Dear Budding Writer and Future Author,
Before you have another pow wow with a friend disguised as a coffee date to discuss your book idea, allow us to give it to you straight: if you want to publish your book, do it. No, really. Do it. And not because you can, but because quite frankly if you’re stuff is good, you really have no reason not to.
For the record, I’m not just talking to the savvy expert with thousands of Twitter followers, the social media guru, or owner of a hip small biz.
I’m talking to you. The person with a good idea who knows a lot about the potential reader of your book. The person who has been thinking about a solid idea for a REALLY long time, probably going as far back as before word processors. You’re earliest drafts are…gasp…written in actual ink (or lead) and is scribbled chicken scratch no one can read but you.
Here’s what: you hold the cards.
And here’s why:
1. Readers Care about Content, Not Publishers
Your book can reach readers, become a treasure, and even earn cash without the obstacles, barriers, or approval of publishing big wigs.
For the record, I’m not saying your book is automatically awesome just because you say it is. You should have an unbiased (i.e. not your wife, hubby, BFF, or dog’s) appraisal of your book before making the leap to publish. But (raising my voice to a high-pitched shrill here) if you do the work to make your writing engaging, you don’t have to wait for a publisher to choose your book.
Readers are buying books and reading them on their own merit of the book. Book publishers are invisible to the average reader.
2. Ebooks are the Present and Future
Throw in ebooks and you have another element tipping the scales in your favor. With the eBooks market a permanent fixture in how we purchase and digest content, with a few simple steps you can make your book available to the masses at a reasonable cost.
We recommend researching Createspace and absolutely considering Smashwords as you pursue ebook publishing.
3. Grassroots Marketing is Working
All you need is a book that offers value to its readers and a strategy to market your book to them. That’s where grassroots marketing comes in and it includes social media, readings, signings, and heavily relying on word-of-mouth. Grassroots marketing is the order of the day, which you’d have to do anyway if you published your book traditionally. Grassroots marketing makes it possible for your book to achieve equal to or better results than if you waited the five years to hear from a publisher, got a contract, and collected royalties after hoping our publisher invests dollars in marketing it.
4. Your Book Can’t Be Published Without You
The day of waiting for a large royalty publisher to endorse your advancement is over. In a fantastic article about taking your future in your own hands the following captured my praise,
“Instead of waiting around for someone to tell you that you matter, take your career into your own hands. In other words, don’t wait for someone else to pick you and pick yourself! If you have a book, you don’t need a publisher to approve you, you can publish it yourself. It’s no longer about waiting for some big corporation to choose you. We’ve arrived at an age where you choose yourself…”
Information is the currency of the day. As an author you create content. You are creating currency. You hold the cards.
So there it is: if you know your book should be published, do it. No more pushing it around in your mind.
Wouldn’t it be fun to invite that friend to coffee, knowing that after all the coffees you’ve treated them to, they’ll finally know it wasn’t for naught. That you actually did it. That you published your book, created an opportunity for yourself, for your readers, and are going to profit from it.
Enlightening stuff! What’s your opinion on shopping out a manuscript AFTER you’ve self-published? Too late at that point or is it ok to self-publish, shop out, hopefully get picked up, then take the book off the self-published market?
@Bryon
Hmmm…that’s kind of a complicated answer. If you self publish and sell the heck out of the book (10,000+) there’s a good chance to get picked up, but at that point it’s still only a chance, and if you get that chance, you’ll still have to ask yourself whether it’s even worth it. Say, in total (design, editing, proofreading, printing), you ended up spending a total of $4.00 per book at 10,000 copies, and sold all 10,000; if on average you sold the books for $7.00 per book, you would have made $30,000. This sales record might invite interest from a traditional press or literary agent, but if you’re already doing so well on your own (and already done all the hard work to market the book), why would you want to go to a model where you’ll get prestige, slightly better distribution, and only 5% of the profits? I’m trying to say that, typically, the only way you’d successfully get an agent or publisher after self publishing is if you have a proven sales record. I’m not saying it would never be worth going to a traditional press after self publishing–that depends on the situation. But you’d have to analyze the pros and cons for each individual case. If they were willing to offer a great advance, for instance, that might make it worth it.
For the record, Wise, Ink also does query consulting where we help authors write a solid query to get more attention from an agent, so we’re not down on the traditional publishing. Our recommendations depend on the project–regardless of how you publish, it has to make sense for the book and author.