Self-Publishing
I expect people to disagree with me on this!
I’ve talked here about editors, and what to do about unsolicited manuscripts, and getting an agent. I haven’t mentioned self-publishing because I’ve never done it – but from my admittedly outside and second-hand perspective I don’t think it’s a good way to get a first novel published.
For one thing, of course, with self-publishing you don’t get a content editor – the one who tells you, “Lose this chapter, cut this repetition, give this character some reason for doing what she does, the ending you’ve got doesn’t work” – unless you pay for one, and I don’t imagine good ones are cheap. And there are considerations like cover art, formatting, ebook, print-on-demand …
A publisher handles all of that, and generally does it pretty well. Small press publishers often do very good work effectively.
“But Powers, legacy publishers hate books that don’t fit their categories! They hate originality!”
Actually they don’t. Consider Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things, or Lisa Goldstein’s Ivory Apples, or Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War.
But if you’re resolved to pursue self-publishing … I guess you work through all this at Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes and Noble Press, which are free, or at Lulu, iUniverse , Xlibris, etc., which aren’t. You can read reviews of a lot of them at: https://www.topconsumerreviews.com/best-self-publishing-services/compare/kindle-direct-publishing-vs-lulu.php
All of them require a good deal of work, and in most cases some various payments, from the author.
And then, in hopes of getting the book noticed – since you don’t want an Amazon sales rank of something like 4 million – you’ve got to do promotion, marketing. I’ve seen advice about arranging giveaways on Goodreads and Library Thing and NetGalley, sending review copies to places like Locus magazine, promoting it on Facebook, trying to arrange book signings, hiring a publicist, making a video …!
I suppose a lot of writers can learn to do all this, but at that point I think they’ve taken on a couple of new jobs: publisher and publicist.
There are success stories, of course – Andy Weir’s The Martian, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey -- but there are literally millions of titles that languish in perpetual half-life.
“But Powers, publishers don’t do anything to promote books anymore! Writers have to do it all in any case.”
Well, publishers never did do much. They would send out some review copies of a book, take out ads in specialty magazines like Locus or Science Fiction Chronicle … rely on libraries to buy the hardcover edition … and then let the paperback edition sink or swim during the month it was in bookstores.
Actually, publishers do more now. They send digital copies to reviewers, upload them to NetGalley, publish the first chapter of a book on their websites, plug it in their online newsletters, even arrange signings and guest-blog appearances for authors … it’s still a maze full of dead ends, but I’m content to just write books and let the publisher handle all the rest of it.
They do it for a living, after all.
POV: I'm published by small presses, work for a small press, and have self-published as well.
There's a lot more successful self-published authors out there than you'd think. By successful, I mean, "Able to live off of their writing income". Yes, you have to learn to hire people to do the work that a press would provide for you... but you also don't end up handing over 40%-60% of your income to those people. Whether it works out in the long run depends on your inclination and the numbers. That's a business decision.
Ultimately, though, it's an issue of flow. If all the publishers in the world can publish X good books a year, and there are 1.1X good books written each year, then some good books are only going to be published if the author rolls up their sleeves and does it themselves.
And, well. That's how small presses get started, isn't it? :)
Now, we can ague about the overall quality of self-publishing efforts, but that's an entirely different discussion.
(Obligatory PR endnote: go check out Raconteur Press!)
The channels narrow by the week. Something has got to give. As a publisher, I try to select work that is really new but fend off the received, overconfident. Most of what I do receive would require too much work before it would merit production costs. That is, manuscripts written by hard working people who nevertheless cannot put themselves in the place of a potential reader.
The books I would love to publish are usually self published before I have a chance at them, usually by writers who have developed their own marketing chops. There is very little impetus for these top-hand cowboys to look for any outside help.