Nontraditional
Ways and Means of Publishing Outside the Big 5
Good morning and Happy Halloween. This is not a Halloween episode of Shelf Life, except insofar as it happens to fall on Halloween. Nothing about today’s Shelf Life is spooky. In the spirit of the holiday, I’m pleased to share that I sold a horror short to a forthcoming anthology (look for it out in March 2024). More info when I can share it. For now you’ll just have you use your imagination, which I think we all know can produce scarier content than anything I can write.
Today’s Shelf Life is about nontraditional means of publishing. That is, alternatives to trad (traditional) publishing. Traditional publishing being the business model in which a publisher extends a contract to an author to exchange cash money (in the form of an advance and/or royalties) in exchange for licensing some of the author’s copyright privileges, including the right to reproduce and the right to distribute. Trad publishing is when a company pays an author for the right to publish and profit from their work.
There are, however, some nontraditional publishers that fall under the “traditional publishing” model, and I’ll talk about some of those herein.
Nontraditional publishing is any kind of publishing other than traditional—which includes, but is not limited to, self-publishing. Self-publishing, itself, is a many-faceted model. In addition to self-publishing, nontraditional publishing includes vanity publishing (sometimes also called subsidy publishing) and hybrid publishing. I’ll talk about those a bit but probably not that much because I don’t think vanity and hybrid are desirable models for most authors.
First, briefly, I’m going to talk a bit about the pros and cons of traditional publishing; without considering those, after all, how can an author know they want to go with a model other than trad? Mostly I’m going to cover the cons because I think everybody knows what the pros are, including:
Publisher pays expenses;
Uptake into brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries; and
Assistance with marketing and sales.
And other stuff too, but those are really big reasons to go trad. Now: Why might one not want to go trad? Trad publishers:
Are highly selective, and it can be difficult to get an offer on your manuscript;
Often require agented submissions, and a literary agent will receive 15 percent of the author’s earnings for any titles they represent;
Can take longer to develop and produce a title than an author needs to self-publish; and
Retain control of elements like cover and interior design, editing, and marketing copy.
And, again, other stuff that I’m not thinking of right now. Just as there are a lot of good reasons to seek a trad publisher for your book, there are tons of good reasons to consider other models as well. Even vanity and hybrid models are right for some people in some situations (as I discussed in an earlier Shelf Life).
So you want to go nontraditional. I’m a big fan of “nontraditional” everything. Nontraditional students, as in people going back to school later in life? I love it. Nontraditional families, like families that consist of any configuration that doesn’t center around a hetero romantic couple and their kids? Yes, the best. Nontraditional publishing? I am all for it. Let’s talk about what options are out there for an author who wants to skip the big five and publish outside the box.
“Nontraditional” Trad Models
I already mentioned nontraditional traditional models so I’ll start with them—these are models in which a company (the publisher) licenses content from the author to reproduce and distribute, but not in the traditional way. The traditional way being author is represented by an agent, signed by an acquisitions editor, extended a contract, receives an advance, book publishes, author receives royalties, rights revert eventually.
What else is out there? First of all, there’s the Bindery Books model that I wrote about in Ties That Bind. While I don’t approve of their terms (I don’t think their terms compensate authors fairly), I am somewhat interested in their subscription model. The idea behind Bindery Books is that social media influencers (popular Booktokers, Bookstagrammers, Booktubers, and so on) will act as acquisitions editors for the publisher. Agents will submit titles for consideration as in the trad model and the influencers, like any other acquisitions editor, will select their favorites for publication. However, in addition to selling units, Bindery proposes a model where fans of the influencer editors can subscribe to the influencer’s Bindery content. In exchange for their subscription fee they will receive not only the books but a bevy of extra paywalled content including author interviews, access to signed copies, and whatever else they can dream up.
As a publisher of periodicals, I am here to tell you that subscription income is some of the best income you can get.
Another cool model I learned about from this October 30 article in The Irish Echo is, essentially, Brandon Sanderson’s crowdfund solution but mashed up with a traditional publisher. Unbound characterizes itself as “a literary crowdfunding platform.” Unbound’s editors select books for publication and feature them on the crowdfunding platform. Those that fund successfully are published using the funds raised for production, marketing, and distribution.
But why work with a publisher who’s just going to crowdfund the work? Why not just make like Brando Sando and crowdfund your manuscript independently? For starters, if you review Kickstarter’s stats page, only about 41 percent of projects fund successfully, and projects in the publishing category are actually less likely to fund, on average (about 37.5 percent of publishing projects fund). Of the publishing projects that did fund, most of them raised less than $9,999 USD (about 75 percent). Conversely, Unbound has raised around $15 million USD (£12,710,125 per their website) to fund 408 projects, so they’re crowdfunding much more successfully than the average publishing Kickstarter (mean = $36,764).
Serial Publishing
Charles Dickens released his novels in serial format in the periodicals of his day—the Victorian Era—and this publishing model thrived during that time due to the recent, sudden, dramatic advances in printing and distribution. Well, you know what we’ve had in the last 20 or 30 years? If you guessed sudden and dramatic advances in printing and distribution, you are correct. When I started my career in publishing around 20 years ago, the following were in their infancy:
Print-on-demand technology.
Ebooks.
Both things existed earlier than the aughties but they were not very accessible to the self-publishing author. Print-on-demand tech was largely available to publishers, not individuals, for small print runs and was prohibitively expensive on a per-unit basis. Ebooks existed but the proprietary devices we use today like the Kindle (2007) or the Nook (2009) did not, and neither were the books readily available for sale at major retailers (the Amazon Kindle store also launched in 2007).
Anyway what I’m getting at is that the conditions are ripe for a resurgence of serial publishing and in fact that is happening.
Amazon has launched Kindle Vella, which competes in the same space as other serial fiction platforms like Yonder and Radish. These use similar models where the first few installments of a story are free to read and then, thereafter, readers use a proprietary currency (for Kindle Vella, for example, it’s tokens) that they purchase from the platform to unlock more installments.
These are like fully paid versions of sites like Wattpad. Wattpad hosts stories in serial format, many of which are free and some of which are paywalled. Until recently (earlier this month), Wattpad offered paywalled content in the form of “paid stores,” but has now switched to a freemium model called Wattpad Originals that allows select authors (invite only) to place some of their installments behind a paywall while allowing others to remain free. Readers can unlock the paywalled chapters with coins they purchase from Wattpad or with a monthly subscription fee.
There are still more alternatives for publishing your work serially, especially if you already have an audience. I’ve seen a few newsletters similar to this one you’re reading right now, but instead of a blog format the owner uses their mailing list to send out their fiction chapter by chapter. You could even sell individual chapter ebooks on Gumroad.
Ebooks Ahoy
If you prefer to sell your ebook as a one-off product rather than serially, self-publishing has never been easier. I mean literally never in the history of mankind. We have social media to help us connect with beta readers, online editing helper sites like Grammarly, AI that can create passable book covers, freely available online typesetting to compose pages on the fly, easy ebook conversion all over the place, and super simply options for setting an ebook up for sale online.
For those who want the simplest, quickest route to self-publishing their book as both print and ebook, it doesn’t get much easier than Kