everything goes smoothly), which is nothing less than miraculous.

At the other end, however, if you want to do high quality print as well as eBook versions, and take advantage of the full range of on-line and brick and mortar distribution channels, then you’ve got two choices: either do a lot of research and go through a very tedious doing everything yourself, or figure out which among the scores of package publishers out there you’d like to use. These come in multiple flavors that have varying mixes of services and charge varying prices (you can read more about print on demand publishers here and here).

So what can’t an author obtain in the open market? That would be the following:

1.  An advance to tide her over while the book is written

6. A marketing team to promote the book at trade shows and sign up book stores to take books

7. Reimbursement for book tour expenses

Happily, that’s not the end of the world. But let’s go through each of these anyway to see how the self-published author’s existence could be improved.

Number one  almost doesn’t count as a differentiator any more, because only best-selling authors seem to be getting meaningful advances now. But it’s still a problem in an absolute sense, since writing a great book in your spare time is no easy task. And given the realities of self publishing marketing today, you’d better make that three or four books, and not just one. So while it’s now very possible for a self-published author to some day quite their day job and become a full-time author, there’s quite a lot of work and investment to put in first.

Number 6 does matter, since the majority of print book sales still occur through brick and mortar book stores. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anyone you can sign up in this department, meaning that you’re on your own. Given that there’s only so much an individual author can do in this department, that means that you’ll need to hope that you’re successful enough in your own marketing that book stores begin ordering your book on their own (or their patrons ask them to order it).

Happily, with over a billion English-speaking people in the world, an author can be very successful without ever approaching the book store channel at all. This is a huge and empowering change in the publishing landscape, without which nothing would have really changed.

Number 7 is less important than it used to be, since there are far fewer independent radio stations and newspaper book reviewers than their used to be, but it highlights the fact that you will need to do all of the new types of promotion yourself. And that is a very, very time-consuming process.

<@Carradee reminds me in the first comment below about something that I should have added, so here’s an addition to address that miss:>

In fact, an enterprising author may actually be able to cover at least their expenses to create a book using KickStarter or one of the other quickly-multiplying “crowd sourcing” sites that have sprung up, many of which have been used by authors to raise $5,000 to $15,000, or even more. An already successful author might be able to pull in an advance as well.

More importantly than the money, however, may be the market boost that you can expect to receive from those that buy into a successful campaign. Not only will they receive free eBook copies of your book if they contribute at the assigned level, but you can ask them to write a review, tell their friends, post to FaceBook, and anything else they can think of to spread the word about “their” author. When they do, you may get a larger boost from their efforts than the money you raise from them to spend on paid marketing services.

That said, of course, there’s more to running a successful crowd sourcing campaign than simply throwing up a page, so take a look at how many such efforts hit their numbers (some), how many fail (many), and what the differences appear to be between the two.

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So where does that bring us out? Clearly, the most important changes have already occurred, with the result that just about anyone has an equal shot at becoming a successful author, which is rather amazing indeed.

So, notwithstanding the intro graphic, clearly we’re not in Best of Times/Worst of Times territory. But it’s also not yet good enough, due to the following;

1.  Figuring out how to self-publish takes a lot of time and effort. There’s lots of information, but much of it is a mile wide and an inch deep. A lot is also unrealistic and makes it sound easier than it is.

2.  Putting out a quality product is going to cost you a few thousand dollars. But putting out a CreateSpace version using a template cover and skipping a proofreader will likely cost you your chance of ever being taken seriously.

3.  If you want to write something other than genre fiction in volume (and multiple volumes a year), then your chances of success are drastically reduced. How reduced? Take a look at the genre column in this list of 804 successful, self-published authors.

4.  Most importantly of all, you will be a customer, rather than a partner, of everyone you work with. If you are successful in locating experienced, professional people, you should get good service (e.g., from an editor, cover designer, or proofreader). On the other hand, when it comes to a package publisher, a social media consultant, or a promotional firm, you may find that you’ve spent a lot of money and gotten very little of value at all.

So here’s what I think needs to evolve so that authors – and readers – can enjoy a robust marketplace of quality, creative work:

1.  A more ordered marketplace whereby authors can find and purchase the quality services they need.

2.  A new breed of service providers that provides real and savvy marketing value, rather than people who just go through a punch list of often outmoded standard items (the most notoriously useless of which is the press release, which isn’t even worth lining a parrot cage with).

3. A new breed of publishing partners that would take all the burdens off the shoulders of authors again, allowing them to get back to writing. These publishers would have fair contracts, and would share in the risks once again with authors.

Next time, I’ll expand on each of these topics. See you then.

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