There’s a certain badge of honour attributed to authors who land a traditional deal, while writers who are self published have to work through a stigma. The stigma is understandable. After all, anyone can self publish; this means there is no quality control, which in turn has allowed the proliferation of self published books which are terrible. If you’ve been burned by spending money on one too many self published books marred by typos and crappy characters, your caution is understandable.
That said, landing a traditional deal can be frustrating, difficult, and even disappointing if you’re successful. We’ve all heard the horror stories of authors who had to scrap their original visions for something formulaic, of authors who despised the covers their books were given, and of award winning authors who continued through poverty while the publishing house raked in the cash.
While there are benefits to landing a traditional deal, these aren’t as pronounced as they once were. Plus, these benefits come with downsides. Somebody else will pay for your cover, but you’ll have no say in it. Other benefits have also become none existent: even if you’re traditionally published, you’ll still be forced to pour your own money and time into the marketing efforts.
Self publishing comes with more responsibilities, true, but it also comes with more freedom, creative possibilities, and larger paychecks.
Watch the video version below:
1) Creative Control
As far as principles are concerned, creative control is the number one reason for authors to self publish. It’s your vision, and nobody is going to mess with it. While authors should still study the market, emulate what works in their genres, and keep an audience in mind, this can be done without adhering to a formula.
With creative control, writers can take risks. They can include controversial plot twists. They can write as many swear words as they want without worrying about some arbitrary limit. They can take their story in unpredictable directions, and shape the protagonist the way they want.
With creative control, you don’t have to worry about an editor making you change a character’s gender just because the market will like it. You don’t have to worry about sugar coating your story to suit teenagers, or about making your plot more like Harry Potter because that’s what’s selling.
You can make your story whatever you want it to be. You can also write about whatever you want. If you feel your book is too different for a publisher to pick up, but that there’s an audience for it, you can write what you want without the gatekeeper. That said, writers should still take feedback. If George Lucas’s execution of the Star Wars prequels are anything to go by, full creative control can have it’s pitfalls. Writers hoping to sell their work have to be cautious of their egos when given so much control.
All this aside, having creative control is cathartic. Your book can feel like your baby, and any parent whose had someone tell them how to raise their kid can tell you how frustrating it can be. Would you let someone else dictate what clothes your child wore, or how they spoke? You probably wouldn’t, and writers can have similar feelings about their stories.
2) Retaining the Rights
With creative control comes the ability to retain the rights. Retaining the rights means nobody can screw up your story—except you. Does this mean full responsibility lands on you if the story turns out badly? Yes. However, that’s a risk self published authors are willing to take.
Think of the original Jaws book. Now think of the mess that was Jaws 3. Even if you haven’t seen it, you know it’s bad. Retaining the rights doesn’t just mean you control the story. If you retain your own rights, nobody else can ruin your story with half-assed sequels, shoddy spin offs, or lazy film adaptations.
It also means you can do what you want with your story without asking for permission from your publisher. If you land a movie deal, you don’t have to involve a third party in the negotiations. If you want to publish your first book for free, such as to create a reader magnet, you can do so without violating some contract. At any rate, retaining your rights also gives you full freedom to write any sequels, regardless of sales. If your publisher decides sales for book one weren’t good enough to justify a sequel, but they won’t return the rights to you, any sequels you dreamed of adding to your magnum opus are now impossible. Those stories you dreamed of telling as a kid are no longer a possibility—unless you can cough up the money to buy your poorly performing franchise back.
3) Bigger Royalty Payouts
Publishers take a larger cut of your royalties than you think. In fact, they get the majority of them. If a book sells, you’re looking at a personal profit of only fifteen to thirty percent. This leaves the publishers to rake in seventy percent of the earnings for the book you slaved over. While it’s understandable that they need to recoup the cost of paying for everything upfront, and for printing, it still leaves an author with relatively little for their efforts.
As a self published author, you take all the earnings. You have to pay expenses for printing costs, and will have to cough up a hefty sum initially for cover designers, editors, and typesetters, but when all is through any remaining money is yours (at least what remains after the government has taken their cut). Whatever choice you make, the government is still going to take a chunk. If an author is only earning five dollars or less on a twenty dollar book, and you add tax on top of that, one starts to question if so much work is worth it.
With self publishing, it’s your money—mostly. Amazon will still take a cut, though it’s lower than what publishers will take, and print on demand services allow an author to pay only for books people have already bought. What’s more, authors can sell books directly from their websites, eliminating the middleman (though it’s still recommended to have a presence on Amazon, since it’s where people buy the majority of their books).
