is self publishing/independent publishing "better"?

Minate said:

Is self publishing/independent publishing better than traditional publishing these days?

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Neither commercial publishing or self-publishing is "better." It depends on the book and the author.

Minate said:

I've been wondering about this and have been leaning towards independent publishing myself due to the fact that it would allow to maintain full rights to and control of my work,

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First, you license rights, very specific rights, to your work, and for a limited period of time, measured by event or specific date.

Second, unless you have your own press, self-publishing doesn't give you full rights or control; there are very specific restrictions and there are always limitations of contract, terms or service or practical necessity and finance.

Minate said:

I would keep most of the royalties vs the 10% I would receive if published traditionally,

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That depends on the agreement with the publishing company, and don't forget most print commercial publishers also provide an advance up front.

Minate said:

and the publishing companies don't even concern themselves much with marketing anymore unless you're already a big seller

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This is a myth that keeps being passed around.

It isn't true.

Publishers aren't doing less marketing or promotion; in fact they are doing more in many respects (like online).

The reason some authors think their publishers aren't marketing is because authors think individual book buyers are their customers.

They aren't.

Publishers market to large book buyers: they market to book stores, distributors and libraries.

Book stores market to individual readers and customers.

Minate said:

So assuming one has enough money to do so is it all around better to go indie these days or is there something else I'm missing? How do I know which one would be the better option for me?

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It's not just a matter of money it's a matter of skill set and whether or not you have a book people will want to buy.

There's a lot of rah-rah at the moment about sales; but most self-published authors don't even sell 2000 copies.

So be cautious before you spend your money and your time, and self-publish a book that you might be able to publish commercially, collect an advance, and write another book while your publisher sells the first one.

It is possible to do very well with either method; the question is, which is best for you and your book?

Neither commercial publishing or self-publishing is "better." It depends on the book and the author.

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I was going to say the same thing.

Minate, in a word, No.

They're different mediums, that's all. Automatically dismissing self-published works is as bad as saying dead tree editions are all equally superior.

Neither argument, nor vice versa, hold water.

I think you need to really look at the pros and cons of both types, AND you need to look at the pros and cons of your MS.

The BIG advantage of going through a publisher, from my perspective, is that it keeps you from putting out something embarrassing. You can pay for most of the other services provided by a small publisher (I don't think you can pay for the cachet of a NY-Publisher name, or their distribution channels), but you can't pay someone to force you to accept that your book just isn't ready yet.

I've been publishing through small publishers for a couple years now, and I'm planning to self-publish my next novel (just to experiment); I've got an editor lined up, I've chosen a professional cover artist, I know how to get the book properly formatted and distributed to most of the same places my other books are available... but it's the gatekeeper function that I'm really missing. I think I've got a good book, my betas say I've got a good book... but I underestimated the value to me of having the approval of a publishing professional.

It also depends on where you are in your writing career. If you're just starting out and are fairly young, you do yourself a disservice by jumping right into self-publishing. You also need to determine your expectations. Do you write as a hobbyist? Do you aspire to be a professional writer (keep in mind, there are many kinds and not all are published in book form)? Have you taken composition classes? Do you read a great deal? Are you interested in a specific genre? Do you like the adventure of learning new technology and want the challenge of handling all aspects of your career yourself or do you prefer to have experts help you throughout the process? AW is an excellent resource to help you get started answering some of these questions.

A good first step, regardless of which path you hope to follow, is to read Michael Allen's "On the Survival of Rats in the Slushpile" (and yes, I've mentioned this article on AW before but it still is a sensible place to start).

Don't forget to consider what you want out of publication. That will influence the better choice for you, too.

Personally, I'm mostly self-published, but I have some novels for which I'll seek a traditional publisher, because they strike me as good fits for certain presses.

My primary objective was to get my story 'out there'. I needed to write it, I needed to have a book in my hands that had my name on the cover, I needed at least a few people to buy copies and read them and tell me what they thought.

No way was a traditional publisher going to look twice at my book. Non fiction, niche market, not ever gonna be a candidate for the next DaVinci Code or what have you ...

So I published it myself. So far, it's doing better than I could possibly have dreamed - but I did try hard to keep my dreams small enough that they had a chance of coming true, and, thankfully, it's worked out for me so far.

The answer, as in so many other things, is, "it depends".

When I could not land an agent, I started writing to about a dozen independent publishers, selected from a list of at least seventy independent publishers worldwide. I didn't bother writing to the Big Six because everything I had read suggested I would only be disappointed.

I was all set to self-publish within the next three months, if I had not heard from the indie publishers or got rejections, when one of them, a small, respectable indie publisher in Asia, expressed interest and I signed a contract.

The tendency these days with indie publishers is to go straight to e-books. When they have an excellent distribution base, that's just great.

