“If roller derby were easy, boys would do it.”
—my good friend Laura Boss
I’m going to get right to the point today and maybe this will be a short article. Just kidding, everything’s longer than everything else all the time. It’s Escheresque. Today I would like to talk about the value proposition that a traditional publishing company offers to the authors they publish.
Self-publishing is as easy and cheap as it’s ever been in the history of publishing and it’s only getting easier and cheaper all the time. This is the truth. We’re at a point in time where you can take a manuscript in any digital format and get it published for sale as an e-book in about 20 minutes. Amazon’s KDP platform makes this unreasonably easy. Sometimes I think you could send Amazon a manuscript by smoke signal and they could turn it around and have it for sale in under 24 hours.
Ten years ago, self-publishing was not nearly so easy as it is today and twenty years ago it was completely out of range for most people. The rise of Kindle and the e-book sales model and the KDP platform have been gamechangers, but don’t count out the improvements in print-on-demand technology and the existence of the internet itself.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to self-publish a book, you had to be able to figure out desktop publishing software to generate a print-ready PDF file and you had to know how and where to get a printer to manufacture and distribute your book.
Twenty years ago there wasn’t even reliable POD printing yet, so if you wanted to self-publish you were looking at paying upfront for an offset print run. And desktop publishing software wasn’t so widely available and affordable. And you couldn’t exactly just Google how to do all this stuff like you can today.
Self-publishing, you’ve come a long way baby.
The ease and speed of self-publishing has lead a lot of authors and writers to ask me to help them understand what exactly is it that publishing companies have to offer. How does their business model still make sense, when anyone can take content and make it available right away at the push of a button? How do they get away with taking all the profits, paying the author a royalty of those profits, taking a year or two or three to publish a manuscript after signing the contract—why would anyone settle for that?
To paraphrase my good friend Laura Boss, “If publishing were easy, everyone would do it.” Well it is easy, so everyone is doing it. Let me try again: “If publishing a successful book were easy, everyone would do it.”
Most authors and writers, in fact most people generally, probably see immediately that I’m underplaying the publisher’s role for effect. Everybody knows the publisher adds value by providing:
Editing
Marketing
And then sometimes people are aware that the publisher also makes books show up in brick-and-mortar bookstores somehow. That’s advanced-level awareness of what traditional publishers do. I think most people, and certainly everyone who reads Shelf Life, understands that the publisher makes books “better” than they were when the author finished work on them, and makes them “more widely available” than an author might be able to do by themself. Okay, fair.
The truth is, there’s very little that the publishing company does for an author that the author cannot independently pay a professional service provider to do. There are freelancers and consultants who do almost all this kind of work and will do it for you if the price is right. Will you get the same rate for services as the publisher who puts out a thousand books a year? Will you get the same schedule that the publisher does? The same terms? No. But most of these things can be secured by an enterprising author with ample funds who wants to self-publish their manuscript at the same quality level as a traditionally published book.
There’s just one thing the publishing company has that the self-publishing author cannot buy for love or money. You can get it for free, just for the asking—you may even have already received it without realizing—but you can’t buy it no matter how much you pay or how hard you beg. It’s in the marketing family. It’s marketing related. But it’s not what you think. It has to do with what the purpose of the publisher really is. Understand what the publishing company does and then you can understand the real value proposition.
The publishing company does not exist to make books available for purchase by the public. That is a very tiny and insignificant part of the work the publisher does. It’s the easiest aspect. Anyone can take a manuscript and make it available for purchase by the public. Twenty minutes, remember? This is not a meaningful part of the publisher’s job.
When the publishing company signs a manuscript, they’re making a commitment to put resources into the book it will become. They’re going to:
Develop the concept
Make sure there are no liability issues in the finished manuscript that the author could be sued for
Secure rights and permissions
Edit the text
Design an eye-catching, accessible interior
Design a cover
Develop and deploy a marketing plan
Manufacture, warehouse, and ship the book
Distribute the book to sales channels (stores, libraries, etc)
Manage subsidiary and foreign sales rights
That’s a value proposition for an author. The publishing company can do that cheaper than you can. But the value proposition for the consumer and the end user is that all the work I mention in this bullet list has been done. When a consumer goes into a Barnes and Noble, they have a high level of confidence that no matter what they select from the shelves, it’s going to be free of typos, the interior design is not going to be illegible or unreadable, they’re not going to be getting something that’s been plagiarized from somewhere else.
Brick-and-mortar bookstores, as a rule, will only carry books from publishers. The publisher ensures the books they put out meet a fairly standard level of quality. Readers know they can trust what they find in a bookstore or what they find online if it comes from a familiar publisher. Consumers are more likely to buy these books than self-published titles because there’s an expectation of quality based that comes from the publisher’s logo on the spine.
Can a self-published book achieve that level of quality? Absolutely. A self-published book, in my opinion, has the potential to achieve a greater level of quality than a trad-published title—because an author with infinite resources can keep sinking more and more money into editing and production values, whereas the publishing company is accountable to a contribution margin.
