I picked you up wrongly, then. I thought that's what you meant when you said: I have a ready-made audience for them who I KNOW will pay more money for the books, thus getting me nearly as much for one sequel as I got for two 99 cent books. It sounded to me as if you were expecting most people who bought your first book to also buy your subsequent books. Instead, you must have meant it would be easier to market the sequels (in various formats) to the folks who liked your first book? I don't argue with that at all. You certainly will have a ready-made audience who will want to know what happens next. However my point was there is no guarantee it will be as large an audience as your original one was. And you're unlikely to pick up enough new readers with a sequel to make up the difference. Most people don't like starting a story in the middle. I know I bought the first two Harry Potter books, then lost interest. I bought the first four Song of Ice and Fire books, then lost interest. I read about half of the first Outlander book and threw it in the bin! Just because people try out a series at the start doesn't mean they'll automatically stick with it. That was my only point, really. I wasn't having a go at you, or at your hopes for success.
You continue to ignore the risk of contaminating the market with a bad version of a promising book. Do you disagree that this is a risk?
Yes, I meant the latter. I know that people who liked the first book and asked me if there would be a sequel will buy the second and pay more for it. A new book may or may not draw an audience but if I take that year writing a new book instead of the sequel, I give up on the interest that I know exists in the sequel.
I did address it. I'm comparing situations where you have professional-quality products to market. If you put out a bad version of a promising book, or send that bad version out to traditional publishers, I think the result is going to be the same - you're not going to get much interest in it. So, yes, it is always a risk that people will put out unprofessional products, but that's not relevant to the relative advantages of pursing a hybrid model when you have a good product.
No, the result is not going to be the same, because the publisher won't provide that bad book to the world. They'll quietly say, "Really? No way." and that will be that. You can then go on to improve it and try again. Are you saying that if you publish a very bad book, and then you work and work and work and improve that bad book, and submit the improved version to the publisher, and let the publisher know (because you have to confess that they won't get first publication rights) that the book was out there for a few months or years in poorly edited state for $.99/copy, that that bad book won't make ANY DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER to whether the improved version will be accepted for publication? None? Not a bit? Not a scrap?
Hi Chicken / Steer, You're arguing at cross purposes. There are pros and cons to both self publishing and going trade. But the bottom line is if you produce shoddy unfinished / unedited etc work, you get nothing either way. No publisher is going to offer you a contract, and you may sell a few copies as an indie, but it's very unlikely to be anything to write home about. At this stage for most newbie writers, going indie is the better route in terms of income. Yes you probably won't earn much - but you can learn from your mistakes. Trying to get a trade deal is most likely not going to happen by a considerable margin - so you will earn nothing. And more importantly since most agents either give you no responce or a form responce, you will learn nothing either. Readers at least give you feedback even if it's only complaints. To give you some idea of the massive hill someone who wants to go trade has to climb, there was an agent who reported signing two out of six thousand submitters in a year. I posted that thread somewhere. The risks in terms of damaging your name are much the same both ways. Submit bad work to agents, they'll get to know you and won't even open your envelope in time. Post it to readers, expect the same treatment. I'd also mention Skoda with regards to reputation. Thirty / forty years ago my father had one. It was a cruddy yellow bomb that broke down more often than it ran. In fact Skoda was a byword for crap. Now look at Skoda - winning prizes, becoming a prestige brand. You can damage your reputation and still repair it if you're willing to put in the time and effort. But where it gets interesting is when you compare authors who are putting out quality product. Books, covers and blurbs in the case of those going indie, just the books for those trying for trade. Now here the ones trying to go trade are still unlikely to get contracts though their odds have considerably improved - maybe it's one in fifty instead of one in three thousand (pure guesswork I admit) but the ones who go indie will sell some books. Maybe they won't be the next King, but hey they won't be sitting at home either sending off letter after letter to agents for ten years. And yes, you can sell well as an indie without marketing. I do and I don't market. (And I also fail to do all the established things that should help me sell more such as writing series / trilogies / sequels or sticking to one genre or even writing in better selling genres.) But there's one more thing to remember about the argument. These days agents come knocking at the doors of established indies. Forget outliers like The Martian and Fifty Shades. Think simply good indies with good products. Establish yourself as an indie with some sales and good reviews and your chances of getting a trade deal go up. They become far better than those of a newbie because you aren't submitting as a nobody - and in many cases you aren't submitting at all. In some ways, and I know this will hurt those who desperately want to get a dream trade contract and will submit forever in desperation and can't hear anything else, your best chance of getting your contract is to start out indie. Cheers, Greg.
