TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING VS. SELF-PUBLISHING/INDIE

First I'd say, though I have had a brief stint where some of my books were stocked at the local Barnes and Noble, that's widely unlikely to happen for indie authors and whether indie or traditionally published, brick and mortar bookstores aren't likely to make you much money. As far as I'm aware, the books that get real estate at Barnes and Noble are chosen for their stores nationwide through publishers with whom they have a relationship. The percentage you get as an author on each sale is extremely small and most traditionally published authors are not full time, or make most of their income from speaking fees. 

 

Trad deals can absolutely be profitable, and if your book ends up being one that they use more marketing budget behind, definitely a pro—another positive is that they would pay for all production (cover, editing, proofreading, etc.). All of this saves you time that you can then spend doing more writing. At the same time, if the book doesn't do well, the publisher is less invested in this particular title than you are, and may well be likely to move on rather than pivot and see if their marketing could be shifted to better fit the story, or if there's another fixable issue. 

 

Going hybrid eventually, whether starting indie or trad, is a great way to go—having a foot in both worlds, with indie books in your backlist bringing in higher royalties, and trad books that sell well leveraging the audience from that publishing house and bringing those readers into your full backlist. After all, your readers are not primarily loyal to the publisher, but to you, who have earned their trust by taking them on a spectacular literary adventure.

 

The first question you need to answer is if you are going to publish independently or through a publishing house. If you publish independently, you are the publisher, and you do everything, bearing both the risk of failure and the reward of success, as any decent CEO is prepared to do. 

Everything means everything, from start to finish—writing, editing and hiring professional editors and proofreaders, hiring and working closely with your cover designer, formatting, publishing, marketing, all of it. 

 

If you publish through a publishing house, they bear both the risk and the greatest reward, investing in your book on the front end, acquiring rights to your title, and then selling the book for (hopefully) a profit. Often, the deal comes with an advance of some sort, which is smaller for beginner authors. The advances must "earn out" or pay back to the publisher what they paid you, before you start earning a royalty percentage Your book may or may not ever make it to the earn out stage. For example, if they paid you an advance of $2,000 in the deal to acquire the title, the book has to earn $2,000 for them upon release before you start earning your royalty percentage; if your advance was $10,000, the book has to earn the publisher $10,000 before you are paid royalties. Publishers acquire a large set of titles and make the most money off the top titles on their list. 

 

If you go the trad route, you will almost assuredly need an agent, and you would start by submitting your manuscript to agents, who will in turn submit that manuscript to publishers. This process can take quite a long time, but varies widely. Stephen King had a tent peg in his wall to hold his rejection slips and needed a second teng peg before he sold Carrie.Leigh Bardugo was still receiving rejection letters for Shadow and Bone well after signing her deal! Books are often published 1-2 years after a publishing house acquires the manuscript in a deal.

 

Although I did just recently sign a deal with a publisher I'm looking forward to working with (and did so without an agent, which is unusual), all my books to date, both children's books under Erin Winters and fantasy under E.A. Winters, have been self-published / independently published and that is where the bulk of my personal experience lies. Independent authorship means becoming a full entrepreneur, finding and working with cover designers, editors, proofreaders, etc.; I leaned on social media marketing getting started, and continue to, and branched into Amazon and Facebook ads as well. I'd recommend Amazon if I were picking just one place to advertise, but it definitely depends on the genre and the book. I wouldn't generally recommend ad spend until you've got a full series out, though there are exceptions. Those exceptions usually involve a social media platform or something else assisting to grease the gears.

 

I'll also note that having a social media platform and website built up, or some other evidence of your professionalism and commitment and knowledgeability to market the title, is a significant boon to your chances with agents and editors at publishing houses, who will still expect you to participate in marketing the book in cooperation with them to give the book its best chance.

 

WRITING & PUBLISHING PROCESS

My current writing process looks like this:

 

• Outline book (if you are a panster, skip the outline or have a super basic overview or whatever you people do; if you think you are a pantser but are actually an outliner, which is totally unrelatable because I definitelyyy didn’t make this mistake myself…well, then come back and add this in when you figure it out, because you probably can’t live without that outline and your process will smooth out dramatically when you do)

• Write book

• Pass book to line editor

• Start working on the next book while I'm waiting for the line editor

• Original book comes back from line editor; I go through it, then pass it to proofreader

• Proofreader gives it back to me and I format it in Vellum, or my assistant formats it

• Upload to KDP (Amazon publishing arm) with professional cover, blurb, competitive back end key words and categories. Tools like PublisherRocket are excellent for identifying these.

