Credit where credit is due, that was @Carly Berg who made that suggestion. Personally I would never put a story up for sale that I wasn't happy with. If I was just trying to test the waters of the court of public opinion, I'd probably just post it for free on Wattpad or FictionPress. Ethically I can't bring myself to charge money for something that I don't feel is the best I can do.
I wanted to address, and address @jannert. The first time you do something, you are probably going to be bad at it. This includes publishing. There are going to be problems you never considered. Stuff you forget about. Stuff you don’t have time for. First-time nerves. Over-expectations. Bad advice you thought was good. So “what’s the point”? The point is to gain experience. Bare minimum, it will help OP decide if he wants to self-publish things again in the future. At some point—with every book—you need to set it aside and decide what to do with it. Sometimes a book just can’t be improved further, and that’s it; it’s time to work on something else. Or, in other cases, you could keep improving the book, but it would take too long. I’ve had situations before where my choices were “spend six months completely rewriting this book I hate” or “spend six months writing a new book.” @Laurin Kelly: I get where you’re coming from, but... I just can’t imagine loving everything I write. It’s hard to gauge “what’s the best I can do.” If it takes me six months to improve a book 5%, IMO, that isn’t time well spent. But maybe I’m just too much of a pefectionist. If I wanted to make every book “the best I can do,” I’d never finish anything.
It'd be pretty heartbreaking to spend years and years on writing a project and then screw up the publishing process for it, for sure. Yes, a lot of mistakes one might make with self-publishing can be corrected, but if someone's put effort into a launch or whatever as well? Yikes.
Self publishing is straightforward. Gaining experience isn't a reason for putting something out there you don't think is good enough. It's for those kind of reasons that self publishing is still looked down on. Do your best. Put out your best.
You can also test the waters by submitting your work and seeing if any agents or publishers bite. In fact that is probably a much better way to test the waters. You want to see how your writing does in the real world. I get that. But anyone can self publish anything, and I imagine that's what you'll ultimately learn from this experience if you put out subpar work.
^This. Imagine spending ages on a book, perfecting it, busting your ass... and then screwing up the actual publishing part because you don’t know how to write a proper back-of-the-book blurb. Or because you picked a bad publisher. Or because your publisher hired a bad cover artist. Or because your agent screwed you over and you didn’t know enough to question her. Or because you signed a bad contract. Don’t spend a million years perfecting a book before publishing (or querying) for the first time. It will crush you. Traditional publishing, you convince a publisher to do the work for you. Self-publishing, you do all the work yourself. Self-publishing BADLY is easy. Self-publishing WELL is hard. This is also a solid suggestion. Sometimes the lesson is “this was a bad idea.” That is an okay lesson.
Self publishing well is just as easy as self publishing badly. In either case if your work isn't your best it was a waste of time anyway.
Oh, I don't think that's true... I self-publish badly all the time, and the reason I do it that way is because it's too damn much work to self-publish well. Like... I don't do a table of contents or any other fancy formatting, I do hardly any promo, I just make rough guesses at what categories and key words to use, etc. Now, I'm not sure someone publishing something just to get rid of it is going to do any better of a job at any of that than I do, but that doesn't mean a better job couldn't be done, if the person was willing to put the work into it. Self-publishing the way I do it is easy. Self-publishing well is a hell of a lot of work.
I'm sure that when you put it out there though you weren't of the opinion that your work wasnt very good. Keywords and categories you can learn beforehand. If the book isn't good enough you'd have no idea whether you've used the right ones or not anyway because it wouldn't sell in either case.
I think I was using that stuff as an example of how it's harder to self-publish well than to self-publish poorly. I agree that it'll be hard to get a good test of whether you've picked the right ones without having a good book to sell, but one of the big problems I have with self-publishing is that so many people who are writing what seems like crap to me are pretty clearly convinced that their work is wonderful. So... putting out work that you think is great isn't any guarantee that anyone else will think the work is great... The whole thing is pretty hard to really sort through with any definitive conclusions.
