Part 1: Indie Versus Trad Publishing

Welcome to the first installment of what will no doubt be a grueling journey of self-discovery, self-loathing, and self-realization – or, maybe, you know, just figuring out how to build a decent business as a writer. From this series, you can expect more than the average number of curse words (they’re flavor, not content), but the advice is well-researched and solid. I’m going to get into as many aspects of indie publishing as possible and first help you navigate through the process of deciding what kind of publishing path is best for you. If you opt for the indie path, there’s a lot more for you in the coming weeks.

First, Are You Ready For This?

I’m not going to lie to you, writing is not the glamorous, glorious career you might think it is. It’s also not necessarily the grueling, unforgiving slog it’s been accused of being in the past. If you’re hoping that it will miraculously financially replace your corporate 9-to-5, your service job, or your landscaping gig, I have to warn you that the numbers aren’t great for writers in general, especially starting out, but that statement is starting to shift through a wide variety of factors. What I’m saying is, it’s going to be a while before you can quit your day-job, but it’s not impossible. It just takes a particular combination of talent, skill, effort, and work over a period of time, and even then, keep a cool head about it. A lot of old school, conventional wisdom about writing and publishing just doesn’t apply anymore – particularly regarding getting your book to market – but some of it does, and we’ll break that down, too.

Indie publishing is changing the way the business of writing works at all. A survey conducted by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) found that self-published authors were making serious gains in the overall market and doing better than in years past. To be clear, indie publishing can refer either to self-publishing or to indie house publishing. In this series, I will mostly refer to self-publishing as indie publishing, but it is distinct from indie house publishing – which is also still separate from traditional publishing. Here’s the breakdown:

Types of Publishing

In self-publishing, you’re 100% responsible for every aspect of your story from beginning to end. This does not mean going it on your own without any help whatsoever (I’ll get into that more later in the series), but it does mean that you are responsible for the money up front to pay for editors, artists, formatting experts, websites, marketing, and all of that. And, trust me when I say, you need all of those roles to be of the highest caliber possible in order to make a difference. Depending on how fast you write and how fast your support team members are, it’s not out of the question to see a book make it from idea to publication in six months to a year – but there are a lot of caveats to that. Through this weekly series, I’ll break it down into the step-by-step details because there’s nothing worse than vague instructions when important ideas are on the line.

Traditional publishing is what most everyone imagines when they get into writing in the first place. If you get a publishing deal with a traditional publishing house, you’re looking at a moderate advance (that’s a chunk of money, to the uninitiated) against your overall sales and then royalties from ongoing sales of your book. Publishers have teams of editors, artists, and marketing experts to support your work and make it shiny – Köehler describes the process of a typical contract here. You’ll still have to do a lot of the junket work yourself – no one can sell a book like its own author – and if you have the right kind of contract, either that marketing effort will be paid for by the publishing house or you’ll be reimbursed. However, to get to that point requires getting an agent first, and then that agent having the right connections to get your book to the right publishing house, and then going through the edits and formats and artwork and so forth, and it’s just a lot – of things that you don’t have to worry about because they’re professionals. I mean, you will need a lawyer to look over the contracts (do not skimp on this), and then someone else is giving you things like deadlines and schedules and critiques, but after your literary offspring is released into their care, a lot of the big parts are handled by someone else. (Just so you know, almost all traditional imprints are held by one of five publishing houses: Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette Livre.) Probably the biggest drawback to traditional publishing is that the time to market – how long it takes your book to show up on bookstore shelves – can be up to two years after you sign your book deal, and sometimes longer.

Indie house publishers (also called micro publishers) are often kind of like a hybrid between self-publishing and traditional models. They don’t have the same kind of gatekeepers that traditional publishing houses and agents do, so it’s usually a matter of finding an indie press that matches your style and genre rather than relying on an agent to find you the right deal. If they’re worth their salt, they’ll have editors, artists, formatting experts, and all the other roles available to help you get your book to market in one piece, and you often have a better say in the editorial process, and they are usually much faster to market than the Trad Bois. The trade-off is that there won’t be any advances, but you could be seeing royalties as high as 50% – whereas the typical royalty rate for a traditional house is around 15%. Not bad, right?

The Squig in the Salument*

The single biggest difference between the three different publishing models outlined here is where your book is going to get sold.

Amazon KDP hasn’t just evened the playing field, they flattened it for 90% of the titles published (that’s a belly-button guesstimate) – but that has meant that literally anyone can publish anything, regardless of quality. What that means in practical terms is that the vast majority of brick-and-mortar bookstores and any non-Amazon digital bookstore will most likely not sell a title that only has an Amazon KDP imprint because there is no guarantee that it’s worth anything at all. (And, yes, we’ll get into the where and with whom to publish later, this is just a point of reference for right now.)

Yet, indie published authors get shelf space and sales in non-Amazon online stores all the time. Traditional publishers already have intense relationships with distribution networks, so they have the inside track to get your title into the Bones and Narbles or wherever without a second thought: your trad published title is listed in the Big Ass Book of Books for stores to order from. Indie house publishers might not have as wide a distribution system, but they should have some pre-existing relationships with stores and sellers to help your book perform well; they have just as much skin in that game as you do since you didn’t pay them up front, which means they only get paid when you get paid. And, finally, being self-published means that you have to go and make those connections yourself and entice those stores to carry your work directly.

Yes, this is something that you can do. It’s not illegal or anything! It just takes research, legwork, and relationship building.

Just because someone bigger than you has an advantage doesn’t mean that you don’t have any chance at all. If anything, the performance of many authors on KDP has demonstrated that talent, guile, and maybe also a little luck can create just as much success as the Big Five who tend to find success by throwing money around. The final say in whether a book is successful is the mandate of the readers, and that is something that, if you are willing to do the work, you can have a major influence on.

However, if the idea of interviewing editors, choosing fonts, doing graphic design, and scheduling your own social media and marketing posts – and, yes, I mean all of those tasks – make you break out in hives, give you the vapors, or otherwise cause you distress, self-publishing might not be for you – and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some have described self-publishing as akin to taking out one’s own appendix with a rusty spoon and radiator moonshine for anesthetic, and then getting razzed on uneven sutures. Others have found it to be an incredible process of growth and personal accomplishment that scaling Everest ten times over couldn’t top. Most are somewhere comfortably in the middle, with all the trials and challenges and triumphs tantamount to any other project-based art form that, yes, I’ll say it again, is still a business.

If you’re still interested, check back next week and I’m going to start talking about who you need on your team to be a successful indie publisher.

* The Squig in the Salument: as in, the fly in the ointment. Yes, I made it up, but I’m guessing you figured out what it meant by the context.

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