by Gary Kessler
This article does not pretend to be a comprehensive guide to self-publishing, but, rather, skims across the surface of the topic, offering some discussion and "reality check" on both basic and frequent questions and myths that exist in this area of publishing.
Choices in Getting Published
You essentially have two pathways toward being published. You can contract with a traditional publisher to publish and market and distribute your work at his/her expense, a process that is often accomplished, in the case of book-length manuscripts, by first engaging a literary agent to initiate and represent the sale of your work. The other path is to produce the work yourself, either through self-publishing by your own, direct effort (in print or in electronic form) or through paying a book producer to produce, market, and/or distribute the book for you.
The Different Forms of Book Publishing
There basically are two forms of book publishing—print and electronic—and three types of book publishing, based on who pays for it—traditional publishing, in which the publisher pays nearly all of the production, marketing, and distribution costs and the author receives a royalty and perhaps an advance on sales; subsidy publishing, where the publisher and author share the costs of production, marketing, and distribution; and self-publishing/vanity publishing, in which the author bears all of the production, marketing, and distribution costs.
In print publication, a physical book, with printed pages between covers, is produced. In electronic publication, the work is provided in electronic form on a disk, a CD, direct computer download, and/or an Internet Web site post. Works can, of course, be offered in both forms consecutively or simultaneously.
The traditional print publishing method of financing the publication of a written work, which requires that the publisher take nearly all of the financial risk in publication (the author still foots the bill in finding the publisher and often swallows some of the promotion expenses), still provides the aura of quality books and periodicals that have weeded out the now-considerable chaff. Traditional publishers will not charge the author for anything in the publishing process (beyond costs associated with producing the manuscript, which would include the author-born cost of permissions to use copyrighted material and images). They will pay royalties, and, if they determine they will make a tidy profit from the venture, will often pay the author an advance. They also will cover the costs of copyediting, cover and interior design, printing, advertising, and distribution. The risk taken by the publisher implies an independent professional determination on the part of the publisher that the work is of high enough quality to produce a sales volume profit for both the publisher and the author. Knowing this, the reader tends to have more confidence in books published in the traditional manner than those produced by other means.
The author will share costs, to a lesser or greater degree, with a subsidy publisher. There, in fact, are few purely traditional publishers left in today’s world except for authors perpetually populating the best-sellers’ lists. Even traditional publishers are increasingly demanding that authors deliver submissions in nearly publishable shape and contribute heavily to sales promotion, both of which incur what were traditionally publisher’s costs for the author. The true subsidy publisher (note that many "subsidy publishers" are really vanity press publishers in drag—pay very close attention to the wording of who does what for how much) has at least enough commitment to the book to share some of the risks.
Self-publishing, or publishing through a vanity press (the difference between the two is that the author does all of the legwork when self-publishing, and a production company does much or all of the production legwork with vanity publishing), will impose the complete costs of production and advertising (if any) on the author. There is no publisher commitment to the project in this category; such a publisher would publish your laundry list (with all the words misspelled), if you were willing to cover the costs. One of the most recent innovations in publishing is the rise of the POD producers (like iUniverse, 1stBooks, Xlibris), which will produce, list on their Web sites, and distribute books for authors using the print-on-demand method rather than the print-run method that is used by the more traditional vanity presses. Writers who can’t stomach having self-publishing linked to vanity-press publishing probably don’t have the fortitude to face the world of publishing with a self-publishing project. There are quite legitimate uses for this means of publishing and neither "self-publishing" nor "vanity press" need to be seen as negative.
All three types of publishers are represented in the traditional print and e-book publishing fields, so read that small print carefully.
Types of Printing Technology
Books can either be printed in print runs by offset printing (high total cost; low cost per unit) or by one-up print-on-demand technology (high per-unit cost). Print on Demand (POD) is just a method of printing; it is not a type of publisher—although both the proponents and naysayers of a business paradigm based largely on use of the POD printing method have confused the world of publishing by assuming otherwise. Traditional publishers use both printing methods for their print books, depending on their assessment of the market for the book. If you anticipate high sales, you would choose offset printing; if you can’t realistically see the sale of at least 350 books or if you primarily want to keep a specialty book in print and available for sale, you would more likely to choose POD printing.
What’s Involved in Self-Publishing
Getting a book produced yourself, in addition to placing all of the costs, risks, and legwork squarely on you, calls up talents and abilities that are mostly different from those required in getting the book written—and takes time and energy away from further writing projects. The book has to be designed (a cover and the presentation style of the book itself), edited, set up, indexed (if nonfiction), proofed, printed, bound, copyrighted, matched with an ISBN number, bar coded, delivered (if printed by offset), and set up for distribution—and this is all before the hardest parts, which are promotion and sales. This is no time for you to assume the best or not to center your planning on objectivity and reality. Publishers—and even self-publishing services—can cover the combined chores of getting a book into print better than individual self-publishers in most cases because volume work attracts experience, specialized talent, and economies of scale.
