Traditional Vs Self Publishing

Traditional Publishing Vs Self Publishing

For the longest time, most aspiring authors thought that getting published only happened one way: go through a traditional publishing house, which hasn't always been easy. The publishing industry can be extremely hard to get into. But now there's other ways to get published that requires next to none of the things traditional publishing requires: self publishing and hybrid publishing (which is a whole separate article!). Self-publishing has had somewhat of a recent boom, and now it's pushed all over social media. But depending on your goals for your book and a variety of other factors, self-publishing might not always be the way to go. However, to figure out which one would work best for you, you need to know the pros and cons of each. 

Traditional Publishing (Using a Book Publisher)

The traditional publishing route entails getting an agent onboard with your manuscript and working with them, and eventually an editor, to get your book traditionally published. If you would like to know more about getting an agent and the reasons you need one if you’re hoping to be published by a major publishing house, check out How To Find A Literary Agent. Literary agents are your go between to get a publishing house to pick up your manuscript. From there, you will work with an editor to polish your manuscript, get a finished cover, market your book, and finally put out the finished product. If you want in-depth details about the whole process, check out How To Get A Book Published. Trust me, if I put every detail in this article it would be as long as a dissertation! I promise these two articles (along with this one!) will give you everything you need to know to make your decision.

Pros of Using a Traditional Publisher

This route is FREE! 

That’s right, querying agents, getting an agent to work with you, and getting published by a major publishing house — from beginning to end— is free for authors. There are no out-of-pocket costs to get published this way, and if someone is telling you there is, you’re probably being scammed

You are paid upfront

When you enter into an agreement with a publishing house, you are given an advance. The advance is determined by how much money traditional publishers think they can make when selling your book. This money is yours to keep from that moment forward and is often anywhere from four to seven figures! (This number varies drastically based on several factors, read How Much Do Authors Make if you want to know more). This also means you are more likely to make money! 

Your book will be more polished

Both your agent and your editor will help you polish your manuscript. The plot, tension, pacing, and voice of your manuscript will be bolstered by having people to bounce ideas off of and who know the market for your manuscript. Even after the agent and editor are finished, a copyeditor and proofreader will make sure there are no grammatical errors and that names, places, dates, times, and other things you wouldn’t even think of are standardized throughout your book. This also extends to the look of your finished book. You will have professional artists making the covers for your book or any illustrations in your book

Better reach

Publishing houses, especially the bigger houses, have more money to dedicate to marketing your book and can get it in commercial retailers and bookstores. This built-in marketing support is what can take your book from being just another cover design in a sea of books to a book everyone is talking about.

Cons of Using Traditional Publishers

Less creative control

Once you sign the contracts, you can’t expect that every vision that you had for your book will be implemented. That's because in exchange for your advance, the publishing company owns the rights to your manuscript, and therefore has a lot of the final say in how things will be done. Everything from book covers to how it is marketed is decided by the publishing house. You are beholden to what the publisher thinks. You can ask for your wishes to be respected, and your agent will help you on that front, but expect to have to compromise.

Lesser to no royalties 

After your book is traditionally published, until your advance is “earned out”, as in until your book makes as much money as the publishing house paid you upfront, you will receive no money for the sales of your book. Some authors never sell enough copies to meet their advance, and therefore never see royalties for their book. This is where publishing houses make their money back and more for the investment they made in you, so unless your book does really well, the income you make from your book is your advance. Oftentimes this is still good, but if it’s your first book, or several in a series, the third con comes in...

Relationships with publishing professionals

This can be a positive but also a negative. If your first book does not do as well as the publishing house hoped, they might give you a lower advance for any books you want published with them in the future or, in the worst-case, your book might not be picked up with them again. And for book deals that cover several installments in a series, if the first book doesn't do well, the other books may just be "shelved", and not in the good way at physical bookstores. This may be contained to an imprint — which every large publishing house has quite a few of, but it is a con worth mentioning if you write within a very specific genre or go with a smaller publisher.

Publishing process has long turnaround 

For a book to go through the entire traditional publishing process can take quite long, often taking anywhere from 1 to 2 YEARS to hit shelves, not including how long it took to find an agent and subsequently a publishing house. With that factored in, that range goes to 2-3 years.

Insular industry

As much as I hate to say it, even getting in the door with an agent and then a publisher can be quite difficult. There are so many authors out there trying to get traditionally published, and only a few of them are selected. It can take quite a while for an agent to pick up your manuscript and give it a chance, and not every agented manuscript finds a home.

