Is there any mid-ground between (greedy dying) traditional publishing, and lonely self-publishing?

Cafe Society
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This article:
The Inevitable Death of Traditional Book Publishers
says that traditional publishing is dying, partly because the big publishers exploit the writer, giving them “10% royalty for print sales and 25% royalty for eBook sales”. I mean why give away 75-90% of your sales if you can do it yourself? It says “Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Ingram, and indie bookstores” all work with self-published writers, you don’t need deals. Sounds great, but, this article:
Should You Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish?
lists certain pros of traditional publishing, including getting media attention, seeing your book in actual bookstores, and getting on a bestseller list (e.g. New York Times).

Are there any balanced, sensible solutions if I’m:
A) penniless
B) scared chickensh** to try to do this on my own
C) don’t want to give away 75-90% of my sales??
D) need some basic professional hand-holding?

Thanks for any help! :slight_smile:

2

It’s depends entirely on what you plan to publish and the marketing you can do for yourself.

First, you need to stop thinking generically. There is no such thing as a “book.” There are only types of books, each a specialized field unto themselves. Advice for one is probably not worth much of anything for others.

Certain genres of fiction, notably romance and f&sf, have enormous internet presences. You can network yourself through a variety of sites, writers groups, reviewers pages, and fan enthusiasts. Other types of fiction, including standard literary fiction, also have developed these but not to the same extent.

Nonfiction is considerably harder. If you are an expert in a specialty subject you need to start by checking out the sites devoted to that subject. Otherwise you will need some credentials to get noticed.

It would help for you to decide what you expect out of publishing your book. Most books don’t sell very many copies and don’t make you much money. First books almost never get any attention no matter how they are published. Do you want to make a living as a writer? Do you plan to write full-time or is this a side job or hobby? If you write fiction, do you write fast enough to put out many books in a short period of time so that people come to know who who are? Are you willing to give away your early work for free to gain fans? How long will you give yourself to get established? What will you do in the meantime?

Writing is a big field. The differences internally are as great as becoming a psychiatrist after ten years of schooling or being an EMT after a course. Both are valuable but the time, money, and planning involved are wildly different. There are zillions of places online that talk about what’s involved with the various aspects of writing. Study them and see what fits you, your needs, and your intentions.

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Moved to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

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100% of 100 sales is not better than 12% of 16000 sales.

It’s very easy to self-publish, but extremely difficult to make much money or have much in sales. OTOH, it’s extremely difficult to break into major publishing, but you always make money and have more people reading your work.

But the cheapest way to get published - both in money and in time involved - is publishing with a traditional publisher, especially for fiction (nonfiction is different).

BTW, the reason publishers are getting self-publishing imprints is that it’s a cash cow: they cover their costs by charging the author and don’t have to sell a single book. You’re paying them to work for them.

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Nowadays, it’s very hard to get a traditional publishing deal, and even harder to get one from one of the big publishers. And even if you do, you won’t get the big marketing budgets, the big advances, and other things more successful authors enjoy.

I’m biased, because I’m a self-published author who’s making a success of it (I quit my day job in January to go full-time writing). Self-publishing isn’t that expensive–you’ll have to pay for editing (unless you know a good editor who’ll work cheap/free), and you need to get a good, professional cover (don’t design your own or let a friend do it unless you/they have pro-level skills–it will tank your book). But the actual act of putting your book out there is free–and you get 70% royalties on books $2.99 and over. That’s a hell of a lot better than you’d get from trad.

You might sell more with trad–initially. But they don’t flog your book forever. They put it out there for 90 days or so, and if it doesn’t sell, they move on to the next thing. Which isn’t a good thing for you, because now they own your rights and they can do what they like with your book. Including sit on it. You can’t sell books if they’re not available.

I know self-pubbed authors who are bringing in 5, 6, and 7 figures a month with their books. Seriously. One of the Facebook groups I’m on has several 6-figure-a-month authors, and a whole lot who are in the 3, 4, and 5 range (I’m currently at 4 moving toward 5). Do your research, put out a good product, market it well, and you’ve got a decent chance of making a success of it.

squish7, is your book fiction or non, and if it’s fiction, what genre? Some genres (like romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and thrillers) are a lot more self-pub friendly than others. I don’t have any experience with nonfiction, so I can’t offer any suggestions there.

