Should You Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish Your Book?

BROKEN AND BREAKING FREE, my first novel, is due out within the next couple of days. I’m certainly beyond thrilled about this! The past month or so, as I’ve prepared all the final details for publication, I’ve been getting quite a few questions from friends and family about the route I chose to publish my novel and how I came about that decision.

In this post, I’d like to tell you about self-publishing. I feel as if I’ve exhaustively researched both traditional and self-publishing for my own book to help make an informed decision.

Pros of self-publishing:

You own your book. This was one I was fairly surprised about. I figured I wrote the book, I own it, right? Not entirely so… More on that in the next post with traditional publishing. However, if you self-publish, your book is yours. You can change the cover for a later addition and it’s your choice what that cover looks like. You can edit or add text as you like. And each decision is essentially yours, both before publication and after. For the lifetime of your book.

Once you’re ready to publish, you can! This one mirrors the paragraph above, but you don’t need to wait for your agent or publisher. Once your manuscript is in tip-top shape, you upload it to the platform/s you want to publish on and you’re pretty much good to go!

You’re your own boss. Nobody is telling you what to do and when to do it. Nobody will tell you a certain part of your book needs to be changed or taken out entirely. Nobody has control, but you.

Cons to Self-Publishing:

Your book probably won’t be in bookstores. Most of the books you see in bookstores (Barnes and Noble, etc.) are sold to those bookstores via a traditional publisher. They have the ability to buy back any books that aren’t selling. With this being said, as a self-publisher, there are ways for you to get your books into bookstores, but it’s not as easy as it is with traditional publishing and you’d be financially responsible to buy back any books they don’t want. It’s helpful to know that 70% of books are sold online through Amazon, though. Yet, even I will admit that there’s got to be an incredible sense of accomplishment and pride that comes with seeing your book in a bookstore.

You are financially responsible for hiring professionals to work on your book. There are definitely books out there that are riddled with mistakes but you really do want your book to be the absolute best version of itself it can be. That means hiring professional book editors and book cover designers. You have the ability to do this all yourself if you’d like, but more likely than not, it will show. If your book has a captivating cover then it won’t be overlooked so readily, and if there are no mistakes in the text, it will more likely sell more copies as people might recommend it to their friends and family if they like the content. I know that personally, I can point out grammatical mistakes in novels that have even been professionally edited and those mistakes throw me off and dampen my enjoyment of that particular part of the book. You can google editors, but for a content or copy editor, you’re probably looking at about $1000 to $2000 for a 100,000-word novel. A book cover designer can run you anywhere from $100 to about $800, from what I have seen. I personally ended up using www.reedsy.com to find and hire both my editor and book cover designer.

Market, market, market! You need to market your book on your own. You can make the choice to publish and then leave it there to do what it will, but if you want to succeed and sell, then you need to market your book. This means a potential website, potential social media sites, learning Amazon’s algorithms so you can attempt to get your book on the Amazon charts, etc. Even traditionally published authors are responsible for their own marketing.

You probably won’t make a best-sellers list. On Amazon, yeah, you certainly might if your book is doing incredibly well, but it’s the traditionally published books that tend to make the New York Times lists and such.

I hope this has helped you understand a bit more about self-publishing. If you’re reading this and you are writing or have written a book, way to go! It took me over two years from my first word to publication date, so I’ve been in your shoes. With only a day or two left to wait, I can honestly say it has been worth every moment. Best of luck to you!