I pretty much started this blog 12 months ago and announced right up front that much of 2012 was going to be spent getting the right things in the right place - and for the most part, I think I achieved that. There's still some work to be done but most of it is of a personal nature and simple upgrades - figuring that some things might work better if played a different way, but right now that's besides the point. As part of that year of building the site - or 'author house' to give it it's proper name - I thought that 12 months would be more than long enough to make a decision on whether to seek out an agent and therefore a publishing house to call home or to press on alone and publish my own material. In the first of these scenarios, the benefit for me was not actually in the publishing and the 'hey look everybody - xxxx publisher thinks I could be a contender' approval that I carried around with me for a long time, but in the distribution. To put it simply, to get a book published by a decent publisher means that all the hard work (and it is hard work) of getting your product in front of reader's faces, would be done behind the scenes without having to care too much about it. When your books appear on the shelves of Waterstones and all of the high street supermarkets overnight, it's a big deal - I would imagine. That's your product out in the world all over the country, all at the same time. I'm sure that's a great feeling. Maybe we'll come back to that one day.
In the financial stakes in this scenario, here's an extract from the 2006 edition of Self Publishing for Dummies - which whilst a little old now (and I didn't actually buy but instead took a photograph of this page in the bookstore), still has some nuggets of wisdom that are worth a damn:
Major publishers typically pay authors a recoupable advance, plus a pre-determined royalty on book sales as compensation. Writers who self-publish their books, however, must cover all their project's development, printing, distribution, and marketing costs out-of-pocket. The profit potential, however, can be significantly greater. Instead of receiving a 25-cent, 50-cent, or even a dollar royalty for each copy of your book sold, a self-published author can earn 40 to 60 percent of the book's cover price and sometimes even more. So, if your book sells for $15 per copy and you sell just 1,000 copies, the profit is between $6,000 and $9,000.
Conversely, if you're an author whose book is published by a major publishing house, you earn only a 25-cent royalty per book. If that book only sells 1,000 copies, your earnings are a mere $250. As initial sales are generated from your book, you potentially have to repay your outstanding advance to the publisher. (If the book doesn't sell, however, the advance doesn't need to be repaid.) Even if that's been done, your literary agent often takes between 15 and 20 percent of your earnings as his commission. If the major publishing house sells tens of thousands of copies of your book, as the author, you stand to earn a decent income. This, however, doesn't always happen.
Another benefit to self-publishing is that you don't have to wait three to six months to receive royalty checks from the publisher. Authors who have their book published by a major publishing house often have to wait for the money they've earned, but self-published authors tend to be paid a lot faster, especially on copies of the book they sell directly to customers. Self-published authors also aren't subject to a withholding of royalties as a reserve against returns for up to six additional months. As a self-publisher you stand to earn more money per copy of your book sold, but it's also considerably harder, but not impossible, for self-publishers to get distribution in major bookstores.
On this last sentence, at the rate tablets have been selling this year (24.7 million of them were activated on Christmas Day this year - which I look upon as 24.7 million bookshops that have just opened in households across the land) I find that last point somewhat irrelevant now - although make no mistake, it's even harder to get your easily published digital book seen on the pages of amazon and ibooks, but at least you can do something about it instead of sitting at home seething about what a clandestine bunch of motherfuckers WHSmiths are.
Anyway - the point of all this was that I would call myself out on whether to go traditional and seek an agent and a publisher (both of whom are probably more than well aware of how shitty the distribution chain can be already) or do it myself, because not deciding at all meant that I couldn't really say what I thought about either one with 100% conviction. So here goes:
I'm going to do it myself.
There are more than financial reasons behind this - there would have to be. It's sure as hell not a fast track to riches. Assuming I can do the work (the writing) I can feasibly publish a good six books a year about anything I like. Working with a publisher I am likely to release just one and get dropped into a genre I will find it hard to get out of in the future. I don't like that concept. This last year I've spoken to over a dozen authors who, while I might not be able to call them friends yet, are certainly acquaintances, and not one of them has ever said "I am over-the-freaking-moon happy with my publishing deal". Not one. Some are doing OK, some are taking it as it's handed out and rolling with the punches, others are wriggling and wanting out, some are even considering going it alone. In this last example, I think it's a great idea - especially when you've already had some success in the big wide world and don't have to start from absolute zero.
I have to be honest. It's a scary thought - doing it all yourself. I mean, there are probably good reasons why publishers like to pigeonhole their authors. It probably helps a lot in the selling stakes and assists the lazy with where to find you in stores, but looking at it another way, the percentage of authors who make it to the shelves with any promotion worth speaking of are in a teeny tiny percentage. I've read a lot of them. Some are worthy, some are not. Some are still even being pushed off the back of The DaVinci Code - can you believe that? In fact, not even the book itself but more that the cover design is slightly similar to Brown's masterwork. So, in the long term, what the hell huh? How much less of a snowball's chance in hell can I get?
Not very many of these guys ever hit the road to do signings either. Shit, with a reasonable advance, that would be the first thing I'd do with the money. What a great investment in yourself, surely?
So, like I said, time to walk the walk and talk the talk - and there are many things I (or any author) can do for themselves. The 'trick' is to treat yourself how you would want PanMacmillan or Penguin to treat you in an ideal world. Over the next few months, I'm going to post my accumulated knowledge here and be proud to be doing it myself. I'll let the public decide if I fall into the 'holy shit, this is great' or the 'as I suspected, just another self published author of averageness' category. It doesn't really matter - take a look at any product reviews on amazon for the best authors in the world and you'll still find a split in opinion. That's what you buy into when you play the internet game - everyone's a critic.
To wrap up, I'm looking to build a writing career. Period. I don't want to put my trust in bean counters who may one day need to cull or recoup. I don't want to put my trust in a project manager whose idea of a great cover is not the same as mine. I've read constantly for over forty years now - I think I know a good cover when I see one. Neither do I want to believe in a promise that I'll be a priority when I'm not - nobody can promise me that except myself (and sometimes even I just want to kick back and watch cheap TV for five minutes). The bigger question in the scheme of things for me has always been - if you get dropped from your publishing house (much as a band can get dropped from their record label), what other big publisher is going to look at you twice knowing a competitor couldn't make it work?
So let's see what happens.
Footnote: the only big change I'm going to make here (if you've been following progress so far) is that I don't like my self created 'publisher brand' of Twin Earth that I created. So I'll be changing that soon. Not that it matters to you. Just dotting the i's and crossing the t's...
Footnote 2: It's now 4.22 am. Have laid in bed listening to Bill Bryson touring this Small Island for over an hour, so have decided to not sleep but instead get back up and work on said 'publisher brand'. Is this how it's going to be?