• Ideally also upload to Ingramspark (Amazon will sell it, and Ingram's network means the books will be available for libraries and bookstores to acquire, as book stores do not play well with Amazon

  • If you choose to go “wide,” which means selling your books through multiple retailers rather than just one (usually Amazon), consider systems like Draft2Digital for distribution

• Promote the new title on social media and newsletter

  • Some people run promos through BargainBooksy, Robin Reads, and Fussy Librarian as part of their launch strategy; I did this with Dragon’s Kiss and got 15,000 free downloads and more reviews this way, but did not directly convert to sales or revenue. I haven’t done it since, and generally choose to focus on investing elsewhere for what I hope to be a stronger ROI, but for many people, this is a consistent strategy and it’s certainly got some advantages.

  • Remember that the people who download free books are frequently not the same people who pay for books. It’s not at all a given that someone who downloaded a free book will shell out for next books in series is they are a “whale reader” of free books who get their reads from free book promotion websites. This strategy may gain you some exposure, may get you sales, and may get you some read through, but you will still need to reach your primary target audience of people who pay to read books they love.

• Release the book (Woo!)

• Run ads on new release

  • Mine are mostly Amazon ads, but Facebook can also be effective depending on your genre and even individual title. 

  • There are exceptions, but until you have capital in your business with which to pay for ads

  • Start small and scale as you see successful return on investment

  • Assess and test. If you’re getting impressions (the ad is being shown to people), say a minimum 2000 for meaningful data, but no clicks, the cover isn’t strong enough to get clicks, or your targeting is off and it’s being shown to the wrong people. If you’re getting impressions and clicks, your cover is good, but you’re losing them at the landing page—probably your blurb needs work. If you’re getting impressions, clicks, and conversions into sales, hey! You’re in business.

  • Don’t set and forget. You have to check up on ads, optimize them regularly, and make sure they don’t go haywire down the line.

• Lather, rinse, repeat

 

Most normal people edit their own work heavily or at least significantly before passing it to line edit. It is considered terrible advice to tell anyone to skip this step, and I won't be the one to utter such words! I at this point don't really self-edit, as my drafts are very clean by the time I'm done with them, and I pass them straight to line. I also don't use developmental edits, because my outlines and process keeps things cohesive for me—though if I ever found a really super excellent dev editor, I wouldn't be opposed to it!

 

The best way to improve in craft is to read a lot and to write more books. For a long time my process was to write a book, read 1-2 craft books (I highly recommend My Story Can Beat Up Your Story; Save the Cat is another popular one) and 1-2 fiction novels, then write the next book, with one specific action item in mind to improve in my prose or story writing for that next story. I've published every story I've ever written, and I personally think my growth as a writer is apparent through the timeline of when I released the books, though my second book out of the 11 I have out so far is still my bread and butter fantasy book and the most frequent entry point into my worlds. Of course, my second series is a connected series branching off from the first, so that part certainly makes sense.

 

Additional to-do items that do not fit neatly into the previous linear list:

 

• Purchasing ISBNs from Bowker

  • I buy them in bulk and bought 500 of them quite some time ago, so I don’t have to purchase each time I release a new book. I do have to go in and assign each title to an ISBN number. I don’t do it for ebooks, though I could—but I do for paperbacks and hardcovers, and each format does need its own ISBN.

• Commissioning cover art and / or cover design

  • I generally get the cover before the book is complete, and may reserve a slot far ahead if the designer is often full, which is why this task doesn’t fit the linear timeline listed above.

• Alpha / Beta / ARC readers

  • Alpha readers read as you are writing and give immediate feedback. 

  • Beta readers read after some edits have taken place. 

  • ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) readers read the finished, edited product before release and generally post reviews and may talk about the book on launch day to help with release. 

  • Some authors have all of these. Some have none. I know someone who has alpha readers but nothing else, and I have done ARC readers more than either of the other two. ARC readers are for promotion purposes but not ultimately to improve craft; alpha and beta readers may catch story issues that you can then fix before the product is finalized, and inform how readers might respond to the book. Make sure these are your target market, not readers who want a free book but aren’t your ideal audience.

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There are, of course, other aspects of running a business I'm not focusing on here. For example, I originally set up as an LLC, but, at least at the time of this writing, I am taxed as an S Corp (chat with an accountant). 

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If you set yourself up as an employee of your business, and pay yourself a paycheck, Gusto is a great software for running payroll. If you need a bookkeeping software to help you sort through your expenses and give you graphs and data on your revenue and expenditures, Quickbooks Online is a great tool for that. I use both Gusto and Quickbooks, and currently have an accountant and book keeper that specializes in author businesses that also works with Quickbooks.

