Trad vs. Indie Publishing: A False Dichotomy

[Philip Overby]

Saw this blog post on social media and thought it might be a pretty good list of pros and cons of each approach to publishing.

Fiction University: Trad vs. Indie Publishing: A False Dichotomy

 

[CupofJoe]

It's an interesting read.

The vast majority of self-published books sell fewer than two hundred copies

I've seen this mentioned in music before now as well.
Once you've sold to your friends, family and [hopefully] faithful fans it's a harder step to get to that wider audience.
Personally I think the Trad/Indie/Selfie distinction will disappear or at least narrow greatly over the next few years and we will all be talking about Boutique, Bespoke and Kickstarter publishing instead...

 

[Mythopoet]

I think there are a few misleading things in these lists.

Advance

An advance can easily be a con as well. Especially since they have been falling for some time. A new writer typically receives between 2,000-10,000 and if that looks like a nice big sum that could pay some of your bills, remember that it comes divided into 3 installments that are each many months apart. And it's almost certainly all the money you'll ever get from your deal, unless you manage to accidentally hit it big. (The publisher isn't going to be pushing your book much if you receive this kind of advance, it's just not worth it.) That doesn't sound like a pro to me. And advance is only a pro, in my book, if it's mid six figures at least.

Greater personal sense of validation, legitimacy

This is not something that objectively comes from traditional publishing. We all decide for ourselves what gives us a sense of legitimacy and validation. Many self published writers report feeling a huge sense of validation and legitimacy that comes directly from the readers who read and love their work. This is my opinion, but I think it is much more healthy to seek validation from the audience that your work is meant for than from the middle men of the industry.

Possible lack of transparency regarding royalties and sales figures

Make that definite.

And then there's the big con that's always missing when people talk about trad pub: It's not a path you can choose to take. It's a path you can only choose to pursue traditional publishing. I suppose one could file this under "need to jump through hoops" but I think that's so vague as to be misleading. It really needs to be pointed out that you can't even choose this route. It chooses you, if you're lucky.

No (or extremely limited) bookstore presence

Actually, if you do things right, it's not that hard to get into bookstores for an indie. Indies who produce a print copy with, for instance, expanded distribution through Createspace are, I believe, automatically included in the ordering catalogs of distributors like Ingram and Baker and Taylor. The real key is to have a professionally produced print edition and to have it priced right for book stores.

Perception that book/author wasn’t good enough for traditional publisher

Well, once again, just my opinion, but this one makes me laugh. Seriously? Oh dear, I'm not "good" enough for the industry that rejected Harry Potter dozens of times and published Snooki and only published mega bestseller 50 Shades after it was already a big hit as a self published ebook. Whatever will I do?

The "Dirty Little Secrets" of traditional publishing are pretty good. I think I would add one more:

No one is on your side, so you have to be.

No, your agent is not really working for your benefit. They're working for their own benefit and their agencies' benefit. It's in their best interests to keep the publishers happy, so they are also working for the publisher's benefit over yours. They all say the right things about how they're so excited about your book, they all claim to fight for you. They all act like your best friend. They aren't. They are business people. It's true that there are some good agents out there, but given that they ALL make the same wonderful promises about your career, it's impossible to tell beforehand which ones will really benefit you and which ones will drag you and your career into the dirt. The horror stories that have been told since authors have been liberated from fear of being blacklisted by self publishing are numerous.

No, your editor is not on your side. Editors don't have any power these days anyway. Even if they are perfectly wonderful people who truly love books, they work for a publisher and they are beholden to the sales department. They are business people whose job is to watch out for the interests and bottom line of the company they work for.

When dealing with business people looking out for their business, authors need to learn to act like business people as well and look out for their business interests. Authors need to learn business, no matter how they publish. There is no such thing as just being able to write and let others handle the rest (even though this is what agents promise, it's a lie). That's the fast track to getting cheated and exploited.

Now on to self-publishing's "Dirty Little Secrets"...

Putting out a quality product takes a great deal of work, skill, and ingenuity

That's not so much a "Dirty Little Secret" as it is "Common Sense". Anyone who thinks they don't need to put in a great deal of work and have a great deal of skill and ingenuity and *gasp* even be able to learn new things doesn't belong in the publishing business at all.

Most self-published books sink without a trace—and deserve to!

[citation needed]

The vast majority of self-published books sell fewer than two hundred copies

[citation needed]

But seriously, these are both nonsensical statements since the author has already acknowledged that, unlike trad published books, there is no shelf like for a self published book. Say you published a book 2 years ago and say it sold 150 copies and then sunk down the lists into obscurity. It's not as if the book died. Say it only sells 1 copy a month for the next two years. That's still a lot more than it would sell if it were traditionally published or, more likely, if you had sought to traditionally publish it but it had never been accepted. And there's nothing to stop it, even from the depths of obscurity, from being suddenly discovered and rising in the lists and selling lots of copies. Particularly if you are working on your career by writing and publishing more books all the time. Every time you publish a new book, the older books are likely to experience a surge. If one of your newer books manages to take off then all your older books will likely start selling more as well. There's no limit, no shelf life, no "out of print", no "it sold X number of copies and that's that."

