Self-Publishing—Your Omni Guide
By Bill Drew - Mar 11 , 2009
You’ve heard a lot about self-publishing—or maybe you haven’t. Either way, you’re probably not sure what to think about self-publishing because there are so many different ideas about it.
Well, I’m in the same pickle—I’m almost done writing my book, and I thought I wanted to self-publish. But I wasn’t sure I knew enough to make a good decision. So I looked up a lot of things on the Internet to get the big picture, as well as the small details.
Here’s what I discovered—–
BENEFITS
The benefits of self-publishing, compared to traditional publishing, include:
- CONTROL. You’re in charge of deciding everything:
—Size (physical dimensions) of book
—Cover design
—Page layout
—Number of copies to print
—When to print more copies & how many
***Traditional: The publisher has the last word in everything. - SPEED. Press setup & publishing—6-12 weeks (or 2 weeks, in emergencies)
***Traditional: 18-24 months, or more - RIGHTS. Retain and control all rights to your book.
***Traditional: You contractually sign all your rights away to the publisher. You don’t get your rights back until your book goes out of print, all copies are sold, and your publisher loses interest in your book (meaning, the publisher decides it’s not going to get any more money out of your book). - MORE PROFIT. You must pay an initial cost to the self-publishing publisher in setting up to publish your book, which can range from $750 to $5,999, depending on the publisher you pick and the features of your book (hard or softcover, amount of graphics, color, etc.). After that, your up-front costs of printing can be $4-$9 per book (depending on size, etc.), and you can get from 20% to as much as 100% of the profit from your book, depending on your publisher. See the list of self-publishing publishers, below, with links.
***Traditional: You may get as little as 5% or as much as 12% of the profit. Whatever advance royalty you may get is counted as part of the profit, so you don’t start getting your percentage of the profit until your sales exceed the advanced royalty. And, if the sales profits don’t cover the advance, you may have to return part of your advance. - NO MORE RETURNS! Publishers for self-publishing authors now have the technology to print your book only when an order comes in, even if it’s an order for just one book. So no one is warehousing a lot of your books or stocking them on bookstore shelves, and therefore you never have to worry about the extra expense of paying for returned books that wouldn’t sell.
***Traditional: When a bookstore or other distributor of books has a number of your books on their shelves or in their warehouse, they return those that haven’t sold after 90 days or so. You see, when they bought them from you, you and your publisher agreed that you would buy the books back if they didn’t sell within a certain time period. Thus, books returned, or returns, are an expense to the publisher and to you. - NO MORE REJECTIONS! No self-publishing publisher will reject your book—after all, you’re paying them to print it, right? So you don’t have to participate in that endless cycle of sending out query letters to agents and publishers to get your book accepted. No more endless back and forth compromising on your book, its title, its length, and its content. No more edits of your work, either, since you’re the editor-in-charge of your book.
***Traditional: It takes a while just to get the attention of a publisher, for which you may first have to get an agent. But even getting an agent interested in your book can be a long and tedious venture. Then publishers often take a manuscript under consideration and run it by a number of their editors to see if they really do want your book. Your hopes for publishing your book can be dashed at any moment until you actually sign a contract with a publisher, and then you’ve still got a lot to wade through with editors concerning the size, shape, and quality of your book.
DRAWBACKS
I discovered these drawbacks to self-publishing:
- It’s not easy to market a book by yourself. The alarming truth is that about 90-95% of all books published by major publishers sell less than 5,000 copies. That’s right—big gasp! Of course, you won’t get a major publisher to even consider your book unless you’ve got a great book and a superior marketing plan set up to market it and an established fan base–called a marketing platform—to market it to (or you’re some sort of celebrity with a ready-made fanbase; no celebrities here, right?). So whether you publish with a major publisher or you self-publish, you’re stuck with marketing your book. And to do that successfully you need to have a fanbase or marketing platform of about 150,000 people who know you or who know of you, think of you as an expert in your field, and would probably buy a book you published. How do you attract that many fans or acquaint that many people with you & your expertise? Here’s how:
—write & distribute a daily or weekly free newsletter (before, during, after the writing of your book)
—set up a website where people can come for your expertise—a blog will do; give away free information, free advice, free digital gifts; solve problems for visitors; provide links to other important sites in your field
—give seminars (free seminars, at first; when others ask you to theirs, start charging)
—write articles for local and regional newspapers
—join a speaker’s club and perform as often as possible at Rotary Clubs, etc.
—offer interviews on radio and TV programs to talk about your expertise
—begin promoting your book with all the above at least 6 months before you plan to publish (be sure to partner with several other authors who have newsletters and a big database of subscribers you can share with)
—plan to keep promoting your book at least 3 months beyond the publishing date (have newspaper, radio, and TV interviews already set up in advance, as well as articles on your expertise also written in advance and mentioning your book and website where it can be bought) - Disapproval from publishers and bookstores.
—Self-publishing is frowned upon in the book industry and can prejudice major publishers against you when you approach them with other books to publish, in the future (on the other hand, if you do well with self-publishing your first book, publishers react favorably and may even approach you to publish that high-sales first book) - Probably less sales, less money, less fame.
—as noted above, very few books by major publishers ever break even, and that’s even more true with self-published books: only a very small fraction of a percent of self-published books ever achieve fame or large sales figures
Self-Publishing Companies
You can click and compare the offers of these twelve major self-publishers for yourself:
- AuthorHouse
- BookSurge (Amazon.com)
- Dog Ear Publishing
- Infinity
- iUniverse
- Lulu.com
- Outskirts Press
- Publish America
- Trafford Publishing
- Wheatmark Book Publishers
- Wordclay
- Xlibris
(If you’d like to know which one I favor, it’s Dog Ear Publishing. Dog Ear makes its money in printing your books, one of the very few self-publishers that allows you 100% of the royalties or profits. They charge you about $4.00 per book for printing, whereas others charge as much as $9.00 per book. And they are the lowest in setup fees, charging $300 less than the best deal you can get from their nearest competitor. No, I have not yet signed up with Dog Ear Publishing, but I plan to. And Dog Ear Publishing has no idea that I’ve written this article and that I’m endorsing them.)
Books on Self-Publishing
If that’s not enough, you can click here to find out about a book I discovered that promises to give you “the inside scoop on the contracts, services, printing markups, and royalty payouts of 45 self-publishing companies” (The Fine Print of Self Publishing). Here are a few other guidebooks to self-publishing:
- Top Self-Publishing Firms, by Stacie Vander Pol
- 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, 6th Edition, by John Kremer
- Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, 16th Edition, by Dan Poynter
When you look up any book, such as the three mentioned above, make sure you go to Amazon.com and check out the reader comments. And don’t look at just the high-rated comments. Many times, the most insight and information are found in the low-rated comments.
Gurus of Self-Publishing
As you research self-publishing on the Internet, two names will keep coming up, over and over, so check’em out:
Looking for self-publishing success stories? Check out John Kremer’s—
Kremer and Poynter offer the most complete—and most authentic—help on self-publishing that’s available on the Internet. Avoid the scam artists out there by checking these two experts out first. Anyone else is just a distant runner-up.
Co-publishing
Did you know that you can enter into a co-publishing arrangement with a major publisher? It’s a strange brand of publishing that can be considered a form of self-publishing.
I’m not going to ‘re-invent the wheel’ on this one, so click here and then scroll down for a great explanation on co-publishing.
