Should I Self-Publish?

Traditional publishing is hard and terrible; is indie publishing a better choice?

Dec 04, 2024

Dear Sonal,

My first novel is almost ready, and now I need to decide whether to traditionally publish or go independent.

I see so many authors on social media who have gone indie. And even the ones who are trying trad publishing, it seems like nothing but years of rejection. Like, rejected over and over to get an agent, and even if they do get an agent, they get rejected over and over by publishers.

And I feel like, I would get rejected, because I don’t think my book is the kind of thing that is popular or that everyone wants; kind of the story of my life, the not fitting in and not being accepted or being what everyone else is looking for.

Plus, I don’t have an MFA, or a list of publications in literary magazines or anything all these successful traditional authors have. I don’t look like what they are looking for, and so why should I subject myself to the gatekeepers who are going to shut me out anyway?

Besides, isn’t traditional publishing dying off? Isn’t being an indie author better for writers anyway? Shouldn’t I get a jump on the new way of doing things instead of getting bogged down in the old school that isn’t going to accept me to begin with?

Still, I am new at this, and it’s hard to know what to believe on the internet. From the bits and pieces you’ve said, it sounds like you’re pursuing traditional publishing, and I’d really like to know why. What am I missing here?

Sincerely,
Indie from the Internet

Dear Indie from the Internet,

We’re going to start with a history lesson, which is probably going to be a little bit inaccurate because history was never my best subject, but stick with me on the gist of things, okay?

Self-publishing has been around for a long, long time. But it’s not always looked the way it does now.

People like to point to Virginia Woolf as an early indie author, but when she and her husband first set up a letterpress in their living room, they weren’t so much self-publishing as they were starting their own small publishing house: Hogarth Press. (Incidentally, Hogarth still exists as an imprint of Random House, so I guess that makes them the Big 5 these days.)

Yes, they printed Virginia Woolf’s work (much to her relief, because she didn’t like the anxious waiting and potential rejection either) but they also printed a lot of other stuff from a lot of other people. Some of them were friends, yes, but there was clearly a submissions process of some kind, which I know because they rejected James Joyce’s Ulysses. (To be fair, their reason was that it was too long for two amateur printers to typeset and print.)

But prior to that, Virginia had published books with Duckworth Books, which was a publishing house that was started up by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. (It’s still around, although it’s changed ownership and nearly went bankrupt a few times.) No shade on Virginia Woolf, and even given some probable strain between these two, (she later accused her brother of molesting her as a child) it’s hard not to imagine that having a brother who owned a publishing company wasn’t helpful.

So is this so much like today’s “I am one person who put out one book on Amazon entirely on my own and hope that people will buy it?” or is it closer to “I am part of a literary community that includes relationships with traditional publishers, one of which my brother started, and the other is the press my husband runs where I sometimes work too, is this maybe kind of nepotism-lite even though I am like, revolutionary in my brilliance?”

In any case, publishing has changed a lot since then—I don’t see a lot of people buying a used letterpress to form a publishing house and physically making books in their living room—so let’s jump ahead to about 20 years ago or so, when self-publishing using Amazon Kindle Direct or Lulu or whatever was in its infancy, and social media was barely even Facebook since only college students knew about TheFacebook.

At the time, going viral was not a thing. This may be difficult for any of you under 30 to imagine, but what can I say, I am old, I was there.

Self-publishing for many years up to that time was more commonly understood to be the vanity press, i.e., I pay someone a bunch of money, they give me a big pile of printed books that I am now responsible for selling. There was no gatekeeper to this except for the limits of your wallet…. okay, for many of us, that is a pretty significant gatekeeper, but so long as funds allowed, you could vanity print gibberish if you wanted to.

Still, the sales part was challenging. eBooks were in their infancy, audiobooks were still on cassette tapes and CDs. Getting self-published books into physical bookstores was difficult-to-impossible, libraries weren’t buying copies, classrooms weren’t buying sets, and so basically, you’d be trying to convince people to buy your book one-by-one. If you weren’t good at sales and marketing, or didn’t have some natural body of people paying attention to you (e.g., you were a celebrity or some major figure in your particular field) this was very, very difficult to do.

So naturally, for fiction writers, especially debut fiction writers, this was generally a nonsense idea. Distribution was hard, marketing was hard, sales were hard. Why would you pay thousands of dollars to get into this? You’d have to be stupid.

And so what was a writer to do but to mail copies of their manuscripts to agents and publishers—electronic submission was also in its infancy—wait several months to be rejected, and keep doing this until either it was accepted, or you ran out of energy for it.

