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!)
Sam, I agree. If you define success as the kind The Martian or Fifty Shades of Gray had, then almost all writers, traditionally or self-published, are not successful. Many self-published writers have filled what used to be the midlist in tradional publishing, writing books that haves steady audiences and income but aren't nationally well-known outside their specific genre. And I personally know dozens of such authors.
Susan, I'm glad to hear it! And you're right, just getting published by the traditional route doesn't mean a writer is, by any measure, successful. I just balk at the "second career" aspects of self-publishing. I find it hard enough, time-consuming enough, just to write a book. Then I want to hand it to people who know how to do the rest.
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.
Writing is one art; editing is another; design is a third; publicity is a fourth—and each requires a different species of obsessive lunatic. And then you need to learn how to juggle all of those things. Even the world's most competent brain surgeons don't tend to perform operations on themselves for a very similar reason.
I think for a lot of folks, the publishing industry seems like one of those exclusive nightclubs on, like, Sunset in 1989, where a beefy bastard with a goatee, the kind of man who looks like he was carved out of a single block of gym membership has a clipboard full of names you’ve never heard of but are apparently “important,” and he’s checking it with the solemnity of a priest deciding who gets into heaven.
He doesn’t care about your manuscript. He doesn’t care about your soul. He cares about the list. You’re NOT on the list.
Well, I’m a sort of debauched sort, so as much as nobody in their right mind REALLY wants to get into a place like that, if the front door is being patrolled, I’ll opt to find another way in. There’s always a window that’s been carelessly left open somewhere, and once you’re inside and you realize the party is better in the kitchen, anyhow.
I can see how it might look like that nepotist, established-names-only nightclub. But it's more like a mobbed restaurant that constantly needs more cooks and bartenders to meet the demand. If an applicant wants to make strange dishes and innovative drinks -- well, we got a big crowd out there, give him a try. (I like "carved out of a single block of gym membership")
Well... let me be honest here: The first article I ever sent was published by a national magazine my junior year at Redlands and I got a check in my mailbox on Colton Avenue for $3500. Did I say anything to anyone else? No. I felt like a complete and total fraud. I waited to be found out. Was it brilliant? Hardly, though last time I read it in some online repository it DID make me chuckle. I worked for them (well, a notorious man with a Golden Wheelchair) for the next decade while I wrote for another magazine on Second Avenue. Did I get lucky? Did I know something or someone who got me in? I think in a lot of ways we all make our own luck, right?
Likewise, I have a friend who won the Booker prize for his debut novel 20 years or so ago. He's a great guy but I think you could say he hadn't lived the most honest life and he was definitely an outsider and possibly a criminal. Did I meet him through friends or maybe he's my uncle's friend? No. I was living in southern Mexico and I found his email address and I wrote him an email.
I imagine your story, Tim, is pretty similar. And look here at your Substack--the BEST writers I've known are always very enthusiastic about writing and are always encouraging and very generous to people who think they want to do the same with their life.
I guess we all make our own luck! I've sometimes thought of it as a roulette wheel -- we put all our money on a number, it loses, so we get more money and put it on the number again ... and it loses again ... but eventually that number *does* come up.
Publishers do a lot, but they do not arrange signings and guest-blog appearances. My publisher did submit my book for review and to a couple of contests and to a podcaster. I have done the rest of the marketing and promotion.
Tim, I actually wish I had self-published sooner, but didn't for some of reasons you describe. I felt that to self-publish would be to admit that I was a failure. This despite the fact I had credentials--first place WOFT winner, publshed works in Realms of Fantasy and pro anthologies, a book sale to Wizards of the Coast (that sadly never saw print as the series was cancelled just as I turned in my final draft), feature articles for national magazines and newspapers and a massive stack of personal letters from editors saying "beautifully written but not for us." But the perception at the time was that self-published books were poorly written works by unprofessionals, people who didn't know or care enough to hold out for the real thing. That was not me. There were years where almost every day I considered quitting altogether, and the sense of failure was overwhelming. I finally had to decide what I really wanted: the "respect" of being tradionally published or an audience for what I had to say. I chose the latter. It was, as you say, a lot of hard work and involved doing things I hate (marketing!) but I found communities dedicated to doing what I was trying to do: produce quality, well-written, well-edited books, ones I wouldn't be ashamed to bear my name as author. Those gave me the support and information I needed. And while I have not, alas, become rich or famous from my books, I now have almost 2000 reviews on my first book, have won some awards, and have made a profit most years. But what matters most is that I have people reading my books, people waiting for the next one. I have no illusion that I'm the next great American writer, but I do believe in what I have to say and want to share that with others. And here's the thing: there are many others like me, writers producing professional quality work, who have gone over to the dark side, so to speak, for many of the same reasons I have.
Susan, you make a convincing case! You've clearly done very well at it. For me, it's that "second career" factor that keeps me in traditional publishing. Marketing, as you note. Dealing with all the issues involved in effective self-publishing. As long as there are companies out there that will do it for me, and pay for it all, I'm happy to just write.
It is a second career in time, learning (so many difficult software programs!) and energy, and if I had to start over today at my age (old!) I wouldn't be able to do it. And I am delighted you can just write because we get more of your books!
Thanks, Susan, I appreciate it! I bet I'm a lot older than you are, and the phrase "difficult software programs" horrifies me. You're fortunate in having figured it all out!
New software programs are indeed horrific. Perhaps worthy of a horror story. It takes me days to figure out what others do in minutes. The tutorials never Tseem to match what I see on my screen so that when something finally goes right it's like "Glory, Hallelujah! I finally got it." There is so much that I don't have figured out, alas, but I keep plugging away. And I doubt you're much older than me--I was in my late thirties when I won WOTF and that over thirty years ago!
Interesting article. There are points I agree with and some I don’t. Selfpub is a lot of work, and expensive to do well. I have friends who have done a very good job at it. But I don’t agree that publishers today aren’t doing more. Seems more like the opposite. From first hand experience, I can say big and small presses don’t always put books on netgalley, don’t get authors in the doors at festivals or put their obvious books up for awards, and rarely put any sort of marketing behind you. They let a debut sink or swim based on an algorithm scooping it up and then drop the author when their book doesn’t do well. Still, I think at the end of the day there are pros and cons to both routes and both are just a viable.
True, it does happen that a publisher will sometimes pretty much let the baby die in the wilderness. It seems to me that that must be a a breakdown in their overall policy, though, since they spent money on publishing it, and would presumably hope for a return on that investment. Admittedly, they they may look at the profit made by groups of books, rather than by an individual title. My first two books pretty well sank without a trace ... but at least they were published, and gave me a bit of a "track record," which was probably a factor in selling my third.
32 self-published books to my name and...I've been at this game since 2011. I'm not the biggest seller in the world, but I'm not the smallest, either, and I've earned a full SFWA membership as a result.
I also have published short stories in various magazines, have a Writers of the Future SemiFinalist placement as well as a Self Publishing Fantasy Blog Off semifinalist. We won't talk about my appalling experience with small presses but there are good ones as well as bad ones.
The reality is that for anyone short of a breakout debut novel, traditional publishing is unlikely to do anything significant with them. Additionally, even regular traditionally published authors have a backlist that is out of print and...getting those books back in print these days involves self publishing.
I've had too many midlist friends who have been cut loose by their traditional publishers. I know of people who successfully do both trad and indie, in part because they can publish their more experimental work themselves. A successful author these days needs to maintain a lot of flexibility.
I will note for anyone following you that the comparison between KDP and Lulu that you link to is...simply not realistic. If you're serious about print versions of your work, it's either going to be KDP or IngramSpark. Ingram has the better quality than KDP in print; it also has better distribution and better prices than Lulu. Additionally, for ebook there are venues such as Draft2Digital (which has the best ebook distribution bar none), and Itch.io.
Hi, Joyce -- well, you're an example of someone who has done it successfully! For myself, trad publishers and small press publishers get the work done -- I just want to write books, and leave the mechanics to people who do that for a living. It's true that publishers cut authors loose -- it's happened to me -- but there are always others out there.
I *wish* I had the luxury of leaving the mechanics of publishing to others! Unfortunately, as a woman who started trying to sell her writing later in life, I'm simply not attractive enough of a prospect for major New York publishers, much less smaller presses. After being burned pretty darn badly by a couple of small presses, I'm skittish about trying them. For me there is no "there are always others out there" because I don't have the publishing history.