The proliferation of ebooks also means an author can sell much of their copies without paying a dime on printing. Having a physical version available is a novelty we all strive for, but most sales could end up coming from ebooks. If you earn seven dollars on an ebook, you’re already earning more than you would on a print book through a publisher.
4) Complete Freedom
As a self published author, you have complete control of the cover, the story, and the rights. While this means more responsibility, it also means more opportunities. You can do whatever you want with the story, not only in regards to the plot but in regards to marketing, supplemental materials, merchandise, and so on. If an author wants to create a tie in video game or graphic novel, those profits, again, go directly to the author. Any merchandise, board games, or video games can be made to the author’s standard.
With complete freedom, a writer doesn’t have to ask for Warner Brother’s permission to share a free spin off story, create a web series, or even write a whole other series in the same world. Films are notorious for having lousy video games, licensed courtesy of Warner Brothers or some other corporation. Occasionally such properties can be decent, and no self published writer could hope to produce something on par with a triple A title, but most creators would probably be happy never to see a direct adaptation, complete with terrible voice acting, broken mechanics, and so on, again. These side projects are money grabs (for the most part) and they once again earn more money for the company than the original creator.
If you’re traditionally published, and the company you’re under contract to decides to create a crappy game or knock off product, you may be powerless to stop them. Moreover, if your fans realize how rotten the supplemental stuff is, you’ll be caught in an awkward position: you’ll either have to acknowledge that it’s all garbage, alienating the publisher, or you’ll need to pretend you love what the publisher has done, and alienate your fan base.
If you have the choice as a writer, to make what you want and create content or products that matter, you can assure that anything that’s attached to your franchise or your name is as high quality as you can make it.
5) Saving Time
How does self publishing save time? If you care about producing a quality book, it may still take you anywhere between a year to ten to push it out. That said, it will be produced faster than if it was traditionally published. This is because traditional publishers have a number of books under their belt. This means they can never give one hundred percent to your book, which in turn means it may take a few months just to hire a cover designer. Editing could take another three months. Then there comes yet another three months for the second round of editing, and so on, because the staff assigned to your book has to tackle other projects.
When it’s just you handling each step, you decide how fast you’ll go. This isn’t to say editing won’t take time, especially since freelancers can have multiple projects on the go too. Hiring a cover designer, going through the various edits, and reaching out to a typesetter, before finally printing a few test copies, are steps which take time.
Still, these steps are faster on you’re own than if you were going through a traditional publisher. Authors with a traditional deal can find their books in a kind of purgatory, with release dates being pushed back. In extreme cases, after the months you’ve spent editing and waiting, a publisher could even drop your book. If you do something unpopular or end up in trouble for a Facebook post you made ten years ago, you are at the mercy of your publisher. To save face, they could cancel your contract, which is a real time setback if you’ve been working with them for a year.
Finally, this is just the time it takes after they’ve accepted the book. Before that, you could spend three, five, even ten years wading through rejection emails before someone gives you a chance. In that time, you could write, edit, and publish your entire series or more, if you self publish.
Traditional publishing involves a great deal of waiting. If it’s going to take twenty years to write a single series, you’re better off relying on yourself. Life is too short to wait for someone else to give you the go ahead on your dream.
6) A Safety Net
Self publishing doesn’t provide you a safety net financially, but it does allow you to keep doing what you do best—write. If someone digs up that embarrassing post you made when you were fourteen and drunk, your publisher could fire you. If you share an unpopular opinion, your publisher will fire you—even if you’ve been with them for twenty years!
While it goes without saying that you should avoid posting your vodka driven videos or political stances online, people mess up. Even for seemingly small offenses, your career can be upended.
While your fans can still turn on you, the lack of a publishing house keeps you from being at the mercy of a CEO. An author, self published or otherwise, should always put up a professional front, but we’re human and we make mistakes. Assuming you haven’t done anything terrible, like boil a live puppy, your fans may be willing to forgive you.
Cut out the reliance on a middleman, and you build a career that’s sustainable even when you’re not perfect. If you’re entirely self reliant, nobody can take away your platform or your ability to write.
In Conclusion
There are a surprising number of benefits to becoming self published. Whether it be the larger royalties, the creative control, the ability to create any multi media projects to your standards, or even the lack of a dependent relationship with a publishing house, becoming self published can be freeing.
Of course, there are downsides to being self published too, such as the stigma attached or the upfront costs, but that’s a blog for another time. Ultimately, self publishing can be liberating, allowing you to see through your vision and create at the pace that works for you.
Which do you prefer, self publishing or traditional? Have you read any self published books you consider good? Share your thoughts.