Q. Can I build a writing career by self-publishing and self-promoting my work? I've just read sixty-seven online articles (fifty-three of them by M. J. Rose) that say self-publishing is the hot new thing.
A. There's about a book's worth of stuff I could say on this subject. If you want to read the full-length version of that book, you can compile it yourself out of the comments I've posted at AW. Meanwhile, the shorter version:
If by "career" you mean "a long-term day job that pays part of all of the bills," the answer is no.
There's nothing illegitimate about self-publishing. If you're publishing poetry, or your grandfather's WWI memoirs and sketchbooks, or a catalogue of antique Victorian glass epergnes, it's probably the right way to go. It'll get your work printed and bound. What it won't do is get your book onto brick-and-mortar bookstore shelves, or persuade strangers to read your fiction. Being available on Amazon is not enough. To make those things happen, you need a publishing company that has a real distribution deal and a real sales force.
You may have heard a piece of pseudo-logic that goes like this: "These days, publishers don't have the resources or the desire to promote books that aren't by bestselling authors or celebrities. Smaller authors have to do their own promotion. Therefore, since you're going to have to do your own promotion anyway, you might as well self-publish and keep more of the revenue."
It's hogwash. I don't care who said it or where you read it. It's still hogwash. Publishers do too promote smaller books. More to the point, they promote them in ways you can't duplicate no matter how hard you try. Nothing you can do on your own can take the place of a real distribution system and a trained sales force.
A word about promo: The ads you see for bestsellers are there to inform readers
who already know they want the book that it's now available in stores. Books about celebrities are a special case: the public may not already know it wants to read that particular book, but it already knows it wants to read about that person. Buying comparable ads for smaller books would be a waste of money. Think about it: how many books by authors you've never read before do you buy because you see ads for them? Zero or close to it, right? Publishers know that. Their sales and promotion efforts for smaller books gets used in places where it will actually do some good.
Some sad truths:
- Most author self-promotion is wasted effort, especially if it's in support of a self-published book.
- Most authors who self-promote do what they do because they can do it, not because it's what's needful or effectual to sell their book.
- A press release not accompanied by a copy of the book is useless.
- A book that looks like it's self-published is unlikely to get picked for a review.
- If you can write good cover copy, you should be making money doing it. Good copywriters are rare. If you can't write good copy, your book is going to be handicapped from the start and stay handicapped thereafter.
- The major review venues won't review your book if they don't get an advance copy months before the publication date.
- You can't get chain bookstore placement by talking to your local branches.
- Most bookstores won't take your books if your publisher doesn't take returns.
- Getting your book onto mass-market racks is such an expert and arcane process that I'm not even going to try to explain it.
- "Leveraging social media to sell your book" is wishful thinking. Do you spend time hanging out on social media sites? If so, how much of that time is spent talking about books you haven't read by authors you haven't previously heard of? And if you do get into such conversations, how often do they lead you to buy books? Whatever your answer, assume the general public is even less likely to buy books on that basis.
- Your friends' five-star Amazon reviews of your book are less convincing than you imagine.
- Even if lightning strikes, you get stupendously good word of mouth, and everyone who reads your book tells all their friends they have to have to read it too, your book will not develop serious sales traction. POD and short-run vanity presses are not set up to produce and ship books in the quantities and at the speed required.
- All the effort you put into selling your unsaleable book will be time taken away from writing a better one.
Really short version: if what an individual author can do were enough to sell a book, conventional publishers wouldn't be doing all that other stuff.
Here's another problem that people have only recently started to talk about. Readers are unbelievably sensitive to the semiotics of cover illustration and design. If you don't get it right, most of them won't touch your book. In fact, they're so sensitive that if a conventional publisher gets things a little bit wrong on a book by an established author, readers may not touch that book, either.
Readers are even more sensitive to books that remind them of past disappointments, and many of them have learned to spot a self-published POD title from fifty yards away. Since so many POD books are major crapfests -- don't look at me like that; you've thought the same yourself -- many readers now refuse to touch
any POD books, period. You can't get past that. You don't control the color saturation on the cover, the thin, scruffy lamination, or the inexpertly kerned type. Your book will be held to account for the sins of every bad self-published book that reader has encountered.
It's not fair, and there's no help for it. We are all at the mercy of the readers.
Now for the numbers. Your best single source is this article by Victoria Strauss
on POD sales statistics. Read the whole thing. It'll only take you a fraction of the time you'd otherwise spend sitting around trying not to look desperate at a single low-yield book signing. There are also a couple of interesting discussions of Victoria's article at How Publishing Really Works, on
POD sales statistics in general and
iUniverse sales statistics.
Upshot: Most POD titles sell fewer than 200 copies total, most of them to family and friends. I strongly suspect that many self-published authors spend more money on useless "promotion" than they ever earn from sales.
While you're looking at those articles about sales figures, keep an eye on these publishing outfits' ratios of total number of authors to total number of titles published. What that tells you is roughly how many of their authors only published one book with them. Answer: most of them.
Even if you reject every other argument about self-publishing, this one inconvenient fact still remains: there's a terrible attrition rate among self-published authors. A substantial majority of them stop trying to publish their work after the first book. Why? We don't know for sure. It could be cynicism, discouragement, exhaustion, loss of self-confidence, or just the fact that they're out trying fruitlessly to sell their first book instead of writing the next one. All we know for sure is that they quit trying.
I defy you to call that a career.