3 ms·

A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage

A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

lionhearted 16y ago
> A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway. It's not all it's cracked up to be. I just wrote another comment on this. You can get 15% from a major publishing house for a semi-mainstream project, and you're looking at 60% from Amazon. The problem is, you're going to have to pay your own copyeditor, cover design, formatting, presentation, etc with Amazon. Realistically, you're looking at $1500 to $3000 to self-publish a quality piece of self-published work, and that's with a lot of hours of grunt work on your own, and then your work hasn't been shaped by an editor that knows what the market wants. Nonfiction really just doesn't sell very well, so there's a realistic chance you won't recoup your expenses for self publishing. Of course, you could skip having your book copyedited professionally, but then your quality is going to be a lot worse. No matter how good of a writer you are, you get too close to your own work and really should have a professional go over it. When you publish with a mainstream house, that's part of what they do. When you self-publish, you're own your own and out of pocket for that. If you have an opportunity to get paid speaking events or being recognized as an expert would increase your pay, you actually probably stand to make more mainstream publishing. Also, it's still probably better for getting your message out to many people. You can probably maximize short term cash by self publishing if you don't worry as much about production quality, if you alreay have a huge fanbase (like Seth Godin for instance, smart of him to jump into alternate models), and especially if you can speculatively burn $5000 to $10000 to hire professionals and spend some money promoting and you could handle taking a loss or breaking even if it doesn't pan out. If you're already fairly established and successful, self publishing is very viable. If you're not, there's a lot of advantages to being signed to a major house.

lionhearted 16y ago

> A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway. It's not all it's cracked up to be. I just wrote another comment on this. You can get 15% from a major publishing house for a semi-mainstream project, and you're looking at 60% from Amazon. The problem is, you're going to have to pay your own copyeditor, cover design, formatting, presentation, etc with Amazon. Realistically, you're looking at $1500 to $3000 to self-publish a quality piece of self-published work, and that's with a lot of hours of grunt work on your own, and then your work hasn't been shaped by an editor that knows what the market wants. Nonfiction really just doesn't sell very well, so there's a realistic chance you won't recoup your expenses for self publishing. Of course, you could skip having your book copyedited professionally, but then your quality is going to be a lot worse. No matter how good of a writer you are, you get too close to your own work and really should have a professional go over it. When you publish with a mainstream house, that's part of what they do. When you self-publish, you're own your own and out of pocket for that. If you have an opportunity to get paid speaking events or being recognized as an expert would increase your pay, you actually probably stand to make more mainstream publishing. Also, it's still probably better for getting your message out to many people. You can probably maximize short term cash by self publishing if you don't worry as much about production quality, if you alreay have a huge fanbase (like Seth Godin for instance, smart of him to jump into alternate models), and especially if you can speculatively burn $5000 to $10000 to hire professionals and spend some money promoting and you could handle taking a loss or breaking even if it doesn't pan out. If you're already fairly established and successful, self publishing is very viable. If you're not, there's a lot of advantages to being signed to a major house.