Literary Agents, Self-Publishing, Throwing Away Your Books, Other Random Rants On Traditional Publishing
A ton of myths persist about traditional publishing, self-publishing, agents and how to succeed as a novelist or writer.
I maintain that the only way you’re really going to learn and succeed at anything is by doing it. Most discussions online act as a substitute for doing it, and in this article, I’m going to prove to you that that’s the case.
I’m a big fan of self-publishing work. I’ll make that clear for those who are new to the blog. This’ll be the first point I make.
I read a terrible thread on Reddit a few moments ago. (I know, it’s a waste of my time, but I was hopping around looking for something to write about.) Here’s the link. I’ll talk about some of the stuff I take issue with in this article.
Traditional Publishing and “Learning By Doing”
Most writers eagerly await the day where someone takes their words and turns them magically into money.
Most writers don’t have any business sense, and don’t want to get any business sense. Traditional publishing exists purely for that reason.
Essentially, everything a publisher does is some extension of this basic fact: You don’t want to learn how the printing process works? Get a publisher. You don’t want to handle the supply chain or marketing? Get a publisher. Can’t be bothered will all the tough math that goes along with working out how much money you get and where it comes from? Your publisher can handle that for you.
I’d hope that the majority of writers want some understanding of these processes. It’s their livelihood after all. Being with a traditional publisher makes it impossible though, because they are in charge and you don’t have access to any of that data.
There’s a bigger problem though.
You can’t learn by doing with traditional publishing because it takes too long.
Say you’re a debut novelist.
You can write a book in a couple of months. Let’s say with editing you get it done in three months. That’s four books a year.
If you release four books a year and they fit somewhere in a paying market, then you’ll do reasonably well, even if that is all you do. If your first book flops, makes £120 and then sales plummet into oblivion, then you try something else. By the end of your first year, you’ll get a ton better at writing and selling books.
If you go with a traditional publisher, you won’t be releasing four books a year. In fact, it’ll take you a year to find an agent. It’ll take your agent two years to sell your book. It’ll take a publisher two years to get that book into production. Despite what a lot of writers say, there’s just as much chance that your book completely flops with a publisher as there is with self-publishing.
Except with a traditional publisher, you can’t even correct the errors or test the variables!
One of my books had a terrible cover. It was affecting sales. I know this, because I changed the cover and within twenty-four hours, my book started selling better.
When I started releasing books, I couldn’t write a blurb to save my life. I can change blurbs at will now. I couldn’t if I had a publisher.
I can change the back matter in my books when I need to.
I have complete control of the marketing of each book I release and my books as a whole.
None of those things are under your control when you sign a publishing contract.
Now I’ve summed up why you need to avoid traditional publishing, let’s talk about some of the other stuff that rustled my feathers in the linked discussion thread.
Agents And Other Gatekeepers
Agents have magical keys to selling your book.
Whereas you, mere mortal, could not possibly ever get your book into the hands of someone who wants to sell it, agents have this magical ability to do that.
For that right, they take 15% of your earnings forever.
They don’t have magical powers though. They pick up the phone, send off emails and do all the other things you can do yourself. Sure, they might have the email of someone at a publishing house that you can’t get… except it’s not likely.
Other than that, agents help you with contracts and earnings.
RED FLAG
Literary agents are not lawyers. They are not (for the most part) trained in law, and they shouldn’t ever be negotiating a contract with a massive corporation that wants complete control over your intellectual property.
Agents are a bad idea.
Let’s talk about another form of gatekeeping that’s apparently prevalent.
Traditional Publishers are the gatekeepers to getting your books in stores.
No they aren’t. Even if they were, you’re being short-sighted by caring.
Amazon is the biggest book store in the world. If you only ever put your book up for sale on Amazon, that’ll be more valuable to you than getting your book in any book store or chain.
But let’s forget Amazon. Let’s also forget all the other digital book stores and international chain stores like Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Nook, Kobo, Apple etc. because you can get your digital book on all those platforms without a publisher. Let’s talk about book stores. Physical book stores.
You don’t need a publisher to get your books in book stores either. All you need to do is act like a businessperson and not a creative prima donna. What this entails is looking on a stores website or ringing them up and asking what their process is.
Most book stores have a particular supply chain. They’ll require a certain discount on retail.
Ultimately, they don’t care whether you’re Penguin Books or Jimmy the Book Writer, they’ll require the same standard for everyone, and they’ll buy books that they think will sell. You simply have to meet those requirements.
If You Don’t Have Thousands To Spend On X, Y, Z, Forget Self-Publishing
It costs nothing to start self-publishing.
Anyone who tells you differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I’ve read stupid things all over the internet about this.
“You need a six-figure marketing budget.”
“You need to spend $1000+ on each book cover.”
“You need to hire three proofreaders, eight editors and four monkeys to do some dancing in the background.”
You don’t need any of these things.
