Genuine concerns about self-publishing

[Jena Grace]

I sent you a PM. Miraculously it didn't bounce.

[leslee]

Got it! Thank you!

[The Tinman]

Jena, you need to demand your 99 cents back lol.

[Gary Kessler]

Like many of us on these forums, I have been hoofing it for years. Working on my book, editing, sending to agents. Over and over you get the rejects. And these are hard times to get into print. SO MANY people writing books. So little money around that agents/publishers don't want to take risks. All very understandable.

So many turn to self publishing, especially on Kindle, which costs nothing.

But my feeling (which I have had all my writing life) is that to self-publish is taking a huge risk, not with money, but with your reputation. Who will tell you the book is not good enough? Because you are putting it out there with no advice.

Self-publishing doesn't ipso facto mean you are putting it out there with no advice. You can get all the advice you need--and most of what anyone traditionally published will get--before you send the book off to be produced. No one is stopping you from doing that. You can join writing groups and share critique to help polish it. You can get grounded in writing style and punctuation and grammar enough yourself to put it in the publishable-quality zone. It just takes time and effort--but once done it's in place for subsequent writings. You can probably even track down relative cheap editing help. You can take classes in cover design. You even have a whole lot advice available on marketing.

The e-book revolution helps you to level a the playing field a bit more than the print-only era did. And you can put it out in print more cheaply and with better quality now than forever. The online book store revolution also is largely competing well with the bricks and mortar stores for sales, so you aren't as much at the mercy of a mainstream tradtional publisher as you were before.

And if you don't want to do all the work yourself, there are far more publishers, digging deeper into the pile thanks to the e-book revolution than there were in the print-only world. The e-publishers won't take you to hardback, but I think that's a dying mode anyway. They can take you to paperback and put you in online distribution channels, where readers increasingly are going to browse and buy.

So, I think authors have better chances now than ever before--even if they are self-publishing.

[Lea Zalas]

Hey Gary! Good to see you again.

[Gary Kessler]

Been busy getting a book ready for launch at this year's Virginia Festival of the Book in late March. What the Spider Saw, a detective procedural murder mystery. The book should hit the market on 1 March.

http://www.cedarcreekauthors.com/Wha...pider_Saw.html

[Lea Zalas]

That's fantastic. Good luck.

[jayce]

Good show, Gary. Looks like an interesting tale.

[Debbi Voisey]

Gary

I thought this thread was dead, so thank you for reviving it with such a great post! You gave me lots to think about.

Good luck with your endeavours.

Debbi

[d. Leroy]

I'm actually coming around to self-publishing... primarily because I plan to self-publish my book in March, 2013. This past year has seen too many near-misses at editorial boards and now I'm so frustrated I could kick a small dog, or knock on someone's door and then take off running. I'm not sure if there's truly any success in self-publishing, certainly it's a difficult endeavor to establish credibility, and there are exceptional stories that entice even the most rigid skeptic, but by god, at least you've got some control over the outcome. The problem is, there's so much crap self-published that I feel it'll be difficult to get noticed.
I'm fortunate to have an agent and she advocates self-publishing, especially in genre fiction, and I think she's as frustrated as me with the traditional route (she makes her money in nonfiction). We're going to give it one more run this fall with my current MS, but if that one goes down in flames, I think it's time to restrategize the approach and probably go alone.
So Debbi, you're not the only one who thinks about this and you're not the only one with doubts on validity, credibility, and remuneration. I'm not sure myself, but dag-on, it's sure sounding better and better.

d.