Self-Publishing

If you decide traditional publishing is not for you, there is a different way: self-publishing. This route is becoming increasingly popular, and many people have had success with this, one famous example being Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. An author only has to finish writing their manuscript and format it to be an e-book or a bound book and then start selling on places like Amazon.

Once you finish your manuscript, you can use tools like Canva and BookBolt to format your finished manuscript into standard book pages and download it as a pdf or other accepted format. Once you have that, it’s just a matter of choosing whether you want to use a print-on-demand retailer like Amazon KDP or a traditional book printer. With print-on-demand, your book is only printed and sent out when someone buys your book. The printer takes a cut of the sale price and gives the rest to you.

The process in how to upload your manuscript for printing will vary depending on which printer you decide to use, but having a pre-formatted version of your manuscript never hurts. With traditional printers you pay upfront for an order of your book lot (the sizes you can order vary from printer to printer). You can either take all of the books, list them online and send the books yourself, or get them put in stores (usually independent bookstores). With this approach, all profits go directly to you. And that’s it! You can market your books separately or use SEO if you’re selling online, but once the book is printed, you often just have to sit back and wait.

Pros of Being A Self Published Author

Self publishing has a fast turnaround

Going from manuscript to published book only takes a matter of days with this strategy. Once the manuscript is properly formatted, the manufacturer and marketplace do the rest. With Amazon KDP, an author only needs to create an account and upload the manuscript and cover, and Amazon will take care of the rest. There are also other print-on-demand or printers that you can use to make a bound book in matter of days or weeks — a far cry from the standard year or more the traditional route has.

No red tape 

When you self-publish, you do not need an agent, an editor, or even traditional publishing houses. There is no such thing as "self publishing offers" like there are book deals, you give yourself permission. You get to skip the steps it takes to get them on-board, and get straight to the fun bits, which saves on the time consuming process of finding publishing professionals to help you.

Full creative control 

When you self-publish, everything is up to you, you have complete control over how your manuscript becomes a published book. There’s no need to compromise with someone else’s vision of your book, or what someone else thinks is best. The final product is completely in your hands.

Relationships with traditional publishers

If you were having a hard time finding an agent or a publisher and your self-published book does really well, this can help open the doors for traditional publishing if you so choose it in the future. You may even find that publishers ask you for the privilege of reprinting your book, which means even more profit for you. 

Cons of Self Published Books

Upfront costs

While Amazon KDP and others like it are free to use and only take a portion of the profits after they’re made, traditional printers for your book may cost a lot of money, and even more money to hold inventory of your book (the yet-to-be-sold copies that you ordered). Even if you do go the print-on-demand route, some of these companies that make higher quality bound books have high prices that easily eat into profit margins, leaving you with sometimes even 20% or less of the profit if trying to match the industry standard of the book market. Either way, you have to invest money in getting your own book out there, whereas if you traditionally publish you wouldn't have to.

No safety net

Unlike with publishing companies, there is no advance, meaning what you get from sales is what you get. So if your book happens to sell very little, your potential profits go from five figures with a publisher, to next to nothing — or even worse, in the red. You also have to wear every "hat" so to speak. You have to do self promotion, book promotion, editing, selling, and if you're bad at any of those there's nothing to fall back on.

Less visibility

You can always use keywords when trying to get your book seen by your target audience, but with the market being flooded by self-published books, it takes a lot to stand out, and even more to make it to the first page of online retailers like Amazon, even with the right keywords and a market where other writers in your same genre are doing quite well.

Less polish 

No matter how hard you try, without having someone else look over your manuscript, preferably someone who has expertise in finding and fixing grammar mistakes and standardizing things, there may be quite a few errors in your final product — which could affect your sales once reviews roll in. This can be mitigated if you decide to hire professionals to look over your work, but that's an extra cost, which still lands it in the cons list.

Stigma

Given that a few of the emerging names for self published authors have had less than stellar polish to their books and plotlines that feel controversial or straight up bad, to self publish now means to get lumped in with them — and not in a good way. Self published authors, and by extension their books, tend to be looked down upon, which can make book sales difficult.

Final Comparison: Self Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing

Overall, you have to decide what’s best for your book as a first time author. If you’re willing to wait and would like for your book to have commercial reach, the traditional publishing might be for you. If you want to strike while the iron’s hot and are willing to take risks with possible high rewards, then you may want to self publish. It’s all about what you’re most comfortable with, neither approach is more “worthy” than the other. It's not about "self publishing vs traditional publishing" or "self publishing vs hybrid publishing", it's about what works best with your sensibilities and goals.

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