You don’t need a massive budget. Learn how to use Photoshop/Gimp. Create some basic covers. Get better at it whilst your books are earning. Hire people. If you’re really artistically challenged, then get someone on Fiverr to make you a book cover.
Editing? Write a serviceable first draft. Check for errors. Put it out there. If you get ten one-star reviews saying the book is horrid, then pull it down and consider an editor. Most people’s writing is serviceable enough, and editors just get the fine details.
Marketing is not something traditional publishers do unless you’re a celebrity or you’re an in-trend. Marketing is free on the internet anyway. Do your own.
Your First 50 Books Are Practice… It Takes Years To Sell One Copy
The first two books I wrote were terrible. They were e-books on fitness that someone never paid me for. I cut my losses by putting them on Amazon. They were practice. I still make money from them to this day. They have positive reviews.
My first short story sold. I wouldn’t have written it if it wouldn’t have. My first full length fiction sold. All of my fiction sells. All of my non-fiction sells.
It’s all practice because I’m still learning the craft. Most writers would have you write two million words, throw it all in the bin and work at McDonalds until some agent somewhere finally thinks you’ve got some potential.
I maintain that writing is one of the few professions where you’re lucky enough that people will pay for you to learn and get better. Why waste that opportunity?
Self-Publishing Will Mean You Sell A Dozen Copies
The reading market has never been bigger. Tablets with their e-reader apps, e-readers, and Amazon’s ability to sell anything to anyone, anywhere, all add up to the biggest reading markets ever.
The massive majority of those readers do not know or care who publishes the book. It’s simply not something readers care about. They care about the contents of the book and what the book’s cover looks like.
Self-publishing makes no difference to the reader.
What makes a difference to the amount of copies you sell? The size of the market.
If you were to stop reading this article, go to the Kindle store’s top 100 books, and write down all the genres and topics, you’d get a good idea of what sells. If you were to stop reading this article now and write a romance book to the same quality and similar subjects/themes to those top sellers, then you would sell more than a dozen copies.
You might sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
Of course, if you self-publish your memoirs about a boring life in Nowhere, Alabama, then you probably won’t sell many copies. That’s not got anything to do with a) your writing quality or b) the fact that you’re self-publishing.
“But Jamie, won’t a traditional publisher help market my book so I sell more copies?”
People who suggest this argument don’t seem to realise what most traditional publishers do.
Go to Penguin books, or your favourite major publisher. You’ll see the following:
- Massive ads for the “big sellers.” Stephen King. Hunger Games. James Patterson.
- Bargain sales (which authors have to write off at a loss because they hired a non-lawyer to deal with their contracts.)
- Small print stuff with hundreds of clones of the big sellers.
- Eight links deep, some six word title and a 20×20 pixel book cover of new authors and their new novels.
A big publisher thinks of your intellectual property as a product to sell. You’re a unit, and if you move 100 units for them and that makes them £500 and costs them £450, then you’re a positive asset.
The fact that you’re living on £50 which is really £42.50 because you’ve got an agent doesn’t concern your publisher.
Now, they know that most of their investments aren’t going to make a positive return. So they will throw all kinds of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, hoping to find a Hunger Games or Twilight.
If you’re going to be the next Stephanie Meyer, then great. You’ll make a ton of money.
If you’re not though, you can look forward to the next step.
Traditional Publishers want a formula that works. That means that once they’ve found Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Twilight, they are going to push that genre to death. They will release two billion variants on that theme until nobody wants to buy a paranormal romance ever again.
When it comes to the traditional publisher, you’re one of a sea of writers who the publisher is happy to make a minimal return on.
This is not going to help you sell thousands of copies and retire to a Caribbean beach somewhere.
Join a Critique Club
I’m ranting like a crazy old mad man here, and need to wrap it up.
However, something else I read just needs to be stated: Don’t join a critique club.
You shouldn’t need a critic to tell you whether you’ve got a good idea or whether your writing is solid. These should be a given.
If you do need a reader, find someone who knows what they are talking about.
Most reading clubs and critique clubs consist of people who either don’t write themselves, or fancy themselves writers yet are on the same step up the publishing ladder as you.
In other words, critique clubs are filled with people who you don’t want advice from. If you needed surgery to fix a broken arm, would you seek out a collection of other people with broken arms and ask them how to fix it? Hopefully not. Hopefully, you’d go to a surgeon with lots of experience in fixing broken arms.
Not-So Final Thoughts On Traditional Publishing
Success in writing and publishing comes from learning about the business of it. Most discussions online are started and continued by people who don’t understand the business of it and therefore make incredibly simplistic statements and inaccurate observations.
When it comes to writing, most of these people are acting in this manner because they subscribe to the idea that the business side of things needs to be done for them.
If you want to gamble years of your life, complete ownership of your intellectual property and control of your personal business, then allow yourself to fall in line with the statements I’ve taken exception to above.
If you’d prefer to make money and retain complete control over the words you write, learn about the business of publishing instead.