A viewer named Dan left me a comment on YouTube, and I thought it would be good to answer his question. The video that I recorded is a bit longer, but in today’s blog I want to cover the first part of that video.
Dan seems to be in a situation that is a little bit more common than I think people realize. To sum it up, he is thinking about starting to write because his life has sort of shifted into a position where he can. He has a lot of content in terms of story ideas, notes, world building, and all sorts of other things that he has accumulated over the years. He’s starting to think about which project to dive into and where to start with publishing in general. And boy, is that a great question. Where do I start?
Let’s talk a little bit about the pros and cons of publishing traditionally versus indie. We’re going to start with traditional publishing. One of the pros of traditional publishing is that you get to outsource everything. You write a book and after you write the book, you send it to an agent. Your agent then sells it to a publisher. The publisher then puts it through an editorial process and then markets and distributes the book on your behalf and then sends you a royalty at the end. Besides the writing, you really outsource everything. That is a great place to be if all you want to do is write. That’s a definite pro of the traditional publishing model.
One of the cons, though, is tied to that. Because you are outsourcing everything, publishers have a limited number of slots for books that they can publish. So, the competition to get an agent and then have your agent sell the book to a publisher is quite fierce. It’s very fierce. It is an incredibly competitive arena, which leads to a lot of writers writing books, sometimes really good books, that then just sort of languish in the darkness and nobody ever gets to read them because they just never get published. They never make it to the agent. They never make it to the editor or the publishing house, who never gives it to an editor. Then, it’s never marketed and distributed.
But if you can get one of those slots, you can get, and this is a pro, a lot of editorial support to make your books better. That’s good. That’s actually really good because none of us write good books, at least initially. Everybody writes books that could be better. Even when you are in your career, even if you’re at the point where you’re selling a lot, really, you can always do better. You can always write better books. Editors are really important. Sorry, I keep putting my finger in front of the camera there.
So, it’s a tremendous pro that if you’re going with a traditional publisher, you get that editorial support because they really know their jobs legitimately. It’s just a great thing.
On the con side, though, with traditional publishing, once your book is published, you get nearly no sales support. This is the tricky bit. They will help you polish your book until it is as good as it can be. But then, they don’t actually sell it. That’s a real problem. Because if you don’t sell books, then you can’t keep being an author.
A common misconception is that if you get a publishing deal, you’re set. You’ll sell lots of books. You’ll get to be a famous author and live off of your royalty checks. The reality is that the majority of published books don’t actually make any money. They make an advance. The publishing company pays you for the opportunity to publish your book. But according to recent statistics we’ve gotten from big four publishers, the mass majority of books don’t actually make any money. They’re a net loss for the publishing house.
If your book happens to be one of those, not because it’s not a good book, but because they don’t actually market any of these books. And if your book happens to be one of those that doesn’t sell, well, then you’ve just sort of missed your chance. Because they’re not going to pay you again for a new book that may not sell either. You sort of only get one shot.
So, those are some pros and cons of the publishing world. There are some definite pros. You get to outsource everything. You get editorial support. And there are definite cons. It’s incredibly competitive. And you get no sales support.
So, what about the indie route? Which is what I did initially. Though I’ve now shifted into more of a hybrid path.
Well, with indie, you get no support. You don’t get to outsource anything. You have to do everything. And that is a con. Because if you have to do everything, then you can’t be writing all the time. The more stuff you have to do around writing and publishing your book, the less time you have to just write good books. That’s a real challenge for most indie authors. I’ve seen more than one career tanked because the person wrote a great book and then could not do all of the stuff around that book in order to sell it.
And that was so demoralizing that they just gave up, right? They stopped writing. That’s a real shame. But on the pro side, it’s much less competitive. It’s so much less competitive that all you have to do to publish your book is go on KDP, sign up, and upload your book. That’s it. There are an infinite number of slots for publishing through Amazon, right? Now, it’s competitive when you go to sell your book, but it’s still not as competitive as traditional publishing. Because again, there’s infinite bookshelf space on Amazon. People just search for keywords. Whereas if you go to a bookstore, there’s limited space in the physical bookstore. So your title has to compete with every other title for that slot. So indie is less competitive in an interesting, sort of weird way.
However, you also get no editorial support. If you want an editor, you have to pay for the editor. And the quality of the editor that you can get as an indie publisher, especially a new indie publisher, is way lower than the editorial support that you can get from a traditional publisher. You have to do all of that editing yourself. You have to make sure you’re writing good books yourself. You don’t get the benefit of other people who have tons of experience in writing and selling books.
But one of the pros is that the indie community is awesome. You can get a tremendous amount of information and training on how to do all of this for free on the internet. That’s how I did it. There are also a lot of conventions that you can go to. 20 Books to 50K was the big one. It’s now AuthorNation. But there are a lot of others that will also help you learn how to write and publish your own books.
So that’s sort of the rundown of the landscape in terms of traditional publishing versus indie publishing, and while both have pros and cons.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/tO-A5M_Tlhg
Thanks for reading and watching.
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