If you self-publish your work, you’re an entrepreneur whether you wanted to be or not. Once it’s between covers and in your hand, or an e-reader, your book is a product.

 

That means you’re in business. You’re an entrepreneur.

 

 

Granted, self-publishing isn’t easy. However, neither is the traditional route to being published. What happens after you sign the contract can be difficult, too.

 

Being “Published”

 

Waiting to be “published” can take years, and even with a publisher’s contract in hand it’s a hard road. If you’re young and have years to spend waiting, and if you want to wait, do so.

 

If you’re bent on becoming another J. K. Rowling or Dan Brown, think of lightning striking, or winning the lottery, because those are the equivalent.

 

Remember, though, that before J. K. Rowling became known she was unknown and on the British equivalent of food stamps. Before Dan Brown wrote The DaVinci Code, he was a relatively unknown author of 3 novels that were largely ignored.  If you want to go through that, it’s your choice, but you will need a great deal of faith in yourself and techniques for fighting discouragement along the way.

 

Receiving a contract is only the first step. For an agent or publisher to continue with an author depends on how well the first book does. On its own. You read that right. Unless the publisher believes a book could be the Next Big Thing, it will receive modest promotion or none. Many authors have to hit the query trail all over again after one or two books.

 

My first two published (nonfiction) book s were stuck in the publisher’s catalog and forgotten. To the publisher, it was the books’ fault they didn’t do as well as the publisher wanted them to. I did not receive any encouragement to submit the third book to them, and my agent lost interest. I sold it myself, to another publisher.

 

Writing high quality books doesn’t matter to most publishers. All three of my nonfiction books were reviewed highly. The third book was a top ten finalist in the Washington State Book Awards. None completely sold out their first printings , and the publishers allowed them to go out of print. 

 

For publishers your book is their business. They think of your book as a product they can sell, and if they don’t sell as well as projections indicate, you will be free to take your work elsewhere.

 

 

Self-publishing is not easy. The self-published author is responsible for the entire publishing process beyond writing the best book we’re capable of.

 

We must handle a list of functions that would make a bee hive surrender: Jacket design, printing, interior design, page layout, promotion and marketing, distribution, bill collecting, and accounting.

 

In the midst of it all, we have to keep on writing in order to keep the readers we have and attract new readers from our niche.

 

In addition, we grapple with an issue common to all publishers, including the Big 6: Technology. We need a website, a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook author page. And that’s for starters. To publish an ebook, we have to learn how to format our documents for Kindle, Smashwords, and ePUB (the Nook software, among others).

 

So it’s true that self-publishers work incredibly hard marketing something we love to an indifferent world. Starting out, we all have to work our buns off to get the word out about our books and build our reputations. It’s an uphill battle for everyone. The Internet is flooded with millions of blogs and websites, and billions of voices clamoring, “Here I am! Look at me! Read my book.”

 

Our task is to rise above the noise.

 

 

We’d all love to live the fantasy of selling our deathless stories for megabucks to a Big 6 publisher and living large for the rest of our lives.

 

But the reality is that J. A. Konrath and J. K. Rowling and other big names in the “book biz” may spend about 20 years in the trenches. They worked as hard as any of us to make it, and still work hard to keep it. They built backlists of books that they can now sell as ebooks. Think of that, and take good care of yourselves. You need to live a long time to make this work, because it takes a decade or two to become an overnight sensation.

 

My choice was to send queries ad infinitum to agents, to spend thousands of dollars traveling to writers conferences in order to have a 2-minute interview with an agent or an editor, and then to wait and wait and wait. Instead I chose to spend my time more profitably by launching my career as a  novelist. I knew I would have to work hard for years to become successful, but those early years could either be spent sitting and waiting, or making progress. I chose to make progress.

 

Remember the poem by Langston Hughes? “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up,  like a raisin in the sun?”

 

You don‘t have to defer your dream while you wait for other people to make their decisions. You can start working on it yourself.

 

P.S. When I read the two online articles that sparked this mini-series, I sensed a logical leap in both discussions. Underneath, they place elite authors who are treasured by the publishing houses in the same category as midlist or relatively unknown authors like me. To compare E. L. Doctorow with me is ridiculous, to bring it to specifics. Yet, they are in effect saying I should wait years to maybe be published because Doctorow, an icon of modern American literature, does not self-publish. Nonsense.

 

 I hope this helps you make the best decisions for your independent writing career. If you have any questions about troubling trends in self-publishing, please ask. Or feel free to share your experience with other readers via the comments!

 

 

 

 

 

-Carol Buchanan

 

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