There is now talk of also doing print but we're putting that on hold for now.

Ultimately, like everyone says, it depends. For me, self-publishing was always a last resort. I believe I have a MUCH better chance of selling my book via the indie publisher's distribution base and marketing efforts (he has a good track record) than going the self-publishing route.

My two cents'.

Agreed with much of the above. Neither are better; use the one you think best suits your goals and needs.

Off topic kinda: What if someone would set up a company for the purpose of publishing/selling his book? Would that still be self-pub?

I'm asking this because it seems Jo Rowling did it.
Do we call her a self-published author now?

Nine am, yup. You'd still be a self-publisher. But you'd be a smart self-publisher establishing yourself as a business and thinking about your self-publishing as a business.

Keep in mind, if you set up as a publisher, it adds several degrees of complication with regards to taxes and other business-related adventures. It also has the potential to become very time consuming and leave you less time for writing.

One benefit, however, if you enjoy that side of it, is that you can expand to add additional writers who write in a niche or genre you'd like to promote. I suspect several of the micropresses and small presses started out that way.

Nimram said:

I'm asking this because it seems Jo Rowling did it.
Do we call her a self-published author now?

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Not quite. She's "assisted publishing" with support from Scholastic and Sony.

Cyia said:

Not quite. She's "assisted publishing" with support from Scholastic and Sony.

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Right. I see lots of ink/pixels on the horizon:
"Look! She could publish with anyone but choose to go solo. Publishers are evil!"

On a more serious note. Do you know what kind of support she gets? I just learned about it.
Uhm, sorry for hijacking the tread.

Software and formatting support, most likely (I'm not sure if she's going to add anything to the books, but if she does, there's probably editorial support.)

Pottermore itself is a joint venture of sorts with Sony hefting some of the production. In return they got exclusive rights to upload the books to their new e-reader prior to sale, which would give them a boost. After you figure in the nearly $60 it would cost to buy the series, the Sony reader's suddenly the cheapest game in town.

Wait, Sony has a new e-reader coming out now?

Man I'm way out of it.

People seem to get very polarized by this. You have one side dismissing the other as a bunch of amateur hobbyists, while the other side scoffs at those old, tree-killing relics. I mean, it's not like you have to choose sides. I've decided to try self-publishing my novel because I spent a year under contract to a publisher that ended up going bankrupt, and I didn't want to go back to square one of submissions and rejections. Besides, after ten years, I just want to finish with the book so I can move on to something else.

I have to agree, AnnikaHTDC. There's no reason to choose one path or another. I plan on throwing everything I have at the publishing wall until something sticks.

I had a few Novellas that were just sitting there so I've started to self-pub those. I've still got two novels in the "traditional" pipeline.

There's no reason to limit yourself.

Medievalist said:

Neither commercial publishing or self-publishing is "better." It depends on the book and the author.

It's not just a matter of money it's a matter of skill set and whether or not you have a book people will want to buy.

There's a lot of rah-rah at the moment about sales; but most self-published authors don't even sell 2000 copies.

So be cautious before you spend your money and your time, and self-publish a book that you might be able to publish commercially, collect an advance, and write another book while your publisher sells the first one.

It is possible to do very well with either method; the question is, which is best for you and your book?

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I agree with a lot of what you said. Traditional publishing is right for some books/authors. Obviously it's worked out well for Kathryn Stockett and Suzanne Collins. I doubt either of their books would have taken off if they had self-published them.

I don't have any experience with traditional publishing except for a file full of rejection emails. However, I've been self-pubbed for almost two years now and know quite a few other self-published authors. I'm curious about where you got 2000 for the number of books most self-pubbed authors sell? I've never seen it, and I can name dozens who have sold more than that. Way more. It's not like a self published book has a limited window of opportunity.

I suppose if you take every self-published book thrown up on Amazon, it would come out to under 2000 sales, but if the book is good, has a good cover and blurb and the author is motivated, there is no reason it can't sell a lot more than that.

Every additional book the author writes, assuming they are written just as well as the first, can increase sales exponentially.

I think it's incredibly fun, exciting and rewarding to self-publish, and now that I've been doing it for a few years, I don't think I could deal with the glacial speed of traditional publishing.

MMcDonald64 said:

I'm curious about where you got 2000 for the number of books most self-pubbed authors sell?

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If you read carefully you'll note that Medievalist didn't say that most self-published writers sell 2000 copies. This is what she said:

Medievalist said:

There's a lot of rah-rah at the moment about sales; but most self-published authors don't even sell 2000 copies.

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I think she's being tactful. It's highly likely that most self-publishers sell less than a tenth of that number.

