Despite most of my time recently being spent feeding/changing/burping/snuggling the baby and much of the rest of it trying my damnedest to get a few hours of sleep I have managed to write a couple of children’s books. I woke up one morning and explained to my husband that I’d had a dream that I had won an award for writing a children’s book. I could still remember the story and as I was telling him about this imaginary book I wrote he looked at me and said, “So write it. Go put it in writing right now so you don’t forget it.”
Well, I did. And it is awesome. It is so awesome that I immediately wrote a second one based on the same main character. I’ve got an idea for a third book but I’ve stopped myself from writing it down right this moment because I’d like to actually do something more with these stories than just tell them to my kid, you know? I’ve looked into the possibility of finding a literary agent and going through a legitimate publisher but that seems unappealing to me. It can take months or years to even find someone who is willing to look at your stuff and once they look at it that doesn’t mean they will publish it for you. If you do find someone to publish it they take an insane percentage of the profit so you only make a few cents a book if you don’t already have a bestseller or two to use as leverage when negotiating your contract. Once they have published your stuff unless they truly believe you will sell a million billion copies they pretty much leave the marketing end of it to you.
My mother-in-law just had a book published and she is dealing with the backlash of all of this stuff right now. She makes 15 cents for every book sold and they have done essentially nothing for her. She has sold about 80 books since September and almost all of those sales have come from either her friends and family or from sales pitches she has made when doing public readings and other promotional stuff she planned on her own. Her publisher and agent have done exactly nothing for her except bind the thing and give her a place to order copies of it. The worst part of this whole mess is that her book is excellent and the entire reason she decided to go through the process of finding an agent and getting this published through an established company is because she thought a team of professionals would be able to sell more copies and do a significant amount of marketing but so far her hopes seem to have fallen pretty flat. I truly believe that if she had it to do over again she would self publish her novel and leave out all the people that aren’t doing anything for her right now.
I’ve done some research and found a few print-on-demand self publishing companies online that seem like they would work. I’m leaning toward CreateSpace but there are other options out there as well. I have a friend who is a professional editor who will look over the books for me. I have a meeting scheduled with a friend of a friend who is an artist looking to expand his portfolio and might be interested in illustrating the books. I’ve looked into affordable ways to create marketing materials, researched copyrighting, come up with almost a dozen promotional ideas, etc., but before I jump too much further into this I’d like to hear from some other people about this process.
Have you ever self published a book? Do you have any recommendations for (or warnings against) a specific publishing site? Am I underestimating the benefit that a legitimate publisher and literary agent could provide?