Where do you Even Start?

Vanity presses are ubiquitous these days. They look a bit different because of digital but they still do the same things to fleece customers.

Either you are actually published, whether trad or self, or you are vanity published.
THE publisher is THE owner of the ISBN. If you do not own your own ISBN for each book then you did not publish that book. Vanity presses try to finesse that factoid to pretend they are helping you self publish when they are actually vanity publishing your work for you.

Your process above was correct up to the point of soliciting printers. Back then true self publishers got quotes from book publishers. Some tried to get quotes from other printers and ended up overpaying. Binding was usually done separately as it is a different specialized skill from the printing.

You are certainly correct about the marketing.
You have to do it yourself no matter how you are published.

Vanity presses will try to sell you lots of totally useless marketing 'help' which only helps them suck more money out of your wallet. Bookmarks, advertisements, and all the other 'sales' help they offer is useless to your making a profit instead of paying out yet more money.

 

Their marketing support only sucks money from your wallet and into their bottom line.

For books, advertising and marketing are generally useless. One exception is if you can identify a focused audience that gathers in one place to aim ads at.

Whether trad or self pub, you are responsible for your own marketing. So unless you have deep pockets and just want to push your tome at a loss, one has to find other ways to get publicity. Starting with a large social media following is a good start. Word of mouth is great but you have no real control over that happening. Reviews are useful, but nearly impossible to get legitimate ones; unless you pay for reviews , and then you are back in the Vanity Press syndrome paying for things that have little value.

 

I suspect Amazon is more likely to try to cancel you than others. Which is why you should publish outsize Amazon and just let them be one channel that distributes your books.

 

I want to emphasize that I chose the word 'some' on purpose. Some genuinely do perform marketing, including sales distribution to the major chains (including selling to Amazon), and conventional advertising and merchandising. The latter would include purchasing shelfspace/endcaps in brick and mortar, or paying for ads on Facebook and Amazon.

This doesn't give the author an exemption from taking on marketing, but my point is that many trad publishers do this work too.

I remain open to trad publishing in my business model, because many do provide value for their percentage. Product development, author development, marketing.

In fact, there's an argument that self publishing through Amazon, and also advertising through Amazon, gives them a larger cut of the author's revenue than a good traditional publisher+agent takes. It's just through a thousand cuts instead of a straight percentage.

 

This does match my estimates, but I'm concerned about the trajectory. Not to dump on Amazon specifically, but the increasing market share was bought through losses that will be reversed once competitors are crushed. It's an old strategy and it works. But in the long run what that means is higher costs. What I'm saying is that the approximately similar share going to the house is temporary. We can expect the platforms to leverage their monopolies in due time.

Absolutely, but there's an analogy in self publish, which is that there's a delay to accumulate the up front investment money in the first place (for editing, cover art, &c), to build the skills, and get experienced enough to get cashflow positive. It's possible the annualized returns over, say the first two years, are the same. After that, it's more consistent through both processes.

Basically, I'm not saying that there is a 'right' way to get published, but I wanted to reality check the bias against traditional publishing being characterized as an industry that is just taking money from authors and offering nothing.

Authors are all over the map in terms of their personal circumstances. Consider my situation as an example: Writing is my long term career change goal, but not an urgent side gig. I have a day job and family that takes up the bulk of my week, leaving me snips and snails for writing. I appreciate my agent and publisher taking hours of work off my plate, and can afford to wait, with an eye to making more money later.

I was told a pithy quote about trad vs self by one of the local publishers in town: she said that it came down to whether the author has more time or more money.

If nothing else: the long term returns seem to be comparable, and I want to diversify my business model to mitigate the risk of supplier consolidation.