Part 2: Why Self-Publishing?
UPDATED:
Part 2.1: Self Publishing Caveats
Why self-publishing?
It's a question I've been asked several times since I made the decision to do it. It wasn't a very easy decision to come to, either. I agonized over it for, oh, about two years or so -- Two years filled with query letters and conversations with agents and a few publishers and such and the like. There was some interest from a few agents and publishers, and there were a few offers here and there... But as you can see, I decided to self-publish. And after I did, I was asked why I'd come to that particular conclusion by a number of people... Usually with the last syllable of "self-publishing" turned up a bit, stifling a chuckle, showing a cross between pitied amusement and derision.
It's as if some people, by asking "Why self publishing, Joe?" aren't asking a question at all. Instead, they're saying very declaratively, "Well, it looks like SOMEbody couldn't get a book deal... Well, have fun with your little hobby, let us know when you decide to give all this up and get serious about life."
Well, let me make something very, very clear right from the outset of this little missive:
Self publishing is a whole lot of work.
Now, I know that the statement "a whole lot of work" is nice and generalized, packaged for easy reading digestion. And as such, some of the key peices of "whole", "lot" and "work" are kinda glossed over and forgotten. Let me say it this way:
For about two years of my life, I worked for my father pulling CAT5 cable through fiberglass-insulated celings at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. The building was radiator-cooled at the time, so the temperatures in the celing during the summer easily topped 120F, and in the winter, the heat exhaust from the furnace pushed the temps up to at least 110F... The colder it was outside, the hotter it was in those damn celings. I'd work 9 hours a day (not including lunch hour) for $5.50 an hour and would routinely need two baths when I got home at night - the first, a vinegar bath, to take the stinging out of my skin from the fiberglas digging in my pores, and the second to get rid of the damn vinegar.
Sound rough?
Self publishing is harder.
Why is it so much harder? Well... The full answer to that question is about a mile and a half long, and I don't think you really want to sit here and scroll that much on your computer monitor. What I will say is that never before in my life have I learned so much about how little I actually know how the world works. Two years and the decision to go forward with the process later, I still don't know 99/100th of the things I know I need to know in order to actually do this thing right... But one thing you should know from reading the stories I've written is that I'm not exactly one to sit around and wait for God or Donald Trump to impart some golden wisdom upon me.
This is my dream, and I've made a decision to chase it and wrestle it into submission... And the only way to do that is to get out of your chair, lace up your Adidas, and start running it down.
So, yeah, it's hard. But if it's so hard, why on Earth would I bother taking it on?
Because, believe it or not, it's easier than the alternative.
"Wait, Joe," you're saying. "What the hell kind of jibba jabba are you spewing here? You
just said it was the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, and now you're saying it's easy? Double-you tee eff, man?"
Bear with me.
Self-publishing is hard because it's a minefield. Everywhere you step, you run the risk of completely blowing things up. And you have NO clue how to determine which steps you're making are the right ones and which ones might turn you into tomato soup without actually taking those steps. You read all these books and websites and business plans and the very first thing that you figure out is that, as great as all this information is to have and read, it means NOTHING in the context of YOUR BOOK. Seriously, I could spell out for you all of the things I've learned about self-publishing here, giving you an exact step-by-step process I've followed to get to the point where I'm ready to print and ship books to people and retail stores, and the second you began following it, you'd hit a mine and become chunks of you flying through the air.
That's because self-publishing is just that - publishing yourself. You. Everything about you -- your personality, your language, your volume, your quirks, your writing and your procedures for doing things affects and determines your success in self-publishing. But that's also why it's so much easier than the alternatives.
The first alternative is... Well, doing nothing. Literally, giving up and not putting out a book. And that's where about 99% of would-be authors end up. Things get too hard, they give up, and another book bites the dust. And that is one hell of a hard alternative... I know that I personally considered it several times.
Several times.
But, as I'd start heading down that path, something started nagging me incessantly. It was a desire deep within me -- a NEED to see the project I'd invested so much time and effort into actually produce something. It was easier for me to actually follow through than to watch things end.
That avenue having been closed, the second alternative presented to me was going through a publisher. And boy, is that ever tempting. After all, everything we've ever learned about success, especially in school, has taught us that in order for your work to be considered "WORTHY", it must be blessed from on high by some sort of authority who considers it worth putting their stamp of approval on. When you think of self-published authors -- even you enlightened people -- I'm willing to bet that the very first thing that runs through your mind is "vanity press."
Self-publishing is NOT vanity press.
Vanity press is, quite simply, a publisher who will secure your ISBN number and print your book for a fee. You pay them X dollars for the privledge of setting and printing your book, then Y number of dollars per copy of your book that you want. They ship them to you. You hand them to your parents and your friends and voila - you're "published". You have a book. Well done.