The process might take years, even if you were submitting simultaneously. If you had no other viable option beyond traditional publishing, then you will send your work out to every possible person from the biggest of the big five to the smallest of the small presses. When new agents or even new small presses came on scene, you might try them, because what have you got to lose? When editors changed at various presses, you might have tried sending the book to the new person to see if that helped, especially if it had been a long time since you’d sent them the book. You’d make a point of going to literary festivals and events and try to make connections with other writers and agents and editors and talk about the book you’re sending around, and see if you could get a referral or an invitation to send the manuscript directly to an editor, even if you’d sent something to their slush pile previously.

After being soundly rejected everywhere, you might shove the book in a drawer for a while, and then later on down the road, you might try revising it yet again, because no matter how excellent it was when you sent it out the first time, this is your first novel. It may be a well-crafted novel, but it’s still the novel that taught you how to write a novel, and it’s unlikely to be your best novel. The mistakes you made and have learned from are still in there somewhere, even if you’ve patched them up. So if the energy for this book is still there, maybe you’ll rewrite it again, and send it out once more. Rinse and repeat.

In my very first MFA class, one of the other students had just had her first book accepted for publication—after ten years and over forty rejections. Granted, this included some periods of giving up on it and letting it molder in a drawer, and some periods of revising it and re-writing it to send it around yet again. But still. Ten. Years.

Now, let’s jump to today, and look at the modern indie publishing movement. Thanks to eBooks and print on demand, there are no upfront costs. I mean yes, a smart indie author is probably paying for copy editing and cover design and such, but to actually make your book available to people does not need to cost you a a dime up front.

So now, self-publishing is affordable. Plus, no storing boxes of printed books in your home and schlepping them around to sell; everything can be conveniently bought on Amazon, just like any other book.

And this is how the lie that self-publishing is so much better began.

Don’t get me wrong—there are people who succeed in self-publishing, and there are certain kinds of books where self-publishing makes much more sense than traditional publishing, and it’s not like trad publishing makes things easy for debut novels either.

But for your average, debut fiction writer, self-publishing also doesn’t work very well.

Sure, you can buy the book on Amazon. But what about in a physical book store? Even though Amazon is by far the biggest seller of books in the USA, people still buy physical printed books in book stores. In addition, people browse for books in book stores by looking at authors and books they’d otherwise never know about online, they read a few pages in bookstores to get a feel for things, booksellers can help market and recommend books. etc.

But it’s very difficult to get self-published books into bookstores. I mean, sure, you can walk into your local indie bookstore and convince them to carry a couple of copies of your book. But you can’t walk into every bookstore, independent or chain store, across the entire country, or even in a different country, and talk them all into carrying your book.

Similarly, libraries. You can go to your local library and see if they will carry a copy of your self-published book, and maybe they will. But can you convince the hundreds or perhaps thousands of library systems across the country to carry your book? Doubtful. And here in Canada, in addition to sales, authors also make money through the Public Lending Right, which is money you receive annually if your book is available at libraries. (I believe the UK has a similar system, but I do not think the US does.)

Sure, neither bookstores nor libraries carry every traditionally published book either. But there’s an established distribution channel through traditional publishing that has not been replicated through indie publishing.

Of course, once the book is available, you still have to market and sell it, and the argument many indie publishers make is that traditional publishers do next to nothing to promote books—leaving it all to the author—and therefore, why should you give up money to the publisher?

It’s true that publishers are spending less and less on book promotion, and authors are expected to do some of this themselves. And it’s true that you may not always get the marketing attention you deserve, especially when one of the big authors at the publisher puts out a book that’s going pay everyone’s salary for the next several months. But it’s not true that traditional publishers do nothing. Part of their job involves having a marketing plan, pitching you to appear at book festivals, at readings, in media if appropriate, submitting your book to awards, getting ARCs out to reviewers and book bloggers, and probably a lot of other things that I have no idea about because unlike the book marketing team at a Publishing House, I do not do this every day. And likewise, many indie authors discover they don’t know much about marketing books either.

There’s no getting around the fact that book sales are hard. It’s the harsh realization that virtually every indie author faces once they put their book out there. For most, it’s a long, slow climb, and often it simply fizzles out.

Yes, traditional publishers are going to expect you to participate in the promotion. We live in a world of social media where people who like a writer will follow them on Instagram, and are more likely to get hyped for the next book because they saw it over and over again on IG, and not because they read the review in the New York Times. Frankly (and sadly) I cannot remember the last time I read a NYT book review whereas I have to put a blocker on my phone to limit my time on Instagram.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the part of the book marketing that you see when scrolling through your socials represents the whole of the effort involved in getting your book promoted and sold.