Figures from 2004 (I think--I blogged about this a couple of years ago) showed that most self-publishers sold less than 200 copies of their books (if you looked at the numbers closely it was likely that most actually sold fewer than 50 copies per title). That's a long time ago and things have changed: for a start, most people self-publish electronic editions now, and not the print editions those numbers referred to; and I think it's safe to assume that far more people are self-publishing now than were doing so then, because Amazon has made things so much easier for us all.

What's great is that it seems that far more self-pubilshers are selling their books in good number. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to sell many more copies of our self-published books.

More people are doing well at self-publishing; but more people are self-publishing. It's possible that the proportion of self publishers who are successful self publishers has remained the same overall. I'd love to know more but Amazon hasn't released any figures, so it's impossible to know.

I suppose if you take every self-published book thrown up on Amazon, it would come out to under 2000 sales, but if the book is good, has a good cover and blurb and the author is motivated, there is no reason it can't sell a lot more than that.

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Except that it has to be found by readers first, and that's what most people struggle with. Good books can be swamped just as easily as bad books.

Every additional book the author writes, assuming they are written just as well as the first, can increase sales exponentially.

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I refer you to this post, which was made in another thread in the Self Publishing room only yesterday.

I think it's incredibly fun, exciting and rewarding to self-publish, and now that I've been doing it for a few years, I don't think I could deal with the glacial speed of traditional publishing.

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I know that "traditional publishing" is widely used online, especially in the self-publishing community: but "trade publishing" is more correct, and if you want to be seen as a publishing professional using the correct terms works in your favour. It's up to you, of course.

I know that trade publishing moves slowly. But only because there's so much involved in publishing a book well. It takes time to edit a book properly; it takes time to design it well, and to typeset it properly too. It's not time wasted. And having seen so many self-published books which needed more work doing to them, I don't think that the time it takes to get a book through the trade-publishing processes should be a factor which puts anyone off. By all means self-publish if that's what you really want to do: but make sure you're doing it from a well-informed point of view.

Old Hack said:

I know that "traditional publishing" is widely used online, especially in the self-publishing community: but "trade publishing" is more correct, and if you want to be seen as a publishing professional using the correct terms works in your favour. It's up to you, of course.

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Traditional is also correct. I don't think one is 'more' correct than the other. Here it is used in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?pagewanted=all

I know that trade publishing moves slowly. But only because there's so much involved in publishing a book well. It takes time to edit a book properly; it takes time to design it well, and to typeset it properly too. It's not time wasted. And having seen so many self-published books which needed more work doing to them, I don't think that the time it takes to get a book through the trade-publishing processes should be a factor which puts anyone off. By all means self-publish if that's what you really want to do: but make sure you're doing it from a well-informed point of view.

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And some authors are fine with that wait period, but I am not. It's not just about getting the book out there, but also about real time information about how my books are doing. I don't think I could get used to waiting months, or even years, to find out what my sales numbers are.

To expand on MMcDonald64's point -- and though I am not epublishing yet I have experience with similar forms of cash flow -- there is something very visceral and motivating about being able to see first-hand the results of one's efforts.

It's a hell of a driver, and not to be underestimated.

MMcDonald64 said:

Traditional is also correct. I don't think one is 'more' correct than the other. Here it is used in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/t...-rules-of-book-publishing.html?pagewanted=all

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While it's becoming more commonplace, the reason people dislike it is because it was a nonexistent phrase until PublishAmerica decided to use it to sucker people into signing bogus contracts. It was picked up initially by vanity presses and scams to make people think they were getting what they'd get from a commercial publisher.

While you see it in the news now or occasionally even on industry blogs, the roots of the phrase are negative and incorrect, and as such we've preferred to stick to "commercial" or "trade" publishing as those are the industry standards. There are a lot of professionals on this site, so using the professional terminology is preferred.

MMcDonald64 said:

Traditional is also correct. I don't think one is 'more' correct than the other. Here it is used in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/t...-rules-of-book-publishing.html?pagewanted=all

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Just because it's in the NYT doesn't make it correct.

Trade publishing is a specific business; traditional publishing isn't. Trade publishing is separate from academic publishing, for example, and from self-publishing, and from music publishing and software publishing and newspaper publishing, and all those other publishing arms. Trade publishers publish books for the book trade. It's a term that's been around for decades, and it has a very specific meaning.

People who work in trade publishing know what trade publishing is, but look confused when you say "traditional publishing" to them. I've had various people guess that it means publishing in print format, publishing using offset rather than digital printing, and publishing handwritten illuminated manuscripts.

If you want everyone in publishing to understand what you're saying, then "trade publishing" is the correct term to use.

And some authors are fine with that wait period, but I am not. It's not just about getting the book out there, but also about real time information about how my books are doing. I don't think I could get used to waiting months, or even years, to find out what my sales numbers are.

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I'd rather wait months and get all that help, and then be reasonably certain that I was going to sell thousands of books with very little promotional effort from me. Horses for courses.