And, really, this is not a bad thing. Again, it's 99% farther than most would-be authors ever get. But still, it's not the same thing as self-publishing.
Self publishing is the act of putting out your own work. It's forming a company (in some cases, people publish books under their own name as a hobby or sole proprietorship, but if you're going to take it seriously, form a company. It's about the only way you'll ever get past step 2: being taken seriously by any printer, distributor, store or customer). It's buying the ISBNs, it's brokering deals with printers, it's calling distributors and getting picked up to be shipped by them, it's calling stores and having them agree to purchase the book you are publishing, it's setting up pricing for wholesale vs. direct market, it's setting up channels for retail returns, it's doing your own marketing, hiring your own PR person (if you want / need one. I don't have one, but then again, I'm a walking disaster just begging for attention), buying your own commercials and advertising... And this is just the first few feet of that mile and a half long list I was telling you about.
Self-publishing is very, very hard work.
So why the hell do it? Because, I personally do not feel that all of the above-mentioned things are worth 90% of the profits of my book, nor do I think they are worth handing CONTROL of the future availability of my work over to someone else.
Sounds greedy, huh?
It's not. It's actually extremely pragmatic.
You see, major publishers (and even minor publishers) are businesses. They have employees who need to get paid so that they can eat and pay for gas and make their mortgage each month. This means that publishers aren't really looking for YOU. They're looking to see if what you've done will sell enough copies to justify the costs of your advance, your printing costs, your layout costs, your distribution costs, etcetera.
Now, for the time being, let's invent a person named... Oh... Moe. Let's say that Moe, as a first time writer with no track record for sales or success, has written a book called Thoughtfully Distended.
Moe has been querying publishers and / or agents and, after several (most likely MANY) demoralizing rejection letters, somehow gets picked up by a publisher. Now, this publisher makes their money from selling authored works. They put a lot of costs into the up-front production of Moe's work, meaning they will reap a large percentage of the profits from Moe's work.
So far, this is not new information. Everyone with any sort of insight whatsoever to the whole "write a book and get it published" thing knows about small advances and low royalty percentages for new writers.
What might be new info, however, is the "numbers game" -- specifically, what it means for Moe's ability to sell this first book 10 years from now.
Unless Moe's book has somehow just arrived on the cusp of a rising trend that his new publisher is willing to bet a LARGE amount of money on, Moe will probably be left with the task of marketing and promoting his book out of the advance the publisher paid him (usually $2,000 to - and this is rare these days - $10,000. Sound like a lot? Here's a bit of math - $10,000 for a 300 page book comes out to $33.33 a page. It takes roughly four or five hours for me to write a decent page [not including editing or layout into a publishing program]. That's $6.50 - 8.00 an hour, assuming I've had a LOT of coffee and that I was somehow crafty enough to get the publisher to agree to the VERY high end of the advance spectrum for a first time writer. I'd make more working at Arby's).
Paying out of your advance to promote yourself is the exact same thing you would do if you were self-publishing.
So Moe, the self-promoting author who's being published for the first time by a major publisher MIGHT get a print run of 20 - 100k copies for his first shot out the gate. Hopefully, Moe sells every single copy (which will net him about 5 - 10% of the profits per sale, depending on how good Moe's agent was at negotiating with the publisher... Wait. Moe doesn't have an agent! Go ahead and count on 5%, Moe!). What happens if he doesn't sell out?
Unless Moe writes a huge breakout hit that makes his publisher a LOT of money with his next book, his first book is done-for. Why? Because it goes out of print, and the only way for it to go back into print before the publishing rights revert back to Moe (which, if he had an agent, might have been 5 years, but since he doesn't, is more like 10 - 15) is for society to create a demand for the book or Moe's second book becomes so stellar, the first book gains more interest. But if that doesn't happen, if someone is interested in buying a copy of that first book 10 years from now and Moe doesn't have copies on hand himself to sell, well... Tough noogies. That's one sale Moe won't be making.
Am I making my point yet?
It's not worth surrendering control of my work for 10% of the profits. It's just not.
As I said earlier, it is my dream to write for a living. It's a dream I believe in so deeply that I have put in my notice at my day job to follow. In a few weeks, I will be officially deriving my income from writing. This means that, if there's going to be a second book anytime in the near future, I need to make enough money to feed myself, my wife and my cats.