 

[TWErvin2]

Actually, if you do things right, it's not that hard to get into bookstores for an indie. Indies who produce a print copy with, for instance, expanded distribution through Createspace are, I believe, automatically included in the ordering catalogs of distributors like Ingram and Baker and Taylor. The real key is to have a professionally produced print edition and to have it priced right for book stores.

Not really. Just because it's available to order and in a catalogue, does not mean it will show up in a bookstore. And if the book is not returnable (a bookstore can return a book with no charge if it doesn't sell), then the chances are slim to nonexistent they'll appear. And with POD, returns can be expensive to the author.

It is far more affordable with offset print runs, but it requires warehousing and such--and a major investment by the author. I know of one self-published author who went through all the effort and hoops (a lengthy and time-consuming process) and it proved to be not worth the effort.

 

[Mythopoet]

And I know indie authors who easily made it into bookstores and found it worthwhile. *shrug* My point was that it's not as unlikely as he makes it sound. Yes, it's still difficult. Everything in this business is difficult. If you expect it to be easy you should go elsewhere.

 

[stephenspower]

Instead of starting another thread, here's a transcript of speech on the fate of big publishers, the choice they have to make about how to reach consumers, and the future of community-based publishing:

Bridging the Gap: Why Publishing's Future is at Risk | Publishing Perspectives

 

[TWErvin2]

And I know indie authors who easily made it into bookstores and found it worthwhile. *shrug* My point was that it's not as unlikely as he makes it sound. Yes, it's still difficult. Everything in this business is difficult. If you expect it to be easy you should go elsewhere.

Maybe we're talking about something different. I am referring to national distribution in the USA, where a good percentage of each B&N store, for example, has a copy or more on the shelves. If it is 'available' via Baker and Taylor or Ingram, it's possible to get relatively local bookstores to carry a title without too much difficulty.

 

[skip.knox]

I read an article today (citation is on my phone, sorry) that talked about the implications of ebooks (not quite the same as self-pub, but close) for archiving. There is at least a reasonable chance that we are going to lose a whole wad of books in the dev/null bucket simply because there is no chance of someone finding an old copy in a used book store. This really has more to do with stupid copyright law than with the medium itself, but the implications for authors and historians are there, nevertheless.

[odd word, that 'nevertheless'; we should have its converse, 'alwaysthemore']

The point I was wandering toward is that there is a difference in traditional vs self publishing in that the latter, at least for now, is more ephemeral. BTW, did you know you can file your book with the Library of Congress? Did you also know the Library periodically culls its holdings, so having your book there doesn't guarantee its preservation? Maybe the thing to do is have a dozen copies of one's books and sell or give them to used book stores, where they will sit quietly to be discovered randomly.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Nice article but I do have to point out one thing he seems to have overlooked. He says he might have done better financially if he had gone the traditional route. What he means to say is that he might have done better financially if he had gone the traditional route AND a publisher had picked his book up. But they didn't. He had a year of rejections before he went indie. (Which is less than I had I have to say).

The simple reality for him and almost everyone else is that if they pursue only traditional publishing, they will do financially worse than if they go indie. It's unavoidable since most will never be picked up by a publisher.

The other thing I have to say is the statistic that most self pubbed books will sell less than two hundred copies. I'm on the fence about this. Certainly I have heard this stat bandied around a lot and I suspect there's a lot of truth in it. But I also suspect there's a dimension to this number that's overlooked. Time. Once a book is out there, it's always out there - unless you take it down.

So take my first book Thief. Pubbed four years ago. It had a bad cover, bad blurb, poor editing, was in an unpopular genre and really wasn't up to standard. I also didn't market it (but then I don't market anything) and priced it far too high. What can I say - newbie to self publishing at the time. So it spent a year selling one copy every month or two. Say ten copies in a year. Then my next book came out in 2011, and Thief started selling - not hugely since its in a different genre. But say it doubled its sales. After that more books came out, Thief got re-edited and recovered, prices were adjusted, and it went out in different formats eg paper. It's still not a great seller - in fact it's one of my poorest. Almost a legacy book. But still it'll sell twenty or thirty copies a month. And it'll do that for the next fifty (?) years. I'm fairly sure it's sold well over two hundred copies now.

So maybe that statitic needs to be reworded to most self pubbed books will sell less than two hundred copies per year. Those last two words make a big difference.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Philip Overby]

I wonder if that statistic about only selling 200 books applies to indie authors who don't continue publishing. For example, they wrote one or two books and have been marketing them for years. Then maybe that applies then? I imagine if you write multiple books (especially a series), you're more likely to sell more copies of the earlier books as time goes on. But I don't really know much about all this, just pontificating.

 

[Addison]

I've been debating which publishing route to take. I've talked to my family, explaining both sides of both paths. My dad was more enthusiastic about the selfie because he sees it as a business and he LOVES business. My mom's not into the indie/ e-books so she was more for the traditional. When I explained it to my kid brother he raised a good question. "Why can't you send your book to the big publishers even if you do the self one?"

