Traditional Publishing vs Self Publishing | S3 E40
Some of my most asked questions when people hear that I’ve written and published a book is how. I’ve helped others walk through the self publishing process and worked with them to publish their own books. I’ve designed book covers and laid out interiors of books. I’ve endlessly done research over the self publishing process as well as traditionally publishing. What many don’t know is what is the difference between traditional publishing and self publishing. What are the perks of each and what are the reasons you would choose one or both. Today I’m going to cover both and help you get a better understanding of each and why you might want to self publish.
So first let’s start with the basics, why would someone want to publish a book? Maybe it’s a novel, maybe it’s a self help book or a children’s book. Maybe you have a dream to create a journal or some other type of published piece of work. Sometimes you have something to write that you know is going to help others, sometimes you need a creative outlet or maybe another stream of income. Whatever it is that you have a dream to publish, the question now becomes how will you publish?
Traditionally publishing means that you would publish your book through a publishing deal with a publishing house and usually a literary agent. There are a lot of publishing companies both big and small. Some are highly recognizable and some you may have never heard of but still good options. So most of the time when it comes to traditional publishing, it requires that you have a decent size “platform” in order to prove to the publisher and literary agent that you can sell the book. Publishing is a business and in today’s culture it puts a lot more on the author of the book than it used to. This also provides more opportunities for more people to become authors but also puts a lot more pressure on the author to grow a platform that can perform and sell a lot of books. I would say that most people who want to to become an author, dream of being traditionally published. I have that same dream but currently don’t have a large enough platform to get a literary agent or publishing deal. Talent is part of publishing but platform is what seals the deal. There are a lot of people with very large platforms that have ghost writers who help them write their books. There are also a lot of really talented writers out there that have the talent to write a best selling book but unfortunately don’t have the platform to get recognized. So sometimes it can be a bit of a catch 22.
So what does the actual process for traditional publishing look like. Typically you have a book proposal and you pitch it to literary agents first. Ideally you would want a literary agent because they are the experts who represent you to all the different publishers. They know who to pitch your book to in order to find the best fit and get you a publishing deal. A literary agent is only a piece of the traditional publishing pie. So you get a literary agent, and next you hope for a publishing deal. Depending on what ideas you have for your publishing career and what the publishing company decides, you may end up with a single book deal or a multi-book deal.
I haven’t personally gone through this process but from friends and research this is my understanding of how this works. Once you have an agent and they find a publisher that wants to buy your book, you sign a deal and begin the full manuscript journey. This can look different depending on the type of book and type of publisher. For fiction books, typically the book proposal includes a full manuscript already but other types of books may require less before the deal. Okay so now you work through a project timeline with different deadlines for the manuscript which then leads to different rounds of edits with your editor. There’s a lot more detail that happens but the Traditional Publishing process takes much longer than self publishing. Typically it can take up to two years from publishing deal to launching the book. Some of the big perks to traditional publishing is that you have the backing and the promotion and money of a publisher to help you launch your book into the world. They get you onto the shelves of books stores and help you get publicity. If you want to be on any best seller lists the only way is through traditional publishing. You get to just be an author and wear less hats when you traditionally publish. However you don’t have as much say or control over final decisions but on the flip side you are getting all the best help from industry experts. Royalties and ownership also work a bit different with traditional publishing too. It’s important to do your research on the publishers and agents for the type of book you want to publish so you can make sure you get the best deal.
Okay so now that we have a high level understanding of traditional publishing let’s talk about self publishing. Self Publishing can happen several different ways. The main difference though is that you wear all the hats and have to run your own project. It’s up to you to make all the different decisions and source all the different resources that you will need to bring your book to life. There are a lot of different self publishing resources out there. Some you pay them up front to help you publish and source everything and others where it’s a print on demand system so you can outsource everything and just upload the final product to then be for sale. Based on my research and my personal financial situation, I chose the print on demand option because I didn’t have money to fork out to publish my book. I used Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon to publish my book and it was honestly a really easy and great option. I had no clue if my book would be successful or not so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money taking that risk at the time. I learned a lot from my self publishing journey and found ways to save money in the process in order to self publish my book. I was able to spend under $300 to publish my book including the marketing because I had a lot of the resources available for free through friends. That may or may not be the case for you so it’s important to get a good grasp of what you have available to you through your network and what you will need to pay for.