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You really need to read this, this, and this. Also this. And this.

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Self publishing is great in three categories

  1. You’ve established yourself, have a following, and can sell without a traditional publisher’s marketing department.
  2. Your book is so niche that you know pretty much everyone who will be interested.
  3. Your subject matter is so out there (the aliens are here) that you know no traditional publisher will touch you.

My wife was a judge in a writing contest, and got a big box of books, many self published. I helped by looking at the sf ones. Remember that these books were from people who cared enough to submit them. Over half were awful - with obvious typos, bad craft, bad grammar, and giant gaps in logic.
If you look at the statistics, there are a few books that do quite well, but there is a long tail of books which sell under 100 copies. Not worth it since even self-publishing has costs, like the cover. Not a lot of money, but something.

PR is good, but no guarantee. A guy in one of my critique groups published a memoir about growing up in Rhode Island. He was an excellent marketer, and even got on local radio there. The books are still in his garage.
A traditional publisher will give you an advance, which is more than most self-published books make, and might sell to libraries etc.
So, OP, has anyone besides a friend or relative looked at your book? Have you been to a critique group? Got a professional editor to look at it? Because the one thing traditional publisher brings to readers is some assurance that the book is not total garbage. You may or may not like it, but there are some quality standards.

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I thought I recognized your name. Squish, how’s the movie business turned out? screenwriter segregation / where to submit movie framework with various finished parts - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

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Infovore, could you give you some details about your book genre, rate of production, how you got to your current level of success, and how long it took?

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Hm. I was just recently thinking that I hadn’t noticed Stranger on a Train in a while. Seeing his presence in that trainwreck of a thread led me to checking–more than a month since last posting. Hope it is just a silent flounce.

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My book genre is Urban Fantasy. I published book 1 in March of 2015 and had pretty good success with it right away ($1-2K/month initially). Here’s my Amazon page, showing my 11 current books (I publish on a 3-month schedule, which I could do because I had several books in backlog before I published my first one). I also sell on Kobo, iBooks, and Barnes and Noble, though I’m considering going Amazon-only (most indie UF books are, and the authors I’ve talked to say they make a significant chunk of their money there). I’ve been doing audiobooks in earnest starting a few months ago–I did the first one with a different narrator, who did a great job but had major scheduling issues. My new narrator does about a book a month.

I advertise on Facebook, and I’ve been slowly building a mailing list which now has about 5,000 people on it. I also have two Facebook fan groups (one official, one more for fun stuff).

If you have other questions, post 'em here or PM me, and I’ll try to answer.

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Congratulations on your success, of course. Hopefully, the OP will notice that you tick off all the boxes I mentioned above. You write in a favored genre, you write series, you put out books quickly, you had several titles ready to go, and you started in an established universe. From your profile, being a gamer meant you also had experience in the field before writing your first novel, so you weren’t taking a stab in the dark.

Oh. And presumably you’re also a good writer. That should go without saying, but I’ve been in SFWA since 1975 and I stopped taking that for granted many decades ago. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I didn’t write in an established universe–my universe is all mine. The only established-universe stuff I did was the Shadowrun novel (and many bits of sourcebooks) and I’ve got another one coming out in early 2019. But yes, you make good points.

Well, I can’t comment on whether I’m a good writer or not–but I do have quite a few fans who look forward to my books, so I guess that’s something. :slight_smile: (I’m in the SFWA too, but only for the last year or so–they accept self-pub writers now if they can prove an income threshold.)

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I misread the line “Her first novel in the Shadowrun universe,” as being your first novel, interpolating a “was”.

SFWA has finally, painfully, begun to catch up with the present, a process accomplished mainly by distancing itself from the Old Farts who have been around since, you know, 1975.*

  • I’ll pat myself on the back because I was on the right side in that war, and in fact had been screaming since the turn of the century that SFWA needed to be more like the Romance Writers and modernize their models.
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My mother is a best selling author in her (non-fiction) genre. She has 4 books published by major publishers. That may sound great but, I asked her about the money, and there is relatively little through through bookstore and Amazon sales. She makes roughly $1 a book after it is all said and done. She could have easily made more more mowing yards for all the time and effort they took.