I know that "Tiger's Curse" started as a selfie before it was picked up by an agent. But is it possible to query an agent about your book that's on a selfie market?

 

[psychotick]

Hi Addison,

Yes it's possible. But it's more unlikely to be picked up because it's already out there and thus publishers will be less interested. Publishers generally won't touch a book that's been published anywhere else. If the book does very well however there's a chance - especially if the publisher thinks it's in that sweet sales spot where its selling well, but they think that with a bit of a push it can do much better. My advice though would be that if you want to go trade then hold out for that option for as long as you feel acceptable. Look at indie as a last resort. Don't go indie in the hope of going trade. If on the other hand you want greater creative control, faster publishing etc then indie should be your first choice.

However one thing that you can do as an indie author if your heart is in trade, is use that first book if it's good and sells reasonably well, to earn a trade contract for your other books. Now in this case a publisher won't have any worries that the book they're looking at is already out there, and if you can show a quality product and some sales then you're ahead of the game.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Mythopoet]

I wonder if that statistic about only selling 200 books applies to indie authors who don't continue publishing. For example, they wrote one or two books and have been marketing them for years. Then maybe that applies then? I imagine if you write multiple books (especially a series), you're more likely to sell more copies of the earlier books as time goes on. But I don't really know much about all this, just pontificating.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure there were enormous problems with the survey that this statistic was taken from. It might have been, among other issues, self selecting, meaning that the data would be basically useless for extrapolating any real trends. I'd have to do some digging to see if I'm remembering that particular survey correctly though. Either way, I wouldn't trust that number without documentation.

As far as how authors are selling, I would trust authorearnings.com far more than anything else. The data there is at least completely objective (not the reports written by Hugh but the actual data) and freely available for anyone to peruse and take from it what they will. There's going to be a new report coming Monday as well.

 

[Mythopoet]

Publishers generally won't touch a book that's been published anywhere else.

This is not true. Unless it's a short story that you would be sending to the short story market. There they generally want first publication rights. But as far as book publishers go, it doesn't really matter if you've published it already. The publishers are all to eager to snatch up any self published book that is selling well and thus provides them with guaranteed income. The only thing that matters is how well your book is selling. If it's selling poorly they'll see it as a bad risk and pass, if it's selling well they'll probably try to cheat you out of as many rights and profit as they possibly can before publishing (though of course they'll do that if you submit to them without self publishing too). As long as they think they can make money off you it doesn't matter if it's already published elsewhere.

 

[Addison]

So self-publishing is another way to build your bio for the query letter. If there's short stories or novels of a smaller caliber that would fit better for self-publishing then you send THE story on a traditional route.

 

[Kennith E Perry]

I'm not sure agree with the OP link, especially this

Most self-published books sink without a trace—and deserve to

I've read a lot of good self published books, I am probably going to self publish my novel. I have a friend, Steven Saylor who writes great historical fiction and he publishes the tradition way, he said that it is so hard to get a book deal and the money isn't that good so he has told me to try self publishing first. Morgan Rice has been successful with her self published books like her Sorcerers Ring series.

 

[PaulineMRoss]

"Why can't you send your book to the big publishers even if you do the self one?"

If you have multiple completed novels, this is the way to do it. Self-publish the ones that are more likely to make a splash that way (genre, generally, but especially romance, erotica, fantasy, maybe scifi). Submit the literary or historical fiction to publishers or agents, because they'll do better with a big name behind them.

 

[ALB2012]

I self publish and at the moment that works for me. I like the freedom it brings but of course there are downsides. I don't like the marketing side, and there is still the attitude that indies aren't real authors. Both routes have their advantages and disadvantages and a writer has to find what works for them and IF they are accepted by the publishing house.
My fantasy isn't mainstream - I write fantasy romance with a good helping of sex in it so this might restrict me. With self publishing I can write what I want to write. Do I make a lot of money? Honestly no, however I am not writing for the money and success is relative. I have sold more books than I ever thought I would when I hit publish and I've received some good reviews. My mother died of cancer a couple of months after my first book appeared in print but she saw it, held it and was so proud. That, to me, is success. I made a dying woman happy.

 

[psychotick]

Hi ALB,

Sorry about your mum. But I agree with you about the success. There is not a lot more satisfying than being able to hold your own book in your hands and knowing you created it. (I send copies to my mum as well - and she's suffering from alzheimers and in a home. I doubt she reads them. But if she sees the cover and my name on it, that has to good.)

Cheers, Greg.

 

[ALB2012]

Thanks Greg, I am sure your mum is proud in her own way.
I've read plenty of good and even great self pubbed and small press books, I have also read some rubbish ones. The same is true of trad pubbed ones. I've read plenty of those with typos, dodgy characters and inconsistencies which should have been picked up and weren't. 50 Shades of Grey is trad pubbed and truly awful - terrible shallow characters, bad plot, badly written, so it doesn't always equate that trad pubbed is good. That said 50SoG is a best seller - BECAUSE it has a publishing house behind it.

Both trad publishing and SP have their pros and cons.