Too many of my older women friends who used to be solid midlist sellers got booted from their publishers for me to see publishing as friendly to older women, especially those who write in niche genres. A lot of my work is SFF/contemporary western/family saga crossovers and New York simply isn't interested--at least from an unknown older cishet white woman who doesn't have a quirky backstory, isn't from a large urban center, doesn't have a MFA, and lacks workshop/Ivy League connections.
A few years ago Jamie Ford told me I had the potential to go trad in a big way, but--that was before the pandemic and, well, I'm now in my late sixties. I've heard enough editors speak to know they don't want my demographic, and I follow a lot of industry voices to keep tabs on what trad is doing as well as indie. Accumulated the "love your voice, love your work, can't sell it" rejection slips. I get excellent reviews but as far as sales go...I'm a poor marketer.
I don't have the time to wait on New York anymore, however. So it's the one-woman shop for me, as professionally as I can do it. That requires hard choices like...my recent decision to deprioritize a fantasy trilogy this year because the first book isn't doing well--in spite of a rave blurb from Alma Alexander and good first week promotion. So it's on to the neoWestern multiverse time travel book with series potential. Guess the fantasy about an empress trying to fix the messes of her predecessors, and her disabled heir who is trying to avoid becoming Empress herself just doesn't appeal right now.
Joyce, it seems to me that publishers shouldn't need to know if one is older, etc. At least I hope that's the case! And I think a lot of publishers see an MFA as a not-altogether-good sign -- it implies obtrusive relevance, lack of plot, self-referential style, post-modernism, and stuff like that. t. But it's certainly true that publishing is a minefield.
I patiently pursued traditional publishing because I wanted professional editing, and I'm quite happy with how that turned out. It did take a very long time of patiently knocking on doors to find someone who had access to other doors to knock on, and a LOT of rewriting and adjusting along the way, but the final novel which will be published in May is something that would be different, and worse, if I'd just gone it alone.
Also, temperamentally I'm very bad at self-promotion, so I'm quite happy to let my publisher handle the task of getting the book in front of potential readers.
As a reader, I find that I rely on publishers to vet books for quality. This can be frustrating when it feels like publishers aren't publishing the kinds of books I want to read. But in my experience trying self-published books, I don't finish most of them. And the ones I have finished I've alway thought needed better editing.
That's interesting because you can give me just about any traditionally published book these days and I will find formatting and copy editing problems (note: I spent some time on a volunteer proofreading team for a small press at one point, I see a LOT). There are a lot of quality books out there in the indie world.
(PS--for someone who complains about indie publishing quality, I note that you have a glaring typo--"alway" instead of "always." You're welcome.)
Really, what turns me off of the self-published books I’ve tried is not typos, but things like pacing and character issues. I’ll be wondering why the author is repeating the same story and character beats for the third time in a row, for example. I’m guilty of doing the same thing, but my developmental editors patiently pointed those instances out in their quest to bring my word count down by 30,000 words! Some gentle pressure to kill those darlings can be beneficial.
I’m sure there are quality self-published books, and I do try self-published books when someone recommends them. And I’m glad there’s an avenue for people to get their work around the usual gatekeepers. But it’s hard for me, as a reader with limited time, to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s hard enough with traditionally published books, and even harder when there’s no guarantee of good editing.
Anthony, I agree with you -- it's the content-and-development editing, not the copy-editing, that makes the difference. I'd be embarrassed to have the original texts of my books published, in the form they were in before an editor made me cut and revise and fix -- even though I thought they were perfect when I sent them in.
Ironically, I run into the same developmental issues with recent traditionally published books. Word on the street is that publishers are not dedicating the same amount of diligence to developmental editing that they used to do, and it shows. But I'm fussy about developmental stuff (which is why my friends like to use me as a developmental beta reader).
Hey man, I don't think people who talk up self publishing are pitching some kind of Kindle Direct setup, where you write a book and send it into the void and hope it works. Rather, I think they are on the Royal Road model, where you write a chapter at a time, and see the readers numbers and comments. Basically the editor function is being performed by the audience in real time. There's 0 time between you pushing publish and eyes on your work, and you can wage the marketing battle up front. If you are a hit, you can pull it down and do the Kindle move with an established audience and real word of mouth. If not, you try again.
Well, Dickens did that chapter-at-a-time method sometimes! Stephen King has too. So when you get comments from the readers, do you revise the chapter they're talking about, and let them have another look at it? And possibly revise previous chapters to conform to that revision? I imagine their comments will sometimes suggest changing the direction of the story -- that would probably call for some revision of the earlier chapters too. I picture the whole thing changing as new suggestions arrive. Is that more-or-less how it works?
I've sometimes seen people on these sites rewrite earlier story arcs in response to reader feedback, particularly when they are about to go to Kindle. More commonly, though, the author just notes the way that the audience is taking the story and keeps that in mind as they write future chapters.
Easier than talking to me, though, you can just check it out for yourself. If you go to RoyalRoad (google for exact address), there's thousands of posted novels with dozens of chapters each, you can look at them and see the comments and what the authors are doing in response to them. It's very different, but I think it's not without merit.
It's a very different model from traditional publishing, the advantage is that you type words, hit post, and readers are seeing it, that hour, that day. (That's also the disadvantage, heh.) No gatekeepers, no publishers/agents, nothing between you and the audience. If people like what you are doing, and you build up a big following, you can take it to another venue to earn from the work. A perfect example is Dungeon Crawler Carl. It got big on the internet, then pivoted to more traditional publishers once the author could assure them it would be a big hit.
Anyway, thanks for responding! I loved 'Last Call'.
Thanks, Walter! I appreciate it! -- and I'll look at RoyalRoad. It seems to be true, though I hate it, that publishers not only want you to provide a great manuscript, but also provide a big pre-assembled audience for it!
That's funny, I read that Mr. Powers thought publishers provided a lot of skills and services that, if one published oneself, one would have to provide (and probably pay for) for oneself. I got that he thought working with a publisher gave a writer more time to just write rather than deal with editing, printing, distributing and marketing.
Mr. Ingersoll -- right. I'm a competent writer, but I wouldn't be a competent promoter and publicist. Luckily publishers are good at those things. They've had lots of practice, and their paychecks depend on them doing effective work.
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!)
Sam, I agree. If you define success as the kind The Martian or Fifty Shades of Gray had, then almost all writers, traditionally or self-published, are not successful. Many self-published writers have filled what used to be the midlist in tradional publishing, writing books that haves steady audiences and income but aren't nationally well-known outside their specific genre. And I personally know dozens of such authors.
Susan, I'm glad to hear it! And you're right, just getting published by the traditional route doesn't mean a writer is, by any measure, successful. I just balk at the "second career" aspects of self-publishing. I find it hard enough, time-consuming enough, just to write a book. Then I want to hand it to people who know how to do the rest.
Me too! It just didn't work out that way for me. :)
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.
Writing is one art; editing is another; design is a third; publicity is a fourth—and each requires a different species of obsessive lunatic. And then you need to learn how to juggle all of those things. Even the world's most competent brain surgeons don't tend to perform operations on themselves for a very similar reason.
And I'd add that a brain surgeon doesn't have to manufacture his own saws and scalpels.
I think for a lot of folks, the publishing industry seems like one of those exclusive nightclubs on, like, Sunset in 1989, where a beefy bastard with a goatee, the kind of man who looks like he was carved out of a single block of gym membership has a clipboard full of names you’ve never heard of but are apparently “important,” and he’s checking it with the solemnity of a priest deciding who gets into heaven.
He doesn’t care about your manuscript. He doesn’t care about your soul. He cares about the list. You’re NOT on the list.
Well, I’m a sort of debauched sort, so as much as nobody in their right mind REALLY wants to get into a place like that, if the front door is being patrolled, I’ll opt to find another way in. There’s always a window that’s been carelessly left open somewhere, and once you’re inside and you realize the party is better in the kitchen, anyhow.
I can see how it might look like that nepotist, established-names-only nightclub. But it's more like a mobbed restaurant that constantly needs more cooks and bartenders to meet the demand. If an applicant wants to make strange dishes and innovative drinks -- well, we got a big crowd out there, give him a try. (I like "carved out of a single block of gym membership")
Well... let me be honest here: The first article I ever sent was published by a national magazine my junior year at Redlands and I got a check in my mailbox on Colton Avenue for $3500. Did I say anything to anyone else? No. I felt like a complete and total fraud. I waited to be found out. Was it brilliant? Hardly, though last time I read it in some online repository it DID make me chuckle. I worked for them (well, a notorious man with a Golden Wheelchair) for the next decade while I wrote for another magazine on Second Avenue. Did I get lucky? Did I know something or someone who got me in? I think in a lot of ways we all make our own luck, right?
Likewise, I have a friend who won the Booker prize for his debut novel 20 years or so ago. He's a great guy but I think you could say he hadn't lived the most honest life and he was definitely an outsider and possibly a criminal. Did I meet him through friends or maybe he's my uncle's friend? No. I was living in southern Mexico and I found his email address and I wrote him an email.
I imagine your story, Tim, is pretty similar. And look here at your Substack--the BEST writers I've known are always very enthusiastic about writing and are always encouraging and very generous to people who think they want to do the same with their life.
I guess we all make our own luck! I've sometimes thought of it as a roulette wheel -- we put all our money on a number, it loses, so we get more money and put it on the number again ... and it loses again ... but eventually that number *does* come up.
Publishers do a lot, but they do not arrange signings and guest-blog appearances. My publisher did submit my book for review and to a couple of contests and to a podcaster. I have done the rest of the marketing and promotion.
Once in a while they arrange signings and guest-blog appearances! Admittedly I haven't experienced it very often.
Which means that you are doing it yourself. Once in a while is not adequate. Agents these days ask how you plan to market the book.
Tim, I actually wish I had self-published sooner, but didn't for some of reasons you describe. I felt that to self-publish would be to admit that I was a failure. This despite the fact I had credentials--first place WOFT winner, publshed works in Realms of Fantasy and pro anthologies, a book sale to Wizards of the Coast (that sadly never saw print as the series was cancelled just as I turned in my final draft), feature articles for national magazines and newspapers and a massive stack of personal letters from editors saying "beautifully written but not for us." But the perception at the time was that self-published books were poorly written works by unprofessionals, people who didn't know or care enough to hold out for the real thing. That was not me. There were years where almost every day I considered quitting altogether, and the sense of failure was overwhelming. I finally had to decide what I really wanted: the "respect" of being tradionally published or an audience for what I had to say. I chose the latter. It was, as you say, a lot of hard work and involved doing things I hate (marketing!) but I found communities dedicated to doing what I was trying to do: produce quality, well-written, well-edited books, ones I wouldn't be ashamed to bear my name as author. Those gave me the support and information I needed. And while I have not, alas, become rich or famous from my books, I now have almost 2000 reviews on my first book, have won some awards, and have made a profit most years. But what matters most is that I have people reading my books, people waiting for the next one. I have no illusion that I'm the next great American writer, but I do believe in what I have to say and want to share that with others. And here's the thing: there are many others like me, writers producing professional quality work, who have gone over to the dark side, so to speak, for many of the same reasons I have.
Susan, you make a convincing case! You've clearly done very well at it. For me, it's that "second career" factor that keeps me in traditional publishing. Marketing, as you note. Dealing with all the issues involved in effective self-publishing. As long as there are companies out there that will do it for me, and pay for it all, I'm happy to just write.
It is a second career in time, learning (so many difficult software programs!) and energy, and if I had to start over today at my age (old!) I wouldn't be able to do it. And I am delighted you can just write because we get more of your books!
Thanks, Susan, I appreciate it! I bet I'm a lot older than you are, and the phrase "difficult software programs" horrifies me. You're fortunate in having figured it all out!
New software programs are indeed horrific. Perhaps worthy of a horror story. It takes me days to figure out what others do in minutes. The tutorials never Tseem to match what I see on my screen so that when something finally goes right it's like "Glory, Hallelujah! I finally got it." There is so much that I don't have figured out, alas, but I keep plugging away. And I doubt you're much older than me--I was in my late thirties when I won WOTF and that over thirty years ago!
Interesting article. There are points I agree with and some I don’t. Selfpub is a lot of work, and expensive to do well. I have friends who have done a very good job at it. But I don’t agree that publishers today aren’t doing more. Seems more like the opposite. From first hand experience, I can say big and small presses don’t always put books on netgalley, don’t get authors in the doors at festivals or put their obvious books up for awards, and rarely put any sort of marketing behind you. They let a debut sink or swim based on an algorithm scooping it up and then drop the author when their book doesn’t do well. Still, I think at the end of the day there are pros and cons to both routes and both are just a viable.
