What do Publishers Offer Writers That Self-Publishing Does Not?

What does a novelist need from a publisher? The question might sound a bit daft but, when publishing your own writing is so easy and so cheap, and finding a publisher is so hard, a writer really needs a good answer to this question. A related question is, what does a novelist need from an agent? Again, finding an agent is a lot of work and there is no guarantee of success, so the sensible writer really should be asking whether it is worth it. I want to tackle each in turn, looking at the services each provides and the costs and benefits of each compared to self-publishing. So, today, let's look at what it takes to do it yourself.

Going It Alone

First, to establish some kind of baseline, let's say you are interested in having your novels appear in print, in English, in all the main markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia) and you'd also like an ebook edition, available globally from all the major online retailers, and, in the future maybe, an audiobook edition (on disc and by download)  and sales in translation in various other countries.

You need professional editing. I'm sorry, you do. I don't care how good you think you are. Try it just once and you will be convinced. You could pay for this outright or do a royalty deal with an editor. Let's say it costs you US$1500 to get the editing done. (You can probably get it done for much less if you shop around.) You will also need cover art. This is much cheaper and you can probably get a good job done for US$100 or so. If professional graphic designers are too expensive, find a starving student. There really is no way to avoid these costs so, if you're self-publishing, you must just suck it up.

After that, setting up and publishing an ebook is essentially free, and very easy. If you use a service like Smashwords (and are happy to say they are your publisher) you can even get a free ISBN.  They take 15% off the top of every sale but handle all the ecommerce side, don't ask for any rights, and are non-exclusive. They have distribution deals with many large players so global distribution in mutiple formats is covered.

For print, you would probably go print-on-demand (POD) and there are many services that will let you do this with no set-up costs. Print books (unlike ebooks) don't just format themselves. You will need to design the book – choose the fonts, the layout, the size, and so on. Book design is a skill that some people believe is essential to create a high-quality printed book. I absolutely agree. However, most books you read could have been put together by anyone with a copy of Word and a couple of hours to spare. My advice, unless you have an artistic bent and a good eye for aesthetics, find a book you like the look of  and copy it's style. It's an area where an amateur with decent word-processing skills can get results that are quite acceptable. The POD company will effectively sell you each copy for the cost of production plus a profit margin. You can then add your own margin and resell the book (through Amazon, say.) Some are affilliated to retail sites. You will probably want an ISBN (which enables listing in catalogues) and the cost of these very much depends on where you live. Some countries issue them for free, some charge you a small fortune. Are they worth it? If you want to try to sell through (physical) bookshops, and many of the big online outlets, then yes. If you're only selling through your own website, then no. If they're free or cheap where you live, get one.

So far, you've spent less than US$2,000 and your book is on sale in print and electronically around the world. Is anyone buying it? Almost certainly not. Figures (which are a couple of years old now) show that the average self-published print book sells 150 copies. That includes the enthusiasts who do print runs of thousands of books which then fill up their garage forever (still counts as ssales as far as the printers are concerned), and the few, the very few, successes who sell a thousand or two thousand copies. Sales in double-digits are quite normal. If you're selling at a $5 markup on the printer's price, you are probably going to spend four times more on production than you recover in sales.

So you need to think about promotion. You need to print at least 50 copies of the book to give away free to reviewers (another unavoidable cost which just pushed your outlay up past US$2,500.) If you're lucky, you'll get a handful of reviews out of this. Most of the reviewers you want – the big newspapers, the literary magazines, the genre magazines, the big websites and blogs – will not even look at a self-published book. So you're left with the small-fry, and your social networking buddies. Work damned hard, do the blog tours and the blog interviews and the Twitter and Facebook promotions, pester your local book shops to hold a book signing or two, run a launch party, send out press releases, and so on and so on, and you might make a few thousand people aware of your book. Maybe one per cent of those people will buy a copy. If your book is really, really good, this is where it has a chance to take off, because now you have done all the promotion you can, and it's down to other people to mention your book to their friends, write about it on their blogs, and generally spread the word. If it's anything less than excellent, this is the point where your book flops. You spent $2,500, you sold 150 copies, you lost nearly $2,000, and spent every spare minute you had for the best part of six months on publishing and promoting it.

Better luck next time.

In a future post I will come back to the questions of what a novelist needs from a publisher and an agent.