With Self publishing you have the freedom to decide what your book is about, what the content will be, when it will release, how long or fast the process to publish will go and you get full rights and ownership to your own work. You also get a higher percentage of your royalties since you aren’t working through a publisher and agent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you would make more with one or the other because both have their perks. With traditional publishing you might sell more books overall but make a lesser percentage off each individual book. With Self publishing you might sell less books depending on your network and marketing but make more per book. The good thing is that publishing is a way to make a passive stream of income on the side either way.
As I mentioned there are several avenues available for self publishing but I’m just going to talk about the avenue that I went through to publish my book since it’s what I know best. For self publishing my book, It is Written: Daily Truth to face the lies we battle, I began outlining the book in December of 2017 and began writing it all at the end of December 2017. I worked with one of my best friends who also happens to be a really great grammar person to edit the book. I think we went through 2 rounds of edits before a final sweep. I did endless research about how to write good books and had multiple sets of eyes on the book. I did research around trademarking and copyrights to make sure that the name I came up with for the book wasn’t already taken or in use for the book I was creating. Once the book was finalized before I uploaded it to the system in Kindle Direct Publishing, I submitted it for $50 to the US copyright office to protect my work. I also did research to find out it was better for me to buy my own ISBN number through the official ISBN office rather than accepting the free ISBN number through KDP. The reason I chose to purchase my ISBN number is to ensure that I fully owned and had all the rights to my work incase a publisher ever wanted to purchase it from me or if I ever decide to remove my work from Amazon and re-publish it through another avenue. It’s always important to read the fine print with whatever platform you decide to publish through so that you know how and where your work can and will be used.
So with Self publishing you are responsible to write your book, source an editor for your book (which in my case was free since I had a friend who is great at that), you will also need someone who can design your book cover and lay out the interior of your book. Sometimes that is the same person or can be two different people but this job is usually done by a graphic designer. Since I am a graphic designer by trade, I was able to design the cover of my book as well as layout the interior of the book and have done this for other authors as well. Once you have the book written, edited then you can upload it to the publishing platform to then order your proof copies. Once you receive proofs and give it a final comb through, it’s time to publish. With publishing you will also need a marketing plan for how you want people to discover your book. For mine I had a small budget for PR boxes, facebook/ IG ads and had all my friends and family help promote my book. Depending on the type of book you plan to publish you may need additional research prior to writing your book but those are the high level steps.
The perks with this is that you can create a passive stream of income on the side. It can create a product for your blog to help you start earning income and you have full control over everything. For me, this was a great option to grow my platform since at the time when I published I only had about 700 followers on instagram and after I published my book through all my promotions and influencer campaigns I grew to around 3000 followers and now sit at about 4600 followers. There are some people who say it’s a bad move to self publish first because if your book doesn’t do well it will hurt your chances of being traditionally published but I think it’s the opposite from my experience. Self publishing helped me to gain publishing experience, grow my platform, launch my speaking career and it helped me to add a stream of income and product to my blog. I plan to self publish other books later this year and next year to add more products. I also felt that the message I had was timely and that I didn’t need to wait until I could earn a traditional publishing deal to put it out there.
So I know that was a lot of information in a short amount of time. I get asked questions about publishing and specifically self publishing so often so I thought this month’s podcast series would be a great way to answer many of those questions and I even decided to create a whole course on self publishing from start to finish. The course will be coming out at the end of June and with this course I will be walking you through the entire self publishing process from beginning to end with a lot of resources to help you be successful with publishing. I give you all the resources that I wished I had during my first time self publishing and it’s all in one place so you don’t have to scour the internet googling all the different questions that I did when I went through this process. It’s a one stop shop to get your book published and the time frame is up to you for how long the publishing process will take you. I walk you through budgeting, marketing and all the details in between. I’ve walked several authors through this process individually before and decided that it would be a great resource to create a course so that I can help even more people make their publishing dream a reality.
If you want to learn more you can check out the course page and hop on the waiting list at selfpublishcourse.com.
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