Again, all of this presupposes that the author is going to self-publish a bad book. Plenty do, but that's not the situation I'm talking about. If you have a bad book, you shouldn't send it out to publishers or self-publish it. If you have a good book, I think the hybrid model is a good approach, particularly now that having gone that route doesn't cut off your traditional options. Seems like there are a few ways it could work out: 1. The self-publishing fails and no traditional publisher wants the book. Ok, you failed. The book is out there, maybe you have a handful of sales on Amazon, but it's going nowhere. 2. The self-publishing does well and no traditional publisher wants it. In this case, it's a good thing you went this route. 3. The self-publishing doesn't do well, but you manage to place the book with a traditional publisher regardless. You haven't done yourself any real harm, in all likelihood. You'll have to remove your self-published version from the market. Maybe, though this is speculative, the publisher wants to give you less of an advance because they don't get first rights. The way most advances are, I don't think this would be significant enough to be a big risk. If the book warrants a huge advance, you're not likely to suffer for this, particularly if publishers are bidding (which they probably will be if it warrants a huge advance). 4. Self-publishing and traditional publishing both do well. You end up having to remove the self-published version from the market, or else negotiate to retain electronic rights for the work (if you can). You haven't hurt yourself, and have likely done better than you would have going straight to traditional publishing. The only thing you've been able to fall back on to sustain your argument is the idea that bad authors releasing bad books aren't going to do well, or that they somehow might poison their ability to progress later when their abilities approve. I find the latter speculative and think it probably isn't going to be accurate in most instances. As for the former, yes that is what will happen. So, don't release bad books. If you've written a bad book, keep it to yourself. If you have a good product that can find an audience, go with the hybrid approach.
@psychotick Yes, Greg, I think what you've said in your post is accurate. It seems to me like a sensible business decision to proceed that way. I think it is going to be more and more common as time moves forward, particularly as the stigma around self-publishing (which seems to me to be a historical artifact) continues to fade away.
And how do you know it's bad? By...having it rejected? By having it fail? Most people don't have a magic crystal ball that tells them that a book is good or bad. What's the best way for that bad book to fail? Scenario One: An agent is trying to decide between five quite good books. Four of them have never been pubished; the publisher would get first publication rights, and the publisher would be able to market the new and unknown author from a blank slate. The fifth has been self-published in a quite badly-edited version, and failed miserably, before the author went on to turn it into a quite good book. Is the agent going to say, "Wow! This one has been out in the market, and it failed! And the author has a little bit of name recognition as a lousy writer! Woo HOO! This is the one I want to represent!" Yeah? Scenario Two: The previous bad incarnation of the book was one of thousands of submissions to a few agents, most of which will have been forgotten minutes after opening and rejection. Is the agent going to say, "Hmmm. This is a fine book, never published, from an unknown author. But I'm going to search all of my archives, and have all of my colleagues search their archives, to see if this author ever wrote anything lousy. Because we know that there is no learning process for an author; that idea that they submit a few times, and improve, and finally learn what's good? Pffft. That's just a rumor. Every author knows exactly how good his work is, from the moment that he sits down to write his first word." Yeah?
@ChickenFreak you're still talking about a completely separate issue. You're focusing on authors putting out bad stuff or having an inability to determine whether their work is bad. I don't know of another way to point out that I'm not referring to those situations. I said, above, quite specifically that I'm not referring to them. If you want to have a conversation about authors putting out bad works, or how an author can know that their work is bad or what steps they should take to avoid publishing bad works, I think that's an important topic of discussion. It's not really relevant to what I'm talking about, because I'm talking about the comparative benefits of both paths of publishing when you've got a good product in hand.
