Why I Became A Self-Published Author

Someone on Twitter asked me this morning why I decided to self-publish. I think I've touched on that here and there in my ramblings, but never dedicated a post to it. So, here goes…

First, a little background: I actually began writing my first novel, , back in 1991 and finished the manuscript in 1994. I shopped it around a bit to various publishers, but needless to say got the typical rejection letters. Now, I perhaps could have been more persistent, but my life was a bit chaotic at the time and I finally gave up on the idea. And I've worked in a big bureaucracy my entire adult life, and wasn't enamored with becoming involved with another one.

The manuscript sat in a box under my desk and was used as a footrest for the next fourteen years, when I found out about this newfangled gadget called the Amazon Kindle. Then I found out that you could publish books for it. Anybody could publish books. Even a normal (well, relatively speaking) person like me. You didn't have to be a previously published author, a publisher, or anything else. Joe Blow could publish his Great American Novel without having to win a lottery into the Big 6, where he would then get a paltry sum for his toil.

So I published in May of 2008 for the Kindle, and followed it up later with a print edition through Lightning Source, which is a print-on-demand (POD) company that distributes to Amazon, , etc. I was published! Woo-hoo!

For me, self-publishing was the only real option. I had lost patience (what little I had) trying to get into the traditional houses, and I doubt my book would have ever been accepted, anyway, because it doesn't fit into any well-defined marketing niches. Vanity publishing, where you pay someone to print a bunch of books that then sit in your garage until you unload them, wasn't an option because I didn't have a bunch of money, and didn't have the time or motivation to go around selling books from the trunk of my car. So that's why I didn't do anything with during that long fourteen year spell when the manuscript propped up my feet.

Now, however, the self-publishing opportunities are amazing. It's like Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he says, "My God, it's full of stars!" Not only is it fairly easy to publish your book in technical terms (read: you don't have to be Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius to figure it out), but the potential for making real money – and potentially REAL money – is more than a pipe dream. I'm a case in point: I've gone from making several hundred dollars a month from late 2008 through January of this year to making what will probably be over twenty thousand dollars this month (June). My dream boat has arrived, and I'm climbing aboard and plan to leave my day job behind come August.

Self-publishing is also ideal for me because, when you get right down to it, I'm a storyteller. I'm not a literary whiz, I'm not a super-duper writer (although having done technical writing for the last twenty-five years has helped a bit), and I'm not a marketing genius. I'm just a guy who gets these stories in his head and has a compulsion to get them down on virtual paper. Because I publish my own work, I get to tell my stories the way I want, and readers seem to like it.

As it turned out with , a few people started buying it, and then people started telling me they really enjoyed it (which came as a pleasant shock!). So I've continued writing, telling my stories, telling them my way.

By contrast, when you buy a book from a Big 6 publisher, you may be getting a book of higher technical quality (although that's increasingly debatable, based on how many bloopers I've seen in some of the things I've read), but you're only getting a spoonful of the potential choices allowed by their marketing departments. In the self-publishing world, there are no limits, there are no bounds on the author's creativity. People can argue "quality" all they want, but the bottom line is that readers want to be entertained, and they're perfectly capable of determining for themselves if they like something.

Another thing is that while authors who get picked up by a traditional publisher are generally considered to have "made it," the vast majority don't make enough to write for a living. I know of two authors who are traditionally published, but whose royalties amount only to supplemental income, and all of my books are currently doing a lot better than theirs on Amazon. I'm not crowing about it, simply pointing out the paradox that so many authors run into: being picked up by a publisher, but never being able to make a real living from it.

With self-publishing, I believe your chances of making at least some money (even if it's only enough for a Starbuck's now and then) is almost guaranteed, and your chances of making enough money to live on are far, far greater than in the Big 6 world.