When you start thinking about this question in depth, it can get pretty confusing. I personally spent many years mulling it over
and experimenting with both approaches.
But when you get it all untangled, the answer is pretty simple.
You should seriously consider self-publishing if you have an
entrepreneurial personality.
What do I mean by that?
By having an entrepreneurial personality, I mean you’re the type of
person that has very strong feelings about anything you create, not only about
how it is made, but how it is packaged, marketed and sold to the customer. You like to make all those
decisions yourself. You like 100%
control over everything you do. You are
naturally good at presenting yourself, and anything you create, to other
people. You are probably not a very good
“team player.” You believe you are right
most of the time, even when you’re not.
And you probably (if you’re like me) loathe bureaucracy. There’s nothing that gets on your nerves more
than long, boring meetings, and you especially hate decision-making by
committee.
What does all this mean?
It means that if you have an entrepreneurial personality, you’re not
likely to get along with big publishing houses whether they want to publish
your book or not. Big companies are bureaucracies,
and they are going to do things their way.
If you are able to land a good literary agent (no small
feat), and that literary agent is able to get a big publisher interested in your
book (also no small feat), Big Publisher is going to want control over
virtually every aspect of your baby. They
will demand control over the basic product itself (editing and fine-tuning the
manuscript), they will demand control over the packaging (the title, cover
illustration, and jacket promotional copy), and they will demand control over
the promotion and distribution of the product (advertisements, press releases, etc.)
And why shouldn’t they?
It’s their money that’s being invested! Would it be any different if
your were an inventor and took your brilliant new gadget to a big company and
wanted them to license it, manufacture it, package it, and market and sell it
through their existing distribution channels and pay you a royalty for each
unit sold? No. It’s exactly the same situation. Big Company thinks they know best, and they
are risking their money, so naturally Big Company not only expects but demands to
have control over every aspect of the product that affects their return on
investment.
Now, this doesn’t bother some people at all. Many writers say “Fine, I understand that, it
makes sense—I would do the same if I were in their shoes.” And these writers are able to comfortably
work with the big publishers and often achieve fantastic results.
If you are one of those people (I’m not), I envy you. I would strongly recommend that you go the
traditional publishing route and persist, persist, persist until you break
through and land that good agent, and get that sweet offer (with all the
strings attached) from Big Publisher. (I have lots of helpful articles about that process here).
However, if you are not one of those people, you should
consider self-publishing. I’m quite sure
if I were ever present in a committee meeting at Random House where they were
discussing the packaging of my book, I would end up stabbing some button-down
executive to death with a letter opener.
There is one exception I would add, though, and it’s an
important one. If you are the type of
person who can get along well with Big Publisher (and you intuitively know this
even at this moment, even if you’ve never had any contact with one), there is a
case when you may still want to self-publish.
That would be when you’ve made a truly valiant effort to go the traditional
route, but you continue to be rejected, not due to the quality of your
writing, but because the publishers don’t believe there is a large enough
market for your work (large enough for them to make their money back plus a
profit).
In this situation, you can self-publish your book for the
sole purpose of proving the market for it.
If you can sell an impressive number of copies of your book on your own,
agents and publishers will start getting interested. I’m not talking Amanda Hocking’s or John
Locke’s numbers—10,000 copies are enough. Then, as Amanda Hocking has done, you can
switch over the traditional route and let other people handle most of the
editing, packaging and promotional details of your book.
Is 10,000 copies a lot of books? Yes, it is.
And that’s where the downside comes in—if you don’t have an
entrepreneurial personality, you may find that selling even 1,000 copies is
beyond your capacity. So, in that case, it’s best to stick to the traditional
route and persist, persist, persist.
I hope this helps. As
always, comments are welcome.