True, it does happen that a publisher will sometimes pretty much let the baby die in the wilderness. It seems to me that that must be a a breakdown in their overall policy, though, since they spent money on publishing it, and would presumably hope for a return on that investment. Admittedly, they they may look at the profit made by groups of books, rather than by an individual title. My first two books pretty well sank without a trace ... but at least they were published, and gave me a bit of a "track record," which was probably a factor in selling my third.
32 self-published books to my name and...I've been at this game since 2011. I'm not the biggest seller in the world, but I'm not the smallest, either, and I've earned a full SFWA membership as a result.
I also have published short stories in various magazines, have a Writers of the Future SemiFinalist placement as well as a Self Publishing Fantasy Blog Off semifinalist. We won't talk about my appalling experience with small presses but there are good ones as well as bad ones.
The reality is that for anyone short of a breakout debut novel, traditional publishing is unlikely to do anything significant with them. Additionally, even regular traditionally published authors have a backlist that is out of print and...getting those books back in print these days involves self publishing.
I've had too many midlist friends who have been cut loose by their traditional publishers. I know of people who successfully do both trad and indie, in part because they can publish their more experimental work themselves. A successful author these days needs to maintain a lot of flexibility.
I will note for anyone following you that the comparison between KDP and Lulu that you link to is...simply not realistic. If you're serious about print versions of your work, it's either going to be KDP or IngramSpark. Ingram has the better quality than KDP in print; it also has better distribution and better prices than Lulu. Additionally, for ebook there are venues such as Draft2Digital (which has the best ebook distribution bar none), and Itch.io.
Hi, Joyce -- well, you're an example of someone who has done it successfully! For myself, trad publishers and small press publishers get the work done -- I just want to write books, and leave the mechanics to people who do that for a living. It's true that publishers cut authors loose -- it's happened to me -- but there are always others out there.
I *wish* I had the luxury of leaving the mechanics of publishing to others! Unfortunately, as a woman who started trying to sell her writing later in life, I'm simply not attractive enough of a prospect for major New York publishers, much less smaller presses. After being burned pretty darn badly by a couple of small presses, I'm skittish about trying them. For me there is no "there are always others out there" because I don't have the publishing history.
Too many of my older women friends who used to be solid midlist sellers got booted from their publishers for me to see publishing as friendly to older women, especially those who write in niche genres. A lot of my work is SFF/contemporary western/family saga crossovers and New York simply isn't interested--at least from an unknown older cishet white woman who doesn't have a quirky backstory, isn't from a large urban center, doesn't have a MFA, and lacks workshop/Ivy League connections.
A few years ago Jamie Ford told me I had the potential to go trad in a big way, but--that was before the pandemic and, well, I'm now in my late sixties. I've heard enough editors speak to know they don't want my demographic, and I follow a lot of industry voices to keep tabs on what trad is doing as well as indie. Accumulated the "love your voice, love your work, can't sell it" rejection slips. I get excellent reviews but as far as sales go...I'm a poor marketer.
I don't have the time to wait on New York anymore, however. So it's the one-woman shop for me, as professionally as I can do it. That requires hard choices like...my recent decision to deprioritize a fantasy trilogy this year because the first book isn't doing well--in spite of a rave blurb from Alma Alexander and good first week promotion. So it's on to the neoWestern multiverse time travel book with series potential. Guess the fantasy about an empress trying to fix the messes of her predecessors, and her disabled heir who is trying to avoid becoming Empress herself just doesn't appeal right now.
Joyce, it seems to me that publishers shouldn't need to know if one is older, etc. At least I hope that's the case! And I think a lot of publishers see an MFA as a not-altogether-good sign -- it implies obtrusive relevance, lack of plot, self-referential style, post-modernism, and stuff like that. t. But it's certainly true that publishing is a minefield.
I patiently pursued traditional publishing because I wanted professional editing, and I'm quite happy with how that turned out. It did take a very long time of patiently knocking on doors to find someone who had access to other doors to knock on, and a LOT of rewriting and adjusting along the way, but the final novel which will be published in May is something that would be different, and worse, if I'd just gone it alone.
Also, temperamentally I'm very bad at self-promotion, so I'm quite happy to let my publisher handle the task of getting the book in front of potential readers.