Yeah, the first thing I published is my second-best seller (though it hasn't sold much lately), and it was just a short story I wrote to figure out how to self-publish. Which is kind of sad when the books I've published since are much better. This is part of the problem, though: you never know whether something is going to sell until it does. Books I thought would sell well haven't, and books that I didn't think would sell well did. And then there are the days when, for no obvious reason, I suddenly sell five copies of a short story that hasn't sold in a year.
Yup. It makes it pretty hard to actually "learn" anything about self-publishing, except to just cross your fingers, do it, and then do it again...
I self e-pubbed, but I did the best I could with what I had at the time. Though I am shit at marketing, so I don't expect much when I get my sequel out there. But you should if anything else put out the best of what you have, and not just what ever it is at the time you have it finished. Get it beta read if you can, fix the bits that need fixing and editing. Leave it alone for a while, and then decide whether it is worth it to place it on the market. The better you are at marketing and keeping inline with what is trending, the better off your book will do. At least that is what I can tell IMHO. Now I am not going to blow sunshine up anyone's ass, cause I have read plenty of books by both indie and well known authors that have been good, and have been shit. So it would seem that I just happen to have a style preference and have seen well known authors get to comfortable, and lose my interest with their more recent works. Might be due to them not putting in the same level of passion into their later works since they already have a well founded fan base that will read whatever they put out at this point in time, no matter how good or shit it is. (This is just an opinion.) So put out the best that you can, and if you need to fix bits, then go back and clean it up so it is a bit better than that, and put that out on the market in the place of the original.
For me, the initial first draft of "the best I can do" is to get it to the point where I'm not embarrassed to send it out to betas. Then the second draft is the best I can do before submitting it to my publisher. Then the third draft is the best I can do based on the working with my assigned editor. There are a lot of steps and a lot of people I partner with between "the best I can do" to get to the end of my MS and having all of that turned into a book that is available for people to purchase. Even if I self published I'd go the beta and working with a professional editor route, so there would still be a large gap and others involved, - it's not like it's all on me to get it perfect enough for release. Everything I've had published has taken a village to shape into something I think is fair to ask people to pay for.
I think, @Philliggi, that you are saying you have a first draft, that no one else has yet seen, and you are having a crisis in confidence as to whether it is any good. Exactly where I was about halfway through The Eagle and the Dragon, wondering if I had just wasted time on a long, meandering piece of crap. We all feel that way, especially with the first piece. And you will go on feeling that way until you get some positive feedback. You are not yet at a point where you can make ANY decision to either publish it or discard it, because you yourself do not know for sure which is the best course. @BayView comes at this from the point of a highly experienced writer who has published dozens of books, all selling well, some receiving awards. Her confidence level with any new work at this point is probably quite a bit higher than yours. I am a bit closer to you than she is, but I am much more comfortable on my third and fourth books than I was at the end of E&D. Your plan is right on the money. I would caution you in one area, however, and that is to screen your first draft for glaring spelling and grammar mistakes, before you hand it out for review. Reviewers can get really annoyed if the spelling and grammar are so bad they get in the way of the story. Do be careful about selecting friends and family for beta readers. There are a number of threads on this site from writers bemoaning beta readers that never finish the books, give gushing but unhelpful critiques, or alternatively nitpick you to death with minor critiques, or worse yet just say it's a piece of crap without giving any explanation. I recommend you join a local writing group, if you are not in one, and choose your readers from among those who know the craft, or solicit students or faculty at the local community college. You can also solicit betas on this site as well. The reality is you have "first book jitters." We've all been there... even @BayView finished her very first book once, though probably so long ago she can't remember, there have been so many since. Not a dig on your age, @BayView, but admiration of your prolificity! I have as many decades on whatever age you have, as you have books on me. So good luck, and hope you get some good reviews!
