At what point do I consider self publishing?

No, it's totally self-publishing. You will be spending either money or time on every aspect. Getting your book in your hands should be worth that to you.

And yes, I know. I have self-published, I thoroughly enjoyed it and would do so again, you don't need to evangelise to me. But you're very unlikely to get the same reach. If that's what you want, you should stick to trad.

The stats are just as skewed by the outliers on the other side, like Joanna Penn. You're far more likely to be one of the thousands who don't make it than you are to be her, because that's just how numbers work. Even if your book is genuinely good - maybe you'll mean to do marketing and then discover it takes time you don't have. Maybe you'll actually do some and discover you suck at it. Maybe you'll do it and you're good at it but it turns out there just aren't many people who want to read what you've written. There are so many ways people end up not making many sales that aren't 'they published dross and didn't promote'. Self-publishing is a fantastic way to get a book that is yours. It's a fantastic way to be published. Outside of a few specific niches, it's a shit way to make money.

And as @LostThePlot pointed out above, if what you're really after is the validation of being trad published, of having someone look at your book and say 'yeah, this is worth it', self-publishing won't ever give you that. Self-publish your book because you want to self-publish your book, not because trad houses won't take you.

 

Yes, exactly. Self-publishing is absolutely a legit way to be published but it has it's own set of unique challenges and it's not a substitute for trad publishing.

If you aspire to trad publishing then you need to spend your time working towards that, not working on something different. That's the bottom line. There's good reasons to self publish but if that isn't what you really want then you won't get much out of it.

And, notably, if you do self-publish you need to go out there with your eyes open and understand that it's just as fraught with perils. It will definitely put your name on a book but it won't do a lot more unless you are both good and work hard.

For me the esteem of traditional publishing does matter. And thus I won't self-publish. And that's ok. Because self-publishing isn't for everyone.

 

Thank you all for your vast amounts of input on the matter. I've done a bit of research on the subject, asked around, and obviously posted here. I think I've come around to the idea of self-publishing and I'm quite happy with the idea now. Again, thank you, all.

 

Let me introduce you to something called Price's law. It states that within any group the square root of the group size makes up 50% of the productivity. This is true in work places, in academic citations, in money earned, in numbers of composers that have their music played.

And it's true both in trad and in self-publishing. The top 10% takes the majority of the earning. The question isn't really if you are average or not, it's if you are in the top 10% or not. If you are then you average a lot. if you aren't then you average probably zero. And, notably, you don't have much choice in whether you are in the top chunk or not. You can work hard but that's pretty much it, and there's a lot of other people working hard too.

My point is that you don't stand a great chance of making anything from either approach. And the larger the group the less chance you have of being in the cream at the top (literally exponentially smaller chances). And given that, you should seek to be in the group where the average of the bottom 90% is highest. And say what you will about traditional publishing but the average of the bottom 90% is not zero. That's what you should do if you seek to maximize earnings; presume you won't be outstanding. It may be harder to become a traditionally published writer but if you can get out there in that world the number is better.

But you're a writer so you probably find other things more important than the statistics of what maximizes earning potential. If you did that you definitely wouldn't be a creative. So really it's a moot point. I merely mention to illustrate that any arguments about earning are meaningless. Those of us going for trad aren't doing it for the money, it's for other reasons including betting that we are better at writing fiction than marketing ourselves (a reasonable bet given that we write fiction a lot more than we market anything). Those pursuing self publishing are doing so because they like controlling their work and being out there and growing something themselves.

The vast majority of both kind of authors make zero. Fact. So it's not really about that, is it?

 

It is literally how averages work. Take 4999 authors who earn nothing and 1 author who makes $500,000, then 'average earnings from self publishing' are $100. At least, if you're using the mean, which is what most people mean when they say 'average'. IMO a better one to use in situations like this would be the median, but it's not like that data's available.

...and that's not how marketing works. It's harder than most people think it is. Will you have a better chance of selling more copies? Sure. Is it guaranteed? Nope. And it's more money and/or time you end up investing. Marketing isn't automatically profitable.

And I'm not knocking self-pub - as noted, I've done it. It was fun. I think it's a great option for a lot of people and there's a lot of great reasons to do it. But 'it'll make you money' is not one of them.

 

Do you have a specific cite from a reliable source, backed up by statistic analysis, that says this? I don't see how you possibly could, because that would require analyzing the book quality, cover quality, and marketing efforts of tens of thousands of authors.

So I don't see how it can be anything but an assumption. It's a happy assumption, but I'm pretty sure that it's not a correct one.

 

You are right that self-publishing is not the same as vanity publishing... But you can't deny that a lot of people use it as such anyway. And you do have to admit that a lot of people see it as the fall back to traditional. That doesn't mean that it is or should be seen as such. It's it's own world. But any financial arguments relating to it should be treated with caution. The spread is so wide that you can make it whatever you want it to be.

People should be self publishing because they want to, not because they think it's the best way to make anything.

 

When 4999 people don't make anything and 1 person does, it stops being the 4999 being very unlucky and starts being the 1 being very lucky. You can't just ignore them or dismiss them as not trying.

Do you have a spreadsheet of the raw data, or something? I can't imagine that this would be anything other than self-reported but eh, it's better than nothing.

^^that.

 

I'm confused. Are you getting figures for the average income of all, or a reasonably representative sample, of authors that do marketing/covers? Someone has done that study?

However, you're talking average and mean, which are not at all the same thing, and I'm not yet confident that there's a statistical model that makes your conclusions make sense.

 

Agreed, there isn't any really useful way to differentiate between "people who try but are bad" and "people who don't try" and even "people who tried a bit and were better than expected". There are indeed things that you can do to improve your chances but everyone knows what they are, just like in trad, so really it's a wash.

All we really know for sure is that if you don't try you don't make anything. And that's not really helpful because, well, that's sublime obvious. So what does that leave? Just everyone plugging away trying to do what they think gives them the best chance of success.

The second anyone can say for certain who makes money and who doesn't it'll no longer be true because everyone will start doing that and suddenly it'll be something else.

 

I think there is some truth to the 12 novels thing. Ray Bradbury said if you want to write short stories you should write one a week for a year because it's impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row. The bottom line in that being prolific can really pay off. If you knew that your 13th book would land you an agent and a book deal, would you still put in all the time and effort it would take to write the 12 bad ones?

I'm very happy that my first novel was never published. Though I wanted it badly and tried really hard at the time, it just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. And the one I'm working on now might not do any better, but I am prepared to keep churning out new writing. It's hard to judge our own work. That I will leave to the editors.

It does sound a little like you're giving up. And I understand that self publishing is way easier than writing a dozen more novels that might not go anywhere, but what is your real goal? What do you really want? And how hard are you willing to work for it? When school's over the real work begins... or some people become high school English teachers. Nothing wrong with that. I just know if I had given up or settled, I would have missed out on something really great.

I love King's short stories and feel the same as you.

 

This is broadly speaking the argument I have for sticking to trad. I've written something like 10 books in 4 years and I am getting both faster and more commercially relevant as I go. I write well, I create good characters and have a strong voice. And whether by accident or design I'll write one book that is just enough to put me over the edge. No I don't know which one it'll be; it might be the one I submitted today or the next one or the next one.

It takes some misses before you get a hit. And at least my misses (and indeed my Mrs) aren't on display. When I'm out there it'll be out of a catapult. And in the end, I can't keep missing the point forever. One day I'll get smart or I'll get lucky.