As a reader, I find that I rely on publishers to vet books for quality. This can be frustrating when it feels like publishers aren't publishing the kinds of books I want to read. But in my experience trying self-published books, I don't finish most of them. And the ones I have finished I've alway thought needed better editing.
That's interesting because you can give me just about any traditionally published book these days and I will find formatting and copy editing problems (note: I spent some time on a volunteer proofreading team for a small press at one point, I see a LOT). There are a lot of quality books out there in the indie world.
(PS--for someone who complains about indie publishing quality, I note that you have a glaring typo--"alway" instead of "always." You're welcome.)
And that’s why I need professional editors! ;)
Really, what turns me off of the self-published books I’ve tried is not typos, but things like pacing and character issues. I’ll be wondering why the author is repeating the same story and character beats for the third time in a row, for example. I’m guilty of doing the same thing, but my developmental editors patiently pointed those instances out in their quest to bring my word count down by 30,000 words! Some gentle pressure to kill those darlings can be beneficial.
I’m sure there are quality self-published books, and I do try self-published books when someone recommends them. And I’m glad there’s an avenue for people to get their work around the usual gatekeepers. But it’s hard for me, as a reader with limited time, to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s hard enough with traditionally published books, and even harder when there’s no guarantee of good editing.
Anthony, I agree with you -- it's the content-and-development editing, not the copy-editing, that makes the difference. I'd be embarrassed to have the original texts of my books published, in the form they were in before an editor made me cut and revise and fix -- even though I thought they were perfect when I sent them in.
Ironically, I run into the same developmental issues with recent traditionally published books. Word on the street is that publishers are not dedicating the same amount of diligence to developmental editing that they used to do, and it shows. But I'm fussy about developmental stuff (which is why my friends like to use me as a developmental beta reader).
Hey man, I don't think people who talk up self publishing are pitching some kind of Kindle Direct setup, where you write a book and send it into the void and hope it works. Rather, I think they are on the Royal Road model, where you write a chapter at a time, and see the readers numbers and comments. Basically the editor function is being performed by the audience in real time. There's 0 time between you pushing publish and eyes on your work, and you can wage the marketing battle up front. If you are a hit, you can pull it down and do the Kindle move with an established audience and real word of mouth. If not, you try again.
Well, Dickens did that chapter-at-a-time method sometimes! Stephen King has too. So when you get comments from the readers, do you revise the chapter they're talking about, and let them have another look at it? And possibly revise previous chapters to conform to that revision? I imagine their comments will sometimes suggest changing the direction of the story -- that would probably call for some revision of the earlier chapters too. I picture the whole thing changing as new suggestions arrive. Is that more-or-less how it works?
I've sometimes seen people on these sites rewrite earlier story arcs in response to reader feedback, particularly when they are about to go to Kindle. More commonly, though, the author just notes the way that the audience is taking the story and keeps that in mind as they write future chapters.
Easier than talking to me, though, you can just check it out for yourself. If you go to RoyalRoad (google for exact address), there's thousands of posted novels with dozens of chapters each, you can look at them and see the comments and what the authors are doing in response to them. It's very different, but I think it's not without merit.
It's a very different model from traditional publishing, the advantage is that you type words, hit post, and readers are seeing it, that hour, that day. (That's also the disadvantage, heh.) No gatekeepers, no publishers/agents, nothing between you and the audience. If people like what you are doing, and you build up a big following, you can take it to another venue to earn from the work. A perfect example is Dungeon Crawler Carl. It got big on the internet, then pivoted to more traditional publishers once the author could assure them it would be a big hit.
Anyway, thanks for responding! I loved 'Last Call'.
Thanks, Walter! I appreciate it! -- and I'll look at RoyalRoad. It seems to be true, though I hate it, that publishers not only want you to provide a great manuscript, but also provide a big pre-assembled audience for it!
Your argument appears to be that their only utility is access to something they are gatekeeping. Create a problem, then sell the solution. 🫣
That's funny, I read that Mr. Powers thought publishers provided a lot of skills and services that, if one published oneself, one would have to provide (and probably pay for) for oneself. I got that he thought working with a publisher gave a writer more time to just write rather than deal with editing, printing, distributing and marketing.
Mr. Ingersoll -- right. I'm a competent writer, but I wouldn't be a competent promoter and publicist. Luckily publishers are good at those things. They've had lots of practice, and their paychecks depend on them doing effective work.