Finding a Self-Publishing Printer
There are various national-level book printing services (e.g., R. R. Donnelly, Sheridan, and Morris) that would do most, if not all, of services wrapped up in self-publishing on a per-service fee (and even print the book for you). These services can be found through the Internet. For what would probably be less money (but perhaps more footwork on the author’s part and with lesser quality), the author could ask around at printers in his/her area for prepress specialists recommendations. In most cases, editing and proofreading are not offered by such services (although they very well may have lists of editors and proofreaders who could be contacted. A few print-on-demand (POD) services and most printers will publish under the author’s own imprint, a helpful service if you don’t want it to be immediately known that you have used a self-publishing source. The major POD producers, such as iUniverse, Xlibris, and 1stBooks, won’t produce books with the author’s own imprint.
A good book to get if you are contemplating organizing the self-publication of your work under your own imprint would be Tom and Marilyn Ross’s Complete Guide to Self-Publishing (Writer’s Digest Books, 1994).
Services and Price Comparison of POD and Electronic Producers
A services and price comparison of the major POD producers can be found on Clea Saal’s website at http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/index.html. For a comprehensive list of POD production services (as well as e-book production services), go to http://www.bookmarket.com/ondemand.html. A large list of e-book publishers can also be found on Bonnie Mercure’s guide for writers markets at http://www.dowse.com/ezine-markets.html.
What to Look (Out) for in a Contract with a Self-Publishing Service
A contract with a self-publishing service (either print or electronic) should include some clauses that are more author friendly than can be expected from even some traditional publisher contracts. You should be able to restrict the production services’ rights to the book to nonexclusive print and/or electronic production. This means both that you should be able to retain nearly all subsidiary rights to the book and that you should even be able to exercise print and electronic rights yourself simultaneously with the publisher. You should be able to restrict the term of the contract more severely than you normally could with a traditional publisher. You should be able to contract for just two or three years. Regardless, your contract should clearly specify how and under what circumstances it can be terminated. You should also ensure that your work cannot be edited or otherwise changed without your review (although it is in your interests to have your work edited by a competent publishing editor) and that there are no nearly hidden clauses in the contract that could trigger further expenses to you beyond the basic agreement.
The Myth of Self-Publishing to Attract a Traditional Publisher
Considering self-publishing of a book a stepping stone to traditional publishing of the same book, writers sometimes ask what level of sales of their self-published book would attract an agent or traditional publisher for that book. In response to the surface question, an agent or publisher would probably take notice if you sold 500 of your self-published books. But the notice they would be taking was on your ability to help market a book, not on the quality of the book itself. Thus, the best you could count on was a zero-based willingness to look at a new manuscript on its own merits, with the knowledge that the author has marketing talents to help with the promotion of the book—if the book manuscript was highly competitive in its own right against the other manuscripts on offer.
But the response to the underlying question here is that there isn’t really much use of wondering how many sales of a self-published book would impress an agent or publisher—and here there is a great difference in what your goal really is—a future for this particular book or a future for your writing career. If your goal is to get this same book picked up by a traditional publisher, this is something that rarely happens, and when it does, this usually is under special circumstances, such as determination of a whole new market for the book, current events renewing interest in the topic of the book, or popularity coming to the author’s works through subsequently published books. If your goal is to get future books published by a traditional publisher, the real question seems to be whether or not—and, if so, to what extent—having a self-published book out is a stepping stone to getting published by a traditional publisher.
Time really shouldn’t be wasted in pondering this at all—and traditional publishers won’t waste much time thinking about it. Having a self-published book out is evidence that you can take a book project to print. But it doesn’t say a thing (either positive or negative) about the quality of your writing or of your creativity in weaving a story—no one of any experience validated the worthiness of your book; you just decided to self-validate. Traditional publishers don’t see self-published books as having been published at all—they see them as inferior manufactured products, and they often give the author automatic demerits with the assumption that they just couldn’t get anyone in publishing to validate the book and put any risk into publishing it. So, rather than wondering how far ahead toward a traditional publishing goal having put out a self-published book got you, you’d best see yourself as at ground zero again vis-a-vis traditional publishers—with something on the plus side in the marketing angle if you sell a lot of your books and the same things to prove about your writing and story weaving ability that any previously unpublished writer had.
Best Track Record for Self-Published Books
Nonfiction books, especially ones that can easily be tied to a market and sales points (e.g., study books for business seminars or self-help or history books connected by topic to one or more direct sales outlets) sell significantly better as self-published books than does fiction or poetry. Just a fact of life.
Resources and Links
Print:
Tom and Marilyn Ross, Complete Guide to Self-Publishing (Writer’s Digest Books, 1994).
Internet Links:
The Google search engine at http://www.google.com is probably the most comprehensive search resource on self-publishing topics.
A services and price comparison of the major POD producers can be found on Clea Saal’s website at http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/index.html.
A comprehensive list of POD production services (as well as e-book production services) can be found at http://www.bookmarket.com/ondemand.html.
A large list of e-book publishers can be found on Bonnie Mercure’s guide for writers markets at http://www.dowse.com/ezine-markets.html.
