Indie Pen Dance
Five Joys of Independent Publishing
Happy Fourth of July! It’s the day writers around the world celebrate writing for independent publishing. That’s why it’s called Independence Day. That does not explain why we only celebrate it in the United States. That’s not true. Lots of countries have independence days. They’re just not all on the same day. We should have put our heads together and planned better. You know who I mean by “we.”
Usually when I talk about independent publishing I talk about it in the context of trad versus indie, two sides of the same coin. Two paths to the same place (publication). I believe both have their benefits and drawbacks. I don’t promote one over the other. Different paths to publication are right for different people—and that’s fine. But today is a celebration of independence so I’m going to write about five benefits to indie publishing that you just don’t get with trad.
First I want to be clear that I’m talking about self publishing today and I’m not talking about independent publishing in the sense of publishing with an independent publishing company. Both of these things are commonly called “indie publishing” and both of them are independent publishing, but they mean completely different things. Today I am specifically talking about self publishing independently—publishing without the assistance of a publishing company of any kind.
Everyone knows what the benefits of traditional publishing are; those need no introduction. But what does indie publishing afford you that trad just doesn’t?
Control Over Your Cover
This is a big one for a lot of people. Did you know that most trad pub contracts do not give the author control over the cover of their book—at all? I worked for a trad publisher and learned that many authors don’t realize that until they see their front cover and want to change it. No dice. Unless it’s in the author’s contract that they have a creative say or final approval of the cover—the author doesn’t.
This isn’t always a bad thing. I’ve seen authors make some terrible decisions when it comes to the cover of their books. But creative control of the cover is very important to most authors and particularly to authors of fiction. I saw someone on social this week complaining that their (trad) publisher would not allow them to request any changes to the cover that had been created for their book, even though the cover had an image of a white woman on it—and the main character of the book is Black!
When you self-publish, all the decisions about the cover are yours. You can choose any designer within your budget, or even design your own. You can go back for as many rounds of revision as your contract with the designer allows (or as you can afford) till you get it exactly right. You get to decide if you run a blurb on the front. You get to draft the back cover copy. You have 100 percent creative control of the cover.
Choice of Editors
You have 100 percent control of the editorial professionals who work on your book, too. If you want your manuscript to undergo development editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading on its journey to becoming a book, you get to choose each of those contributors.
Under a trad publishing contract, the editors you work with will typically be freelance contractors of the publishing company and your acquisition or production editor will select one for your book based on cost and availability. The author does not have control over who copyedits their book. In my days as a production editor, I’ve always been happy to accommodate requests from authors when I can—when an author wants a to use a copyeditor again that they were happy with before, for instance—but I had no power to hire a copyeditor who wasn’t on our freelance roster.
This means, if you don’t get along with your copyeditor, if they don’t share your vision for the book, or if you’re not thrilled with their work, there’s little or no recourse in a trad publishing environment. You get who you get.
When you self-publish, you can vet and choose your own freelance contractors. You get to decide for yourself what level of editing your book needs, how many rounds—within your budget—and who gets that job. You can request editing samples from copyeditors, consider their previous experience and work, and often you can meet with them virtually or on the phone before you choose a provider. This way you can make sure the folks who work on your book understand and support your vision for it.
Freedom From Scheduling Overlords
If you think writing the manuscript was grueling and now that you’re done writing, revising, and self editing, that you can just hand that manuscript off to your trad publisher and kick back till the book comes out—think again. Production schedules require a lot from the author and can be demanding. A trad publisher may expect the author to do some or all of the following:
Respond to copyediting queries.
Review copyedited manuscript.
Review proofs.
Review an index, if one was created for the book.
Solicit blurbs for the cover.
And all those things will need to be done on the publisher’s tight schedule.
If you’re self-publishing, you’re driving the bus. You get to decide the production schedule and determine how much time you will take for each step of production. A trad publisher’s production schedule is driven by the publication date, which may be set years in advance. A self-publishing author may design their production schedule around their other life commitments and let the schedule drive the publication date, if they wish.
Financial Independence
This might seem like a con—when you publish independently, the cost of publication is on you, the author, whereas in a trad publishing arrangement the costs are shouldered by the publisher.
But hear me out: When you, the author, are holding the purse strings, you get to decide for yourself what the budget is. No one else is deciding that for you. Consider that when you publish traditionally, while, yes, the publisher pays the bills, the publisher also sets the budget. The budget determines things like who gets hired to design or illustrate the cover or whether the cover is made from a template; whether the manuscript gets development and how much and who does it; how heavy the copyediting will be; how much effort goes into the marketing plan; and so on. You, as the author, may feel your book needs more of something—or perhaps less of something in exchange for more of something else—but you don’t get a say.
When you self-publish, you foot the bill but you also design the budget. You alone get to determine where to spend your money to get the biggest bang for your buck. And you know your book better than any trad publisher could—they may have a wealth of knowledge about what sells books generally, but they don’t know your book from all the other ones that come through their hands. If you want to be in charge of making sure your book gets the editorial, design, and marketing services you think it needs, then this is the route for you.
No Royalty Sharing
Sharing is caring, right? Well when you publish traditionally, there’s a trad publisher—and (usually) an agent—who have to get paid out of the money your book makes. In fact, the publisher takes the pot and pays out a royalty to the author from that pot, from which the author’s agent is paid.
When you self-publish, all the income from that book—the gross sales less the retailer’s or wholesaler’s fees—go to the author. The author doesn’t pay 15 percent to an agent. The publisher doesn’t share any part of it with a publisher. The retailer or distributor will take their cut—places like Amazon or Ingram—and then all the money that comes in after their cut is yours.
Keep in mind that this really adds up over time. A trad publisher may ultimately decide to put your book out of print if they decide they no longer want to publish and sell it. When that happens, the rights revert to you and you have to decide whether to shop that book around to another publisher, self-publish it, or retire it.
But book sales tend to have what is called a “long tail.” This means book sales kind of look like half of a bell curve, where they start out the highest they’ll ever be and then taper off over time. But book sales don’t usually taper off to nothing, they taper off to a little bit of sales—maybe a few copies a year on an old book. But when you’ve got ten, or twenty, or fifty old books in your back catalog each reliably selling maybe a dozen copies a year, or a month, or what have you—that’s the power of the long tail. And when you publish independently, you can keep your books available for sale as long as you wish. No one is going to come along and put them out of print on you.
There you have it. Five of the benefits you can get from publishing independently that you just won’t get with trad publishing. This isn’t the best route for every single writer, but it’s a totally valid route to publication and can go toe to toe with trad any day—but especially on Independence Day.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.