And here's a big blinding newsflash: I am not very well known. I'm a new fish in a HUGE pond, which means I can't just walk into the market like a James Patterson or a J. K. Rowling and sell one million copies of my book on a whim - which is what I'd have to do if I were going through a publisher for my first book, because 5% - 10% of the PROFIT (all the money left after all the costs) of one million books is $50,000 - $100,000, or basically enough to live on for a year or two (because writing isn't exactly a job where you fill out a W2. You pay self-employment taxes -- about 34% of your income -- which is approximately double what you'd pay if you worked at Arby's, which would pay me more for my first book if I went through a publisher, because I can assure you - I'm not selling a million books).
So, here's my situation as it stands (as I see it):
I am a new writer. I have a choice of either a) Going with a publisher and spending my own money to publish and promote myself
OR
Spending my own money to promote myself and have a publishing company cover the costs of my printing and distribution, at the low, low cost of 90% of the profits from any sale I make.
I think you see now why I chose this route. And if you don't... I'll see you at Arby's if (when) this thing falls apart.
I am not pontificating about self-publishing a la Dave Sim or Jeff Smith. I'm not trying to tell anyone to choose self-publishing over traditional book publishing as a business model, and I'm CERTAINLY not trying to fly the flag of the independant artist. All I am doing is explaining why I personally chose to go the self-publishing route. There may very well be a day where I choose to move out of self-publishing and into publishing through a minor / major publisher... Perhaps when my sales figures climb into an area where I make enough to live while simultaneously selling to double or triple or quadruple the number of people I would if I self-published, because my number one goal is to be read, not be rich (and let me tell you something that you SHOULD have already picked up from the rest of this little bit o' ramblin'... If your goal in writing is to become rich... Well, I'll see you at Arby's too, along with the guy who didn't see my point about choosing self-publishing. Because starting a writing project with profit as your goal will result in a flat, horrible and boring book and readers will see right through it. Unless, of course, your name is Paris Hilton, in which case your book will sell plenty of copies to the millions of morons who actually think you are relevant).
But before I do, they're going to have to convince me why going through them is worth 90% of the profits of each book I sell, and why surrendering control of the editorial direction and future availability of my book is worth it.
This is just my opinion, however. There are a number of writing websites out there who recommend that you, the first time writer, pick up magazine work and get an agent, then use those 2 things to get a better advance and royalty rate. And some just say "Keep submitting! You'll make it!"
For me, however, I've already been down that long, loney and painful route. I've been told by agents and publishers that there's no market for short stories. I've been told that "Internet stories aren't worth reading." I've been told I don't fit into the humor, essay, memoir, poetry or self-help genres. I've been told a lot of things, mostly "No thanks, and here's why".
So, I'm foregoing any more of the entire "You suck, new writer! Besides, no one buys short stories!" process and just putting my work out myself and see how it does. If I sell only 100 copies (half of which will be to my mother), I've learned a very valuable lesson about the quality of my writing and how much people are willing to spend on it. If I do ten times better than that? Well... I've got a pretty good nest egg from which to pay my house note and feed my wife and cats for about three months while I work on the next five books I have cooking in my head right this moment. One thing is for sure, however... I won't ever have to look back on my life and wonder what might have happened if I hadn't left my job as a software development geek to persue something I've always dreamed about.
Part 2.1: Self-Publishing Caveats
With the decision to self-publish comes the responsibility for everything that goes wrong.
You know all those little things you might hear about in interviews with authors where they cite "Publisher problems" for delays in books?
Well, I have a publisher problem. My publisher did a test run of the Mentally Incontinent book through lulu.com (an author services company) as a proof of concept earlier this year. As part of that proof of concept, my publisher bought an individual ISBN for the book, titled Mentally Incontinent.
When it came time to actually print and publish the REAL book, my publisher went to register the proper ISBN from the block it owns. Well, guess what? This means that there would be two books with identical titles by identical authors with identical binding types listed in "Books in Print", the official catalog of... Well, books in print. So when stores or individuals went to order a copy, there would be a major issue in figuring out which was the correct title.
And because I am self-publishing, the only person I can blame for my publisher problems is me.
As a result, the book will be shipping a week later than originally announced. Now, the actual street date for the book is November 8, 2005, and I feel absolutely horrible about it. I have been consoled by several people, all of whom say "One week? That's all? Man, don't worry about it, people will understand."
Well, I don't want people to UNDERSTAND. I want people to read my book when I told them they could.
Anyway, this is just one example of what can happen when one makes the decision to self-publish. It's a lesson learned - always make sure your listing queue is clear for your title. I'll never make that mistake again.
So, how am I going to market and promote my book and make it so that I can actually keep going with this writing thing? I'll cover some of that stuff, along with my insanely boring theories on the state of advertising in general, in Part 3. Drink plenty of coffee and join me then.
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