Wondering whether to invest in yourself and your talent by self-publishing, or whether to try for a traditional publisher?
I discuss the pros and cons of both here. This is my contribution to a thread in CraftChats, which is part of Litopia writing forum. There’s a LOT more information on this vast subject in the full CraftChats thread, including marketing advice and information.
Litopia writing forum has free CraftChats on this subject, and more. Head over there and take part in the discussion – it’s open for a few more days. Or leave a comment here if you prefer.
All opinions and experiences are welcome.
THE MOVING FINGER WRITES AND HAVING WRIT MOVES ON…
Twenty years ago, if you told me you were considering self-publishing, I’d have made a twisted wee face and said, “Are you sure?” Now, I try hard not to show that face when someone tells me they’re “holding out” for traditional publishing. The world is not what it was twenty years ago. Publishing isn’t what it was twenty years ago; writers’ earnings aren’t what they were twenty years ago; and God knows, technology is frighteningly ahead of where it was twenty years ago.
Writers have moved on. We have choices. An entire generation has grown up using online tools to earn a (good) living from their creativity. It’s worth looking at some industry figures before you make up your own mind.
The Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS), Published December 2022, showed that “earnings from writing alone for authors with third-party publishers [that’s traditional publishing to you and me] stood at approximately $8,600 (£7,000).” I think we can assume that’s per annum. Most of you know how long it takes to write a (decent) book so you can work out an approximate hourly rate from that figure.
Compare that with the “median revenue” for independent authors in 2022, which stands at about $12,749 (£10,229). [NB: as with these industry reports, I’m using the term “independent author” to mean the same as “self-published author”. Check out the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), who “represent, advance, promote and support independent (self-published) authors globally”. This term is not to be confused with a small, independent press / publisher, which is a tiny publishing house dedicated to traditional publishing. Nor is it to be confused with the hybrid publishing houses who offer to edit etc and publish your book for half, or more, of the book’s lifetime earnings. In my view, those hybrids are not traditional publishers, though they may be affiliated to one. They are new / hybrid companies set up to take advantage of the independent / self-publishing boom.]
Most of this ain’t goin’ to traditionally published authors
The ALCS 2022 report showed “a sustained fall in professional writers’ real terms income from writing over the past 15 year of around 60%.”
ALLi suggests indie / self-publishing authors are bucking that trend: “Average incomes of self-published authors are rising, with a 53% increase in 2022, over the previous year.”
SOURCE
Okay. So what?
Here’s another couple of statistics, and then I’m done with the figures:
Hachette Book Group (parent company Lagardére): Revenue for UK branch, 2022, grew 3.4%. Group revenue for the year totalled €6.9 billion “UP 28.3% from 2021”.
Average executive compensation is around $235,000 pa.
HarperCollins (owned by News Corp): profits have been falling recently. However, stats for 2022: HC operates “with an annual revenue of $2.19 billion The company increased its publishing revenue by 10.5% compared to the 2021 fiscal year”. SOURCE
Average executive salary is £200,000 pa; (highest is $430.000 pa; smallest is $57,000).
I won’t bore you with the rest – you know how to use Google to check traditional publishing houses’ profits. All I would emphasise is that one billion in the US and UK = one thousand million (as far as I know, a billion in the EU = one million million. Please correct me if I’m wrong). Whether it’s in £, $ or € that is a lot of money. It is not going to (most) traditionally published writers.
Edited to add: Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins have all seen reductions in profits in 2023 and are reducing staff to cut costs. Nonetheless, profits remain in the millions. Here is another great site for keeping up-to-date on information and news for indie authors and traditionally published authors: killzoneblog.com – a fantastic, professional resource for all writers.
Don’t misunderstand me here. I have no problem with anyone earning a lot of money. Good luck to you! Earn as much as you can. Just don’t do it by ripping the piss out of someone else, especially creative people who barely earn enough to scrape by. Compare the salaries the executives of the big publishing houses take for themselves, with what they pay the vast majority of their writers – writers without whom those executives would not have a job.
NB: Smaller publishers, the independents who are not affiliated to what’s known as the Big Five (HarperCollins; Penguin Random House; Macmillan; Simon & Schuster; Hachette (Lagardére)…and all of their many subsidiaries) will be struggling as much as any other small business these days. So, if you’re picked up by a small “independent” traditional publisher they probably won’t be able to offer you much in the way of an advance. That’s not greed; that’s tough economics. For those companies, “Independent” means just that: they are independent of any big company and so they don’t have a big pot of money to dip into whenever they want. I applaud those small independent publishing houses. We need them.
I can hear you say Ah, but it was ever thus: greedy companies take all the money, and poor writers starve in garrets.