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If you're just starting out, you may well not need this yet. Identify the next thing you need to focus on, and zero in there. Learn pieces of the business at a time, when it makes sense, not all at once so you get too dizzy and fall over.

 

PACKAGING & MARKETING

For me, though everyone's mileage will certainly vary, I started by building a platform on TikTok and Instagram, and adding Facebook later. Starting small with 2 social media platforms and posting the same content to each one was less overwhelming, and more sustainable for me. I picked the two that felt least intimidating, and jumped in there. It’s also worth considering where your specific readership hangs out while determining which platforms to prioritize.

 

Social media isn't the move for everybody, but having a professional website and at least one social media channel is a wise move. Agents, editors, or readers make their first impression of you by whatever presence they find when they look you up. If they stumble across you, it’s probably either through social media or through your book cover, which, if you are indie and making your own cover, must be professional. Your cover is the single most important marketing tool that you have. And it needs to hit at thumbnail size on the carousels on Amazon.

 

Additionally, to build a newsletter, you need a funnel from somewhere to gather and direct traffic. You could launch a book on Amazon and use ads without social media, which is also an option, but you do have to have an excellent product with professional packaging, and budget for ad spend, and either time to learn ads yourself or budget to pay someone to manage them for you. 

 

As for professional covers for professional packaging, do your homework. Study covers of bestsellers in your genre and subgenre. Note what they have in common and where they differ. How does your cover stack up? Does your genre prefer illustrated covers? Graphic design object covers? Graphic design covers with real people on the front? For example, LitRPG will be illustrated covers; young adult is more likely to have stock images of real human people worked into the cover. 

 

Please, oh please, if you are not a graphic designer, and don’t do your work to become one, do not make your cover. And whether you become a cover designer, or hire out, you are still responsible for the quality of the work. I might not be able to draw a top notch dragon worthy of cover art, but I can tell which type of art hits for my book and my genre and which doesn’t, and I’ll be making my business decisions accordingly. I will also assess who to work with based on their professionalism, communication, and response times. Bonus points if you find your artists and designers through referrals from other authors. I don’t want to be halfway through an expensive art project only to find they ghost me and don’t deliver.

 

Releasing a book into the ether with millions of other titles and wondering why no one has read your book is similar to putting a one inch by one inch sticker advertisement on the floor at your local mall and wondering why your new business hasn’t taken off.

 

Social media takes time, but was free, so I started there. Kickstarter is another option—also time consuming, and also requires some hustling to get traffic driven to the campaign, but definitely a possibility! My first children's book was paid for by Kickstarter because I had no money to pay for illustrations. Once that book started doing well, profits there helped me try out other ad strategies as I grew and reinvested into the business, and now I have an assistant that runs a bunch of stuff for me, including ads. 

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"Sheesh, I just want to write books and have people read them!"

 

I get it! It’s a lot! 

Here’s the thing.

Many author hopefuls anticipate hobby effort for career revenue. It doesn’t work like that.

 

If you want to write a book without needing people to ever find or read your book from the sea of millions of titles, that’s easy enough — write the book!

 

If you want to publish a book friends and family can enjoy, but don’t want a career as an author, and you can get excited when the occasional sale might come in from someone coming across your title somehow, launch it on Amazon without doing anything else.

 

If you want to skip the hiring of editors, proofreaders, designers, etc. but want to truly publish and get into stores, you need a solid, polished pitch and may be emailing hundreds of agents before landing an agent who will then shop it to publishers. You won’t have to do as much work, but it IS work—it’s a career. 

 

There’s no overnight success for authors without any effort to generate exposure. 

 

It can definitely be overwhelming. I think most people underestimate what writing as a career really looks like. It’s similar to the music industry in some ways, in that being able to sing doesn’t mean you have a career that pays the bills. 

 

Step 1: have an excellent product (a great book!!)

Step 2: package the book professionally (cover, blurb) so when it gets in front of people and they see it, they want to buy it

Step 3: get the book in front of people

 

Without step 1, steps 2 and 3 are useless.

Without step 2, no one who sees your book will buy it.

Without step 3, no one will know your book exists no matter how wonderful it is, and no one will buy it.

If steps 2 and 3 are solid without a good step 1, you might sell book 1 of a series you hype up, but the disappointment on that bad book will show in the reviews, and they won’t be back for more. 

 

I hope this is realistic without being too discouraging! 

If it’s a hobby, enjoy the ride! If it’s a career, it needs to be treated as a career.