Again: You have a book. It could be good. It's not good yet. You don't know if it's good enough for publication and/or you do think it's good enough for publication. You're behaving as if the above is a situation true of a tiny percentage of authors. I think that it's a situation true of the vast, vast majority of not-yet-traditionally-published authors. Starting with that situation, is it better to: - Hand it to the world, so that EVERYBODY knows that you wrote a lousy book? - Hand it to some people who will evaluate it in private? You are concerned with the small minority of writers that are correct in thinking that their book is good. I am concerned with the majority of writers that are either deluded, or not sure. I am concerned with keeping that majority from throwing their books away. I'm not interested in the minority case that interests you.
As I mentioned previously, a self-published author needs to go through a professional editing process. Those editors are going to be able to answer those questions for you if you can't do it yourself, particularly if you have a developmental editor (which you need if you can't do it yourself or are uncertain). And before you even get to that stage, you should have good people providing input on the work as beta readers etc. I'm looking at it from a business perspective, and when I work with people launching a business you've got to look at whether the product is good, their business plan, what professional services they need, etc. If their product is bad, they don't have a plan, and they refuse to do what is necessary to make the product good (or even find out whether it is bad), then you say "Don't go into business." It doesn't matter what path they choose, they're not going to succeed. When you're looking at a choice of publishing options, you've got to be at the stage where you have a professional product. If you don't have that yet, you shouldn't be thinking of either of them. Counseling unprepared, or unskilled writers not to waste their time is a step before what I'm talking about, and it applies to both sets of authors. The decision about what route to take should come into play only when you've got a good product, and there are ways of ensuring you have one (and finding out if you don't) if an author is willing to make use of them.
This is approximately how I'm seeing the above: "It's unwise to allow a small child to pet a dog while he's eating." "Oh, there's no down side." "Sure, there is. Dogs can get territorial about their food. The dog could attack the child." "Oh, I'm presupposing a well-bred and well-trained dog." "But tons of people buy dogs of unknown origin and barely train them at all. You can't assume that. Your presupposition is the minority case." "Counseling people to buy a well-bred dog and train it is a step before what I'm talking about." When you say that there's no down side to self-publishing, and that statement is based on a large body of other information, then that other information should at the very least be alluded to.
I think maybe a better way to sum up is that you appear to be arguing that the low barriers to entry into self-publishing, and consequent bad decisions by people to enter the market when they shouldn't, just because it is easy, makes the self-publishing or traditional route a bad choice for people who are ready and have good products. I don't agree that those dots should be connected like that. EDIT: posted this before seeing your post from moments before.
So, let me qualify it in this way: if you're a good writer with a professional product in hand, your best bet these days is to take the hybrid approach rather than pursuing traditional publishing exclusively.
I would add, "But keep in mind that the market has a memory, so you need to be very sure that your product is good before you take the step of releasing it to the public." If that were added, I would still think that self-publishing is a bad idea, but I would be closer to, "It's going to be a viable alternative someday, and somebody has to take the early risks." rather than "Oh, dear God, NO!"
True, the market does have some memory, though you can always publish under a pseudonym if you're really worried about it. But regardless, I agree that you have to make certain you have a good product. If you have a good product, I don't see a down side to going both routes, because it doesn't seem like one negatively impacts the other much these days. You have the first rights issue, but I think that's going to be minimal in most cases, for the reasons stated above. If a publisher really wants a book, that won't stop them. The agent I spoke to about my book said as far as she was concerned, the prior self-publication status of the work wasn't an issue. There are doubtless some for whom it is an issue, but certainly not all. At least, not what I'm hearing. And I go back to my friend who got a contract with Harper Voyager for multiple books based on her first one (which was self-published). They didn't care that they couldn't get first rights, they just wanted her to take the self-published version down during contract negotiations and leave it down (of course). No big deal. But she had a good product. If you don't, then you're not doing yourself any favors by rushing to publish.
I'm not confident that first publication rights have absolutely no value for a traditional publisher. If they do have non-zero value, then there is a potential down side to self-publishing, that needs to be balanced by some up side. But that's the issue with a lot of these things--the assumption that the publisher "really wants" the book, that they'll make sacrifices for it. I don't want a publisher to have to make sacrifices to accept my book; I want my book to be as valuable a package as possible for a publisher. Books don't earn that much money; if I make decisions that take some dollars out of the publisher's side, I believe that I'm reducing my odds. And right now, I don't think that the odds of success in self-publishing are high enough to make that sacrifice worth it--especially by my definition of success. Self-publishing is waiting for someone to solve the review problem. If and when that happens, it will change utterly. But I don't see it happening yet.