Not any more. Not since the IT revolution. And I know we all love to hate Amazon, but it has altered the playing field. Many creatives are taking advantage of that.
So where does that leave writers?
PROS AND CONS
It leaves you with choices.
If you prefer the traditional publishing route, that’s fine. You submit to agents and/or publishers. If accepted, you’ll be offered a deal. They edit your book, ask for rewrites, take you through it all, handle the proofreading, pay for the cover and the print run etc, and sort out distribution (a biggie)…
They may offer you an advance. If your book sells enough copies to recoup that advance for the publisher, that’s great. Once the advance is covered / paid off, you then begin to reap the benefit of any subsequent sales. Those are your royalties. The publishing house may also take a cut of those subsequent sales, depending on your contract with them. If you don’t “earn out”, ie if your book doesn’t sell enough copies to pay back the advance the publishing house gave you, they may not accept any more of your work. Again, it depends on your contract.
Of course they hope you will make them money; they’re a business, not a charity. If your book takes off and starts earning a lot of money, you should start making a lot more money too. At least, that’s the theory.
The major thing to remember about a bona fide traditional publisher is they do not charge you a penny. Nothing. Ever. They pay for it all, and they help you grow as an author by investing their money, time and editorial staff in you. They don’t charge you any money before or after taking you on.
THE PROS of traditional publishing are obvious: they do all the heavy lifting with regard to the technical side of publishing. You don’t have to worry about where the hell you find someone to “make” a cover. And formatting – what’s that? Don’t worry, you can leave all that to the traditional publisher. You don’t have to do anything except sit back and wait for the money to roll in, right?
Wrong. (See under.)
The biggest PRO of all, though, for many writers is being able to say to friends and family “I’ve found a publisher!” Which is code for “See! I AM good enough.” That tacit validation is what drives so many writers to hold out for traditional publishing – it sure isn’t the expectation of making a liveable annual salary. Of course, that is absolutely their choice.
Interesting how the term “vanity publishing” has changed over the decades, too.
THE CONS: traditional houses are less likely to take a risk on new writers. They prefer writers with their own website / blog / vlog / FaceBook followers / TikTok followers / Threads followers etc. Traditional publishers, quite rightly, expect writers to be professional, to be committed to growing as a writer / business, to produce consistently good work, and to work hard at the marketing, too.
Even as an unknown, you will be expected to know about social media and you’ll be expected to help market your own book. Don’t think your traditional publisher will do all that while you sit back, drink coffee and dream up the plot for your next book. Like I said: That World is Gone.
You’ll still be expected to do your share of marketing, from book-shop readings and “events” (if you can get them), to social media followers (if you can get them), to selling at your local market, if need be.
They will also expect you to be marketing your book LONG before it is published. They’ll want you building a buzz around it, perhaps doing some short TikTok videos, organising reader reviews etc. This all takes time and effort. Most of it will be yours.
AND IF I DO IT MYSELF?
Publishing independently / self-publishing, means you do it ALL yourself. You write the book. If you can, you have it professionally edited. You have a cover professionally made. You do research on what’s the best way to format your book for different online retailers (Amazon; Apple; Barns & Noble etc). You upload the book online to Amazon etc either formatted as an ebook file or as an ebook plus print on demand (POD).
You need to know all this. As an independent / self-publishing author, you are essentially making a commitment to yourself and your work. You become a small business dedicated to YOU, promoting you and your creativity. For that risk, and hard work, you will reap all the benefits, because all the profit you make (minus the small fee Amazon et al charge for uploading your book) will be yours. All of it. You do all the work, you keep all the money you make (minus expenses, if you delegate, and minus any tax owed).
That’s why, when I hear about hybrid publishing houses that offer writers a “deal” where the house takes 50 or 60% of the writers’ life-time earnings on a book, for giving the book a light edit, a proofread, a cover and an upload, I get incensed. THAT is just one reason why the big publishing houses, and others, are making millions of dollars, pounds or euros in profit out of creatives. Yes, of course, some of those hybrid publishing companies might have decent standards and may accept manuscripts that are pretty good to begin with. Some may be good to deal with. But many won’t. They’ll publish just about anything, and then make sure they take the biggest cut of any profit cake, forever. Multiply that by the thousands (millions?) of writers who will use them and you can see why it’s an attractive side hustle for so many publishing companies.
Those hybrid companies, no matter how they sell it, are still there to make money out of all the writers in the world who want to say those magic words: “I’ve found a publisher!”
To be clear: those hybrid companies are not traditional publishing houses (even though they may be affiliated to them). A traditional publishing house will not charge a writer anything to publish their book, either before publication or after it.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
Whether you pay a company before publication (sometimes known as vanity publishing – which is fine if that’s what you want); or whether you pay a company after publication (as in the hybrid companies who will “edit, proofread, provide a cover and upload the ebook” for a big percentage of your earning on that book forever), my warning is the same:
Know what you’re getting into.