I think there are many people doing authors a major disservice by talking up indie publishing as the great replacement to traditional publication, and much of it is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of how authors make money.

Most people think it’s all about book sales, and yes, book sales are a big part of it. But the other part of it is rights sales.

If I sell publication rights to a traditional publisher in Canada, yes, I make some money through an advance against Canadian sales. But then the book can be sold to a US publisher for US publication rights, a UK publisher for UK publishing rights, a French publisher for French translation rights and French publication rights. Typically, both the publisher and I make money this way.

At the moment, there’s no equivalent to this in indie publishing, at least not that I’m aware of. Indie publishers only make money from book sales. They are their own publisher within a universe of books that are also published by people who are their own publisher, and “My Own Personal Publishing Company” isn’t going to sell other people’s books, and therefore they aren’t going to pay anyone money for those rights.

It’s also why it’s hard to sell an indie book to a traditional publisher later. You’ve already expended your valuable first publication rights.

Ask Sonal A Question

This is why I’m sticking with traditional publishing, at least for the time being. Ask me in ten years if I’m still trying to get this book sold.

I’m under no illusion that trad publishing is some wonderful utopia, particularly as a racialized woman. I remember one agent rejected me by saying she was very torn, but there had been too many outstanding books by brown people published recently and therefore she didn’t think she could sell mine. Because like, there is a limit on how many brown authors can publish a book at a time and all the spaces had been used up by truly amazing brown writers. I am unaware of any such limit on books by mediocre white men.

I have suspected, although I cannot prove, that at least some of the rejections I’ve received come from a fundamental misunderstanding of my book because I wrote about a brown person and the people rejecting the book were white; there are some things they cannot easily see. If the book does get published, is that going to affect my promotion and book sales? It’s hard not to think that it won’t. Should I revise and rewrite my book so it’s more tailored to a white audience? I genuinely don’t think I can, but again, ask me in ten years if I’m still trying to get this book sold.

And rejection sucks. I’m going on years of rejection right now—and this was a book that was a finalist in a writing contest. And yet, I’m still expecting years more rejection. I’m not loving it. I don’t know if all of this ends with a publishing contract or if this book is going to end up digitally mouldering in some forgotten corner of my hard drive. I would not be the first writer who didn’t sell their first book. Or their second. Or their third.

Still, I can absolutely see how a person would say, screw it, traditional publishing does not have a place for me, I’m going indie. And maybe that works better for you. Maybe it will ultimately work better for me; I don’t know. But it’s not necessarily an elegant solution to the problems of traditional publishing.

And as much as I hate to admit it, the time and rejection is possibly (ugh) helpful for writers for their first book. The temptation to send a book out to publishers and agents before it’s truly ready, even when we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s ready to go, is strong. My friend who stared down ten years of rejection sees how all the time in the drawer and then revised and the rejected and then revised helped the book and also helped her a lot as a writer. I did the same when I first sent out my novel to agents—way earlier than I should have sent it, even though I believed it was time—and then after letting it sit in a drawer for a while, I could see much more clearly what I needed to do to make it a better book. As much as I think that it’s ready now, will I feel the same a few years from now if the book has not found a home? Will I think that if it does find a home and cringe my way through promoting it, knowing it’s still not quite fully baked? Will I look back and think I was so naive to believe it was ready to go out?

This doesn’t mean that a rejection necessarily implies that your book was not ready, but still… I think about what my novel like was after the first round of rejections, and imagine what would have happened if I had given up on traditional publishing right at that moment, and published it independently. I’d have put a poorly written book out there with my name on it. Very cringe. Not demure.

I am not ruling out self-publishing one day. But for the moment, the primary advantage I see for myself and the novel I have completed is that it will allow me to realize the dream of having an actual print book with my name on it much sooner. Powerful stuff, for sure. Still, I can always pay some money to do that for myself and have exactly one copy printed to hold in my hands.

In the meantime, if you’re thinking about indie publishing, take the time to really scrutinize your own motives here, and which route is best for your book. Both methods have some deep flaws, but in both cases, our own impatience in wanting to realize the dream of being a published author is most likely to be our downfall.

Don’t go indie because everyone on the internet seems to be doing it, or because rejection sucks. Do it because it’s what makes sense for you and your book.

Writer Therapy

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