However, it isn’t about the books themselves at least for her. She is a professional speaker and uses them to promote her speeches because that is where the real money is. She also sells her books directly for much more profit after the speeches. It is similar to music industry. Most bands don’t make much money at all from album sales once the big labels have their way with them but the artists need them to promote tours because that is where the big money is.

Things may be different for someone that has a vision for The Great American Novel but publishing is a business like any other and some people still use it to their advantage even if the benefits are indirect.

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Yeah. I have a lot of friends who are gaming writers, and I watched the recent hoopla as SFWA decided whether to consider game writing to be worthy of membership. I’m glad they finally decided to do the right thing, though surprisingly a lot of my game-writing friends are fairly cynical about the whole thing.

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This is anecdotal, of course, but I’ve been enjoying Infovore’s books. :wink:

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Very helpful information as always, guys, thanks!!

I wasn’t intending to get into my specific project (it’s not finished), but here goes anyway (no need to comment on this if you’re not in the mood, I’m just throwing it out, what the hell). This is nonfiction; the closest thing that exists to it might be a LARP rule set (Live Action Role Playing) (see here for a great video series on LARPs) except that this is much more versatile than a specific fantasy setting or whatnot. It can be used by anyone, to “graft” any fictional reality on top of just about any activity we already do, from kids in their back yard imaginging there are aliens, to turning heavy athletics into games akin to action movies, improvisation that can even help turn people into actors, or at least play out scenes that people might even want to watch. (LARPs are mostly for fantasy stuff, there’s not much for like freerunners to roleplay like action movies or whatnot).

This system will also help prepare people for the full coming of Mixed Reality (MR). (See this and this great videos!) With MR, we’ll soon basically look around us in our real-life space and see/hear just about anything that can be seen/heard by the human eye/ear, and even heavily interact with the objects. We can even interact with people anywhere in the world, as they can appear as holograms just as if we’re in the same room. We’ll soon more or less be in the Matrix or Inception, except we can only see, hear and interact with the holograms, but not feel/touch/smell/taste them, as obviously they don’t create actual physical matter. So, if we have tech-free LARP systems (many already exist) that already bring us into a fictional world, it becomes very easy to bring in MR to those systems and actually see/hear/interact what we’re already imagining is there.

Also, for people who evolve these types of games extremely well and in-depth, like in the way of professional actors and professional special effects, we can actually record people’s games/roleplays/etc and this can be a source of actual mainstream movies/shows. And even if you’re not recording your sessions, if the MR is good, it can still feel like you’re inside a movie. You guys taught me a lot in the 2014 thread about how my stuff wouldn’t really fit in with traditional filmmaking processes **(I’m sorry if I was a bit argumentative in that thread) **so this is a bit of an example of where I get creative and actually develop new ways of doing things instead of trying to fit into pre-established frameworks.

As for a more direct/concrete method I’m designing to do film in a different way (largely unrelated to the above project), I’m working abstractly on an online system of video/film collaboration. Basically it’s a YouTube where people upload very versatile “scene-modules” of video/film that can be combined with other scene-modules people upload, to form very strictly coherent plot lines, so you log on and watch (maybe even pay to watch) e.g. some 90-min string of these scenes which if things are done right, plays very similarly to a 90-min linear movie with a coherent plot line and character development, etc. I’m not describing it perfectly so please don’t go slaughtering and lynching the idea as I’ve roughly described it, that’s just not fair. Saying things like “well, that sounds like crap to me” are just arrogant, childish, foolish attitudes, no matter how much experience you have. That’s not all of you, but it’s the attitude some of you hand me sometimes. Again I’m sorry for being over-argumentative in that thread.

A lot of your advice/information is extremely useful, and it’s kind of you to offer it, and I do appreciate it very much, but if you’re going to do it please do it politely and constructively like an adult, thanks :-).

I’m not per se asking for advice about anything in this post but feel free to comment if you want! You sort of asked :frowning:

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might I ask which shadowrun novel ? I read something like the first 50 …

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Soooooo, squish. You want to create Mad Libs / clip art movies? (Checks, not in the pit.) Uh, that is sure to work out well for you!