Why I Will Probably Never Get A Real Publisher.
The twenty first century has seen some pretty awesome things happen commercially. These awesome things have led to massive changes in the publishing “industry” which, if you’re a writer of any sort, you’re working in.
Things like Amazon, E-books, and websites for authors are obvious things that have changed how publishing works.
Yet there are other less obvious things – like the fact you can do pretty much everything a traditional publisher does on your own time schedule and under your own control – that have been made possible by new innovations.
This has worked quite well as an introduction to the topic of this article: Why I’ll probably never get a traditional publisher.
Here are the top few reasons that I’ve decided traditional publishing isn’t for me. (Aside from the fact I might be a terrible writer with a tiny brain, of course.)
- Traditional Publishing Takes So Long
I wrote a novel which I’ve yet to release under any of my pen names. Originally, I wanted to do a case-study about timing in the traditional publishing industry versus the indie publishing industry. I wrote the novel in a few weeks. I then went to look at the process. It’s remained relatively unchanged in the publishing industry for years.
Get an agent. Wait for them to sell your book to a publisher after making you fit commercially. Then the publisher will grant you an editor or two that’ll repeat the process. Then you wait for the marketing people to look over your book and decide on a cover and all the other fun stuff, before deciding it’ll have the exact same cover and font as all the other books in your genre they’ve already released anyway. Eventually sometimes two years later your book comes out and then disappears after its initial five hundred copy print run.
That’s assuming a best case scenario. In reality, you’re going to get rejections and whatnot.
Anyway, I thought that I’d see how long the process takes. I look at agents that take the sort of books I like, and do all the necessary research.
If I submitted my query letter and a sample of the book, I could expect to hear back within six to eight weeks from these agents.
Six to eight weeks!
That’s not six to eight weeks to publish. That’s six to eight weeks to find out if somebody is going to try and sell your book to a publisher.
I never got past this first step.
- Traditional Publishers Are Fighting a Losing Battle
Some of the big publishing companies routinely use their considerable lobbying powers ro attempt to force companies like Amazon into adhering to the rules of the old publishing game.
In a former life, I was involved in the music industry. The record labels did the same, fighting against technology. First they fought the illegal (Napster, Kazaa, Torrents,) but then later legal alternatives such as Apple, Youtube, and ten streaming services like Spotify. It didn’t work for the music industry, it won’t work for the publishing industry either.
Any industry that is entrenched in keeping things unmarked by progress will eventually go the way of the steam train.
- Traditional Publishing works for the publisher, not the writer.
If I had have followed through with the idea of going with a traditional publisher, then I would have forfeited all rights to my work. Depending on the contract, I might have been asked to surrender rights to my work for the lifetime of the copyright. I would then have had to work to their schedule – so if my book was destined to come out (and I was destined to get paid,) that might be ten years into the future.
I also would have had to give over control of my ideas for marketing, the cover, tie ins and the like.
Obviously, this is a hypothetical contract, so there’s no telling what would, or wouldn’t, have been negotiated. The point of this section though is that as a “first time author” (because the work I’ve published to date wouldn’t count because it didn’t get an industry stamp of approval,) all of these terms would have been someone else’s, and not mine. Added to the next point, it makes seeking out a traditional publisher a lot less enticing.
- The Pay Is Probably Going To Be a lot Worse with a Traditional Publisher
The one thing that traditional publishers have over independent authors is wider distribution. (We’ll come to this in a later point.) However, that’s nullified as an advantage when a traditional publishing deal will see your publisher + agent take most of your income.
You might get an advance of $5k/£5k or whatever. You’ll then have to earn that back before you get royalties. Your royalty figure will probably be in the region of ten percent (or less,) so you’ll have to sell five thousand copies if you get $1 per book before you start earning royalty payments.
Selling that many copies is really difficult, to put it softly.
I could go into depth on this in another article, but let’s assume that you don’t sell five thousand copies on your first book. So your total earning is your five thousand dollar advance.
Let’s assume your book retails for ten dollars (or, $9.99 in order to get 70% royalty. These won’t be your figures, but I don’t want this article to be too much of a math lesson.)
Let’s also assume you publish just on Amazon (don’t do this) and you avoid Kindle Unlimited (do do this.)
If you price your book at what we’ve said above, you’ll get around $7 for each sale.
Already our simple scenario shows the difference the royalty makes.
To earn more than our traditional publishing contract, you only need to sell seven hundred books over the lifetime of your novel, which you own the complete rights to and can market in any way you want. 714 over the course of your career is a lot easier to sell than five thousand in a print run for a first time author.
- What About Distribution, Marketing, Etc?
Traditional publishers offer a lot – if they offered nothing, there wouldn’t be piles of manuscripts sitting on the desks of publishing interns everywhere.
But there’s a reason that traditional publishing is in decline.
That reason is that those twenty-first century developments mentioned in the introduction to this article are nullifying those strengths.
Money to front an initial print run? You don’t need a “print run” anymore, and when you do, it doesn’t cost as much.
Marketing Costs? The best marketing channels in this decade are based around social media, which is free and you can do yourself.
Selling to Brick and Mortar stores? You can do this yourself, but most of your sales are going to come through the internet.
Hardback Editions, Paperbacks, Audiobooks? Again, you can do these yourself. But most of your sales are going to come from Kindle and Nook and Kobo and other e-book platforms.