If you’re writing or have written a book, one of your first questions probably is whether you need to find a publisher to sell it. Fifteen or twenty years ago, most writers never asked this question. The only workable way to sell was if an established print publisher accepted your work.
That’s because there were no ereaders or tablets, and a lot of people (including me) had a PC, not a laptop. No one wanted to curl up with a PC to read by the fire. While you could pay a printer to print your book, you usually had to buy hundreds or thousands of copies, which was expensive, and most of them sat in your basement and/or ended in a landfill.
Also, there simply was no good way to let people know your book was for sale. After you sold five copies to friends and family—or a hundred copies if you had a lot of friends and family—that was it. That’s why this type of publishing was often referred to as vanity publishing. You spent a lot of money so you could say you’d written and published a book, but you were lucky if a handful of people read it.
Now, with e-readers and print-on-demand paperbacks, there’s no need to order a thousand copies, or any copies, in advance. Once the initial costs, such as cover and editing, are paid for, an ebook costs you nothing to deliver. For print-on-demand, the book is printed when the reader buys it, and the author and printer share the dollars earned, so there’s no need spend a lot up front. More important, the Internet, social media, email, and other forms of communication allow authors to reach and sell to readers directly.
So the question is not so much Do you need a publisher—you don’t—but Are you better off with a publisher rather than publishing yourself? That depends on a lot of factors, including:
- What you want out of writing (money? prestige?)
- How much control you want over your work
- Whether you like running a business
- What type of book you’re writing
I’ll talk about each of these points in future posts. First, a little about each path to publication.
- Large Publishers: A year after college, I finished my first novel—a young adult novel at a time when young adult, due to demographics, wasn’t a big genre. Back then, there were a lot of different publishing companies of all sizes. Since then, the publishing industry, at least at the big money end, has contracted. By July, 2013, there were only six major trade publishers.
Now, there are only the Big 5:
(1) Hachette Book Group
(2) HarperCollins
(3) Macmillan Publishers
(4) Penguin Random House and
(5) Simon and Schuster
Each has imprints. For instance, HarperCollins includes Avon Books, William Morrow, Harper Business, HarperCollinsChildrens, and many others. Getting a publishing contract with one of the Big 5 almost always requires having literary agent. Most of the books the Big 5 publish are by authors who have previously been published, often by that particular publisher, whose books have sold well.
If you get a contract with one of these publishers, you will be paid an advance on royalties, and it will probably be significant. If your book earns back the advance through sales, you’ll then be paid additional amounts for most of your book sales. If your first book doesn’t earn back the advance, you’ll probably have a hard time getting another publishing contract.
- Small and medium-sized publishers: These are publishing companies that are not gigantic but that publish print books and sometimes ebooks as well. They offer a better chance at publication for a new author or for an author who has loyal readers, but who hasn’t become a household name. Some have a substantial list of authors, others publish only a handful.
Like large publishers, medium-sized and small publishers pay you an advance, though it may be $1,000 or less for small publishers. I’ve been told that the size of the advance generally equals the size of the marketing budget. So if you get a $15,000 advance, the publisher will likely put $15,000 into a marketing and sales campaign. (This is supposedly true with large publishers as well, which is a good argument for trying to obtain an agent and a contract with a publisher who is willing to pay an advance of $100,000 or more.)
One element indie/self-published authors control and are responsible for is the book cover. To the left is an audiobook cover for The Conflagration, Book 3 in my Awakening series. I just had this cover redesigned after feedback that my first cover didn’t look good in thumbnail size on Amazon.
- Publishing services: Some companies coordinate for an author the services needed to self-publish, such as cover design, editing, and marketing copy. The companies then charge the author a flat fee up front for the package.
There also are companies that provide those services and rather than charging, take a percentage of royalties. I distinguish both these types of companies from vanity publishers because while they presumably need to make a profit or they wouldn’t be in business, they are not significantly ratcheting up the pricing over what you would spend if you contracted these services yourself.
The best way to evaluate whether you are paying mainly for coordination of services as opposed to paying a premium to say you have a publisher is to compare the total fee to what the services would cost if you contracted directly with freelancers for the same work. Also, a good place to check out companies that want to charge you to publish your work are the Watchdog Reports from the Alliance of Independent Authors.
- Vanity presses: These are presses and publishers who charge you significantly more to publish your work than you would pay if you contracted the services yourself. Some people in the traditional literary world view any type of self-publishing or use of publishing services as “vanity.” I think that’s a mistake, but they have a right to their view that the only “real” publishing is traditional publishing where the author pays nothing and the control is in the hands of the publisher.
Often a vanity press will make a lot of claims about how much publicity they will provide for your work. This frequently amounts to little more than posting your book on their own websites and writing a press release that will blast out to various news outlets and websites that generally have no interest in your book. Tons of people are publishing books now, so the news about that is that it’s not news. Don’t pay someone to send press releases.
Remember, you can publish your own work through various ebook and print platforms with no up front cost to you at all if you are willing to put in the effort to learn how. Based on that, in my view, any charge to you for a publishing package that gets into thousands of dollars is far too much.
- Independent/Self-Publishing: A self-published or independent author handles all publishing tasks and the business of publishing either by personally undertaking these efforts or finding and paying freelancers to do them. Platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing and Kobo Writing Life allow authors to post and sell their work and do not charge anything up front for doing so. The platform makes money by taking a cut of the sales price — generally far less than a traditional publisher takes. As an indie/self-published author, you make all the decisions. The title, the cover art, the editing, and where to sell are all up to you.
Now we have a common language when talking about publishing. In future posts, I’ll talk about the pluses and minuses of each of these approaches. In the meantime, please feel free to share your experiences with any of these types of publishing in the comments section.
Best wishes for a productive, not-too-stressful new year.