Check the small print.
Check for hidden fees. For example, who pays Amazon’s small fee for uploading digital work – them or you?
Is the total amount you get GROSS or NET? Ask them what that means. Exactly.
Work out the finances before you sign anything over to a hybrid publishing company.
If a service takes 55%, that means for every 100 pounds, dollars or euros, that’s 55 to them and 45 to you. But they will probably take Amazon’s (small) fee out of YOUR slice of the cake, so that’s even less than 45 to you. Is there anything else they deduct? Ask them. Get it in writing.
If you make 1000, they will take 550 and you will make 450, less whatever fees they put in your contract. But you wrote the book! You spent months / years trying to make it the best book you could, writing and rewriting and … and they take the biggest slice of the cake forever, on the book you signed over to them. Excuse me while I go wash my mouth out with soap.
If you think that’s a good deal, then go for it. It may suit writers who don’t mind paying a publishing company for that service. If you can, check with The Society of Authors about any contract from a company that wants to take a cut of your earnings.
ALTERNATIVELY…
Rather than pay a company more than half your earnings for the rest of the book’s life, you could invest in yourself. Delegate the things you can’t do. Check online for designers and illustrators who make covers, either for ebooks or for ebook plus POD (prices vary. Check online. Join forums and ask questions. There is a whole community of indie authors out there and they are incredibly helpful).
Equally, you can find a formatter to make the book ready for digital upload. Or learn how to do it yourself. It’s up to you. It all depends what your budget it and how much you want to invest in yourself. Again, as an indie author, you have choices.
AVOID BURNOUT
Sometimes you just can’t do it ALL yourself. Don’t risk becoming a Moany Lisa instead of being your best Mona Lisa self. Learn to delegate. Do what you do best, and out-source the rest, if you can. I know budgets are tight but it can pay to invest in yourself.
GOING TO MARKET
Whether you publish traditionally or independently, you’ll have to know how to market your book, using every social media and technological strategy at your disposal. Preferably, begin marketing your book long before it hits Amazon or any book shelf. Be proactive.
Organise ARCS, if you can – Advance Reader Copies. Some companies provide this service. Honest reviews will help sell your work.
Create interest. Give snippets of the book, depending on your genre.
Consider TikTok, Instagram etc. Be consistent. Keep it short. Post often. Read up on other indie authors’ successes. Check what they did, which social media they used (and which they didn’t waste time on). This will also be genre dependent.
Don’t make the mistake of going on every social media outlet. That’s a sure way to burnout (it’ll turn readers off, too). Be fussy. Where do other authors in your genre advertise? Amazon or Facebook? TikTok? Threads? Should you have a newsletter? (Probably.) A reader magnet? A website? A blog? How do you plan to engage with your readers to ensure they buy your next book? How long are you going to make them wait for it?
Answers will vary depending on your genre. Ask around on forums. You’ll be surprised how many other indie authors – some very successful – are happy to help newcomers.
Communication and community are strong in the indie world.
I AM THE MASTER OF MY FATE, I AM THE CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL
Poet William Earnest Henley had it right. But you can master technicalities, too.
You can make a cover for free on sites such as Canva.com. You can format your book (Vellum.pub is a good paid-for software, as is Atticus, but there are many other free options). As an indie author you can do all, or most, of it yourself and tailor it to your own budget. It means commitment and loyalty to yourself as a writer, and to your journey as an author. Which, sadly, a lot of traditional publishers no longer offer. If you don’t earn them the biggest slice of the pie, they’ll drop you faster than an old cliché.
And yet, one road can still lead to the other. Traditional publishers are also trawling indie communities and forums, looking for the most popular authors and offering them deals. The carrot offered there is distribution. But it’s another way indie authors are taking control, so it’s good.
You see? Choices.
One last caveat: don’t think for a moment that self-publishing or traditionally publishing ONE book is going to make you a decent annual salary. If you make this your job, you have to work at it just like any other job. That means you’re writing the next book while you continue to market the one you just published. Have a deadline for finishing it. Build hype around that, too. Have LOTS of ideas ready for your next books and keep that ball rolling. And keep reading! But you do that anyway, right? You’re a business. Your words are your product. Write! Keep writing, and keep publishing. That way, you will grow as an author and hopefully your reader base will grow, too.
If you’re sitting thinking Yeah, I can do this! I’ve got a soul. I’m a captain! But, um, what should I write?
Research what sells best, at wordsrated.com
Whatever path you choose, whichever sea you sail, I wish you success.
Kay Leitch
Author of Treasure This
Here is the full thread in CraftChats
kaywritesheretoo 