So... How is self-publishing different (or better)?

Tuesday, we discussed exactly what traditional publishing is, how it works from submission to publication, so today it’s time for self/vanity publishing. For our purposes, I’m going to simplify it and call them both self-publishing (really, vanity publishing is just a more expensive version of self-publishing).

How it Works

Essentially, self-publishing is designed to make it easier for an author to get published. In the traditional realm, authors have to keep sending out their manuscripts to various publishers, hoping an editor somewhere out there will read it and like it enough to take it to the board. But in self-publishing, we get to completely skip that whole process.

(Usually, this is where I’d tell you how annoying it is to work with self-publishers, but remember, I’m not doing that in this series. This month is all about the good stuff.)

Self-publishing is great if you’re on a clock, or if you’ve tried it the traditional way and gotten nothing but an endless line of rejections. It’s also a great way to start developing a platform, if your intention is to work with a traditional publisher later on down the line.

But let’s look at the specifics on how it works.

It starts when a writer pays a publisher for the ability to publish the manuscript. Depending on what publisher you go with, those prices will vary. The author becomes the sole person responsible for editing, cover design, marketing, everything. There is no advance royalty, because there is no formal contract of that nature. If you’re working with a publisher like Amazon, sometimes there’s no formal contract at all.

Authors get to maintain all the rights to their work. The copyright goes in their name, once again, but now everything else is also creatively controlled by the author. There’s no reason to worry about not liking your cover design or getting stuck with edits that you don’t like, because you’re responsible for everything. After all, you’re the one paying for it.

Self-publishing allows authors to make their own decisions, to choose where they want to market and what readers they want to reach for in order to create and develop their platform. That’s something authors don’t get with traditional publishing.

I’m not going to lie though. Self-publishing is hard work—but that’s exactly what some authors need. 

If you’re looking to make your writing into a hardcore business, then yeah, maybe self-publishing is for you. If you have the money to throw into your projects, then yeah, self-publishing might be for you. There are some very good things about self-publishing, and it does fill a void in the system. Now there’s nothing to stop authors from getting published, no big business to tell writers they can’t be published.

And yeah, it means that the market is more saturated, but that really just means we all have to work harder to get our work seen—which is what we were already doing, from the start.

Next week, we’ll start getting into the nitty-gritty details.

[love]

{Rani Divine}