I remembering hearing a youtuber by the name of "Shadiversity" once say; "the first you publish will always be crap. Always." And I agree, heck just read my first self published book, because if not because you enjoy it then because you could learn what not to do from it. Add to that, the hardest thing to do when self publishing is actually selling the damn book anyway. You need to hype it up before you've finished writing, heck maybe even before! So no, I personally don't see a problem with you self publishing even if its not good (by everyone's standards), you've gotta put yourself out there.
I don't agree with this at all. I assume the person you're quoting is referring only to self-publishing, but even then, I don't think it's true that the first thing will always be crap. Why would that be true? What's the logic behind the statement?
Oh, I totally agree with you. I hate it when people say that an author's first book is always crap. Because it's not. Learning how to write doesn't necessarily come from writing something 'else.' It can also come from learning to perfect what you've already written. By perfecting, I mean correcting mistakes in story flow and character development, fixing plot holes, learning to pare down or expand dialogue, learning to pick more exact words for what you really mean, etc. Nothing is ever 'perfect' and sooner or later you will want to quit and get published. But that doesn't mean your effort will be 'crap.' I can think of quite a few authors whose first published books are actually my favourites. I buy their second book and sometimes even the third, and feel disappointed. There is something lacking. Hard to say what, but sometimes I think it might be enthusiasm. It's as if they wrote their first book because they wanted to, then the subsequent books because they were expected to. There is a lot to be said for a first book, actually. It can cook for longer in the writer's mind before it gets written. It can be the story they 'always wanted to write.'
I third that statement. From the way I understand it, King was actually pretty good with his first novel, and over time his work turned to shit. So no, a first book isn't necessarily going to be shit, but it is possible that it could be, and over time they get better. However, from some revs I have watched some start out shit, and get way worse the more the follow it.
I'm pretty sure my first book will pan out to be the best thing I'll ever write. It was like catching lightning in a bottle. Everything I've done since then or will ever do is in the effort of living up to that initial first foray into original fiction.
I've read this whole thread top to bottom and I'm no closer to deciding if self publishing is something I would like to one day pursue myself, but I do appreciate the honesty in a comment like this.
@Ben James, I would recommend that if you are young enough to endure the long wait and frustration to land that first good publisher, go traditional. Be prepared to send out hundreds of queries to agents before you get a nibble, then some more before you finally sink the hook. It can take a year or more to get an agent, then a year to two after that before you book is finally on the street. From what I understand (I haven't done this, @BayView has done this very well) it is very satisfying to have a reputable publisher behind you pushing your product for you. They will handle the launch, the marketing, etc. But make sure you have a good publisher, because many small ones have no marketing arm. I have a friend who went with a small one (oddly one that caters to religious publications, which his story was not). Frankly, for the support they gave him, and his sales and ranking, he would have been miles ahead self-publishing. Since they are a religious house, they had him make a lot of relationships quite bland. Early on in my publication quest, he gave me a referral, and in retrospect, their ultimate rejection for too much sex and violence, too many pagan religions (@100AD!), was the best thing that happened to me! I was too old to wait for trad publishing, so after a few months of queries I self-published and I don't regret it. But there is as much work in that route as there is in trad publishing. I spent about 18 months editing my book, seven major revisions, and I don't know haw many minor SPaG checks. That is, I think, the difference between "your first book is always crap" and "Your first book was great". Once you have finished, you have to perfect it, tune it like a racer until it purrs, then it will be great. If you rush it out the door just to see your name and title on Amazon, be prepared to watch it sink to the Amazon ratings basement, with few or poor reviews. And if you go trad, put the same amount of work into it before your first submission, because the agents WANT a reason to reject it... an agent gets hundreds of queries per month, and accepts dozens per year to pursue. If you submit an obviously unfinished product, you are fishing with spoiled bait. I think one of the best compliments I get from strangers leafing through the E&D for the first time is when they ask "Who was your publisher?" and I answer "Me, I self-published." Make your product that good if you go that route. And, once it is out, be prepared to spend some money and a LOT of time advertising it, because the self-publisher also has to self-market. Surprisingly, I have found myself enjoying that part much more than I thought I would. Whichever way you go, good luck!