This brings up an interesting related issue with respect to readers identifying work as self-published. If you have a professional title, and it looks, on the screen, equivalent to a big, traditional publishing job, are many readers scrolling down to see who the publisher is? I know I have done it on more than one occasion, just out of curiosity (I use the sample to decide whether to buy), but I wonder if your average reader will scroll down to look. And if the self-published author has an entity name that they use to publish their own books, I wonder, with the number of imprints these days, how many readers will realize it is self-published. The way I can usually tell is the cover is crap, or the sample is so bad it can't possibly be traditionally-published. If those two factors are otherwise equal, do you think the average Kindle purchaser does much looking to see if a traditional publisher is behind the book? I have no idea what the answer to that is.
I suspect that most of the time, the evidence of self-publishment is apparent, and the potential buyer confirms it by scrolling down and checking. That's what I do; if the book didn't give me that vibe, I probably wouldn't check. It doesn't appear that I have ever purchased a self-published book due to this not-noticing combined with not-checking, but I'm not a good data point, because I tend to find new fiction authors by browsing in stores, and only after discovering them am I likely to buy them online. With the exception of some previously traditionally published novels whose rights reverted to the author, I have yet to find a novel that actually looked really and genuinely good, fit my interests, and was self-published, so I don't know if the mere fact of being self-published would be enough to put me off it. I have found a few self-published nonfiction books that were never traditionally published, looked really and genuinely good, and fit my interests. I bought them and regretted it. I'm not buying another one for at least two years.
Hi Chicken, Why don't you go to Amazon Kindle, find whatever genre / category you're interested and scroll down the first few trieves of results when you search it. It varies but last I heard roughly half of them are self published - and it's hard to spot which are which. Then do a look inside. Chances are they are all of similar quality. Cheers, Greg.
from @psychotick That's a very interesting angle to this issue. I don't know if this is happening with any regularity yet, but why not? If I were an agent, this approach would certainly appeal to me. I'd get to see the way authors present themselves beyond the query letter, and get to read a good-sized sample of a finished book as well. It would take up more time than beasting through query letters at the rate of 50 per half hour, but would also SAVE time, in that an agent would have a better idea of what they'd actually be getting if they took that author on. Awaiting developments.... The perverse devil in me loves the vision of agents submitting query letters to authors! What goes around comes around? I agree with @ChickenFreak about the online review issue. It's major. It's got to the point that I hesitate to offer a 5-star review of any book, simply because lots of people are going to assume I'm a pal of the author. I've often wondered if it might be worth while for indie authors to send a paper copy of their self-published books to newspapers or magazines for book reviews. I have often bought new books based on these reviews. According to my husband who worked for two of the biggest Scottish daily papers before his retirement, the review department receives books for review. It doesn't seek them out. You'll only lose the price of a book if you take that route, and it might be worth a try. If your book catches a reviewer's eye, it might result in a great deal of valuable publicity. The review will be unbiased and can be trusted to reflect the reviewer's true opinion. This also means it might be somewhat negative, but these journalists don't review books that they think are crap, unless they are substandard books from an already-established author. The one thing that bothers me about self-publishing and eBooks is the strangle-hold Amazon has on this activity. If Amazon were to suddenly change their policy in some major way, a lot of authors who are currently dependent on them would be out of luck, unless some other mega company fills the breach. It would need to be a service that reaches nearly every household in the world, like Amazon does. That's scary. It feels foolish, in a way, to trust Amazon and Kindle too much. Having said that, traditional bookstores are also a dying breed. More are closing down than opening up, at least where I live. Ditto libraries. We are on a cusp of change at the moment. How people read as well as what they read is in flux. So why not try @Steerpike's approach and explore all avenues while we still can? Makes sense to me.
I did that maybe eighteen months ago for murder mysteries. I had to go out of my way to find the self-published ones because they didn't come up high in the searches, and the samples...shudder. But the self-publishing world changes fast. I could try the experiment again.
