So, a friend and colleague of mine, Leia Shaw, who is also self-published, has been chatting with me about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing, and I hope she doesn’t mind that I’m using a part of a letter I wrote to her in this blog.
I think a lot about traditional publishing. It would be wonderful to be distributed everywhere without the hassle, so nice, but from what I hear—and feel free to yell and scream at me if I’m wrong—most publishing companies don’t spend a lot of time promoting their own authors, so a lot of them still have to do that on their own. Also, I hear if you don’t sell a certain amount of books in the first few months they move on to their next big author and write you off. This is from people I’ve met who have been traditionally published for years.
It seems many traditional published authors don’t think much about self-published authors; mostly I think that’s because they’ve never been where we are, and that’s understandable. For them, publishing companies take on a lot of the ins and outs like cover art and distribution. At one of my old writing groups someone brought up self-publishing for ebooks and most people scoffed. Not me though 😉
The main reason I decided to move forward with self-publishing, besides the fact that I’m impatient and don’t want to spend the next ten years soliciting agents, is because I don’t believe an agent or publisher would take me seriously. I’m basically a nobody in the publishing world, and a lot of agents think the market is too saturated with my genre, paranormal romance, which I highly disagree with, especially after talking with all the people on goodreads, and other book-loving community sites, who are just dying for new stuff.
At this point I don’t really know which one is better self or traditional publishing. It really depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Check out this post “Should You Self-Publish After a Near-Miss?” by Jane Friedman.