But in the aggregate, trad publishers are ensuring a level of quality that, again in the aggregate, self-published authors are not. Consumers—people who spend money on books—want to see that expected level of quality and most of them don’t want to spend time screening self-published titles to see if they are coherent or typo-free before they spend their money and sit down to start reading.
So that’s the value proposition, right? The promise of a quality standard that the reader can count on? No—that’s still not it. But we’re getting warmer.
I get that this is misleading because the word publish literally means to make public so it’s a bit disingenuous to call yourself “a publisher” and then say, “Well the act of publishing in its literal sense is not what I do.” I’m acknowledging this disconnect.
The value proposition that the publisher offers is not evident in what they choose to publish but in what they choose not to publish. The publishing company is not here to take manuscripts and make books available from them. The publishing company is here to not make available that which the market does not want.
Okay, I didn’t write that in an eloquent way. Here comes the main thing: Here’s the part about the service that the publishing company has that you cannot buy.
When I say, “The publishing company has a robust marketing department that you don’t have access to,” authors think, “Well, I can work really hard to market the book myself or I can hire a professional marketing manager—I can even hire, specifically, a book industry marketing manager—to design and deploy my marketing campaign for me.”
That is completely true but it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
The marketing department at the publishing company does design and execute marketing plans for products. That’s a huge part of what they do. That’s a skill that you can leverage from a freelancer for your self-published book.
The other part of what they do, you can’t buy. When an editor wants to sign a manuscript for their company to publish, they take it to a committee. The editor beings their project and the editorial leadership will decide whether the book fits with the overall editorial direction. The production leadership will give estimates on how much it will cost the company to make the book.
And the marketing leadership will tell the rest of the committee: “Yes we can sell this” or “No we cannot sell this.”
If marketing, together with editorial, understand that they cannot reasonably sell enough units of that project to earn back costs and make a profit, the publisher does not sign that book. No matter how good it is. No matter how well written. No matter how original.
The marketing department at a publisher weighs in on dozens or hundreds or thousands of books every year. When you submit your manuscript via agency or on your own to a publishing company, and an editor thinks your project is viable and takes it to pub committee, you receive this service from the publisher’s marketing department: They will make a judgment about whether this book has the potential to sell or it doesn’t.
Publishers sign good manuscripts and bad manuscripts, but they sign manuscripts they believe will sell enough units to turn a profit. When authors tell me, “I’m certain my book is as good as anything the trad houses are putting out”—maybe it is. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes you have written an absolute gem and it’s just not marketable. Sometimes more work could make it marketable and sometimes not.
The marketing machine at the publisher can evaluate a manuscript and say, “No, we don’t think this will sell,” and then move on to the next manuscript. If you’re self-publishing, you’ve got one manuscript to publish. Maybe a handful of manuscripts. But they are your work product. You can’t simply toss them in the bin and pull three more out of the infinite pile to use instead.
When you decide to self-publish your manuscript, you also tacitly decide that you don’t care if you have a marketable product or not. Or perhaps more accurately, you are proceeding from the assumption that your product is marketable. Either way, you’re going forward with what you have, marketable or not. You will make the best of it with this manuscript that you worked hard on and believe in. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not against self-publishing. I’m not against any model of publishing or in favor of any other. All the models of publishing that exist—even vanity or subsidy publishing in certain circumstances—have their place. Different publishing models best suit different goals.
If your goal is to see your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, to earn money from sales of the book and other rights related to the intellectual property (Netflix show? Merchandise? Theme park?), to have name recognition as an author—then traditional publishing is probably the model you want to go with. Not because the book you put out will necessarily be of higher quality but because securing a traditional publishing contract with a reputable house is the best way to sell meaningful numbers of units, which is what leads to the rest of those things.
In large part that is because the publishing company’s entire business is knowing what is likely to sell and what isn’t.
If your goal is to be a published author, self-publishing is as good as any other type of publishing. A published book is a published book. Your book is not more valid if it’s published by a big-five house than if you published it yourself. They’re both published books at the end of the day.
If your goal is to be a published author but also you kind of suspect that your book will be a huge breakout hit if you just make it available and get a little word-of-mouth buzz going—I hope you are right. In case not, I’ll leave you with a tip about getting that market thumbs up or thumbs down for free.
People love to point to Fifty Shades of Grey and The Martian as breakout hits that were originally self-published. Don’t E.L. James and Andy Weir prove it can happen sometimes? Sometimes you make a book available and the market runs away with it?
E.L. James and Andy Weir didn’t dump their manuscripts on KDP to sink or swim, crossing their fingers that the market would notice them. The Martian was published on Wattpad for free and Fifty Shades was published on Fanfiction.net for free. These were not offered as published books to the paying market. They were offered serially, chapter by chapter, to people who seek out free content tailored to their tastes in venues that a lot of writers turn their noses up at. In both cases, the market gave them clear and actionable feedback that pretty much everyone wants to read this.
E.L. James and Andy Weir can kick back and relax in the comfort of their own homes and watch the feature films made from their stories surrounded by their millions of dollars. Think about that for a quick second the next time you feel yourself getting ready to scoff at fanfiction.
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