Self-Publishing, Does it Actually Work?

his post is in response to a comment from C-Check on my AWP post.

As I understand it, like anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to both self-publishing and publishing through a publishing house. Self-publishing is a method of publishing that rose as a backlash to the increasing difficulty of getting a manuscript published by a publishing house. Many publishing houses these days won’t even accept unsolicited manuscripts–manuscripts without a literary agent, or manuscripts from an unknown author–which is something that authors should always keep in mind in order to seem professional. Always check to see if a publisher accepts unsolicited manuscripts before you send yours off, otherwise you could end up wasting your time and looking unprofessional.

Getting a literary agent can sometimes be costly, and can almost always be time consuming. In my research on self-publishing, one of the main things people cited as a plus to self-publishing is that it’s immediate, or nearly so, whereas going through a publisher will always take months, if not years for new authors.

Of course the advantage of putting up with soliciting your manuscript and waiting for responses is that the publishing and advertising of your book is all taken care of by the publisher. The publisher will design your cover, front the money for the printing, find you bookstore space, and sell copies of your book (while taking a chunk of the profits, of course). This is the conventional way to make it big, and though the allure of controlling everything and self-publishing can be strong, it’s hard to deny the benefits of having a publisher to get your book on the shelves.

That said, there are some serious advantages to self-publishing. To answer your question in a nutshell, C-Check, self-publishing definitely does have its merits, and there are many authors out there having a great deal of success with it. For example, the fantasy novel Eragon was self-published by the author and his parents, and went on to huge success as a novel and as a movie. (That said, I thought Eragon was an awful book full of nothing but cliches and bad writing.) Here’s an article from the Boston Globe about a lady who made two million dollars from her self-published novel.

If you read the article, you’ll see that what the lady and her husband actually did was start a publishing company themselves, basically, but only for that one book. She wrote the book, and together they formatted the manuscript, dealt with the production company, fronted all the money, pushed to get the novel into bookstores, and handled every aspect of publicizing the book. This is essentially exactly what publishing houses do for you. The advantage is that once her novel became popular, she was able to sell it to a publishing house for a huge profit. The disadvantage is that the process is unrealistically time consuming and expensive for most authors. Plus there’s the possibility of doing all this and NOT making it big. So unless you have a lot of money and free time, or unless you have parents who have a lot of money and free time (in the case of the kid who wrote Eragon) I wouldn’t suggest this self-publishing method.

The other method of self-publishing is a lot less expensive and time consuming. This is what you proposed, which is going through self-publishing companies like lulu.com to publish your book. This method of self-publishing wasn’t really an option before the internet existed, but now, you can find self-publishing everywhere. In fact, as great of a resource as lulu.com is, amazon.com’s self-publishing service might be even better. There you can publish your own book and anytime someone wants to read it, they can purchase it and amazon will manufacture a copy of your book and ship it out. You can also publish your book in an electronic version for amazon’s Kindle. (The jury is still out on this device for me. I love that they’re promoting web publishing…but does the thing have to look so darn archaic? Where’s the iphone-style touch screen? And couldn’t they have made it less prohibitively expensive? You can buy an iphone for half the price of a Kindle 2. Anyway, this topic is fodder for a separate post.)

So publishing this way seems pretty great, right? The only drawback is that it’s really hard to get anyone to actually pay attention to your book when you publish this way, outside of your mom, your great-aunt Mildred, and possibly your high school English teacher. You have to do a lot of promotion to have any success. A quick look at the top sellers at lulu.com will tell you that in order to actually sell your book this way, your book needs to fill a specific niche, like technical books, weight loss books, or other hobby books, or you have to be already relatively well-know, e.g. you need to run a popular blog where readers can see that you actually are a decent writer before they spend their hard-earned dollars.

Finally, you can do what I’ve done with my creative pieces, which is to simply post them online in one fashion or another for free and see who reads them. You certainly won’t make any money this way, but that’s not terribly important if you’re more concerned with simply writing because you like to, damn the consequences.

So there you have it. Have I answered you question? Not with a simple answer, no. But I can say that if a writer’s work clearly has some merit, with a little effort it can be relatively, if not hugely, successful through self-publishing. It also can sit at the bottom of lulu.com’s list, never visited by anyone. Publishing is always a gamble, no matter what way you do it.

Have any of you self-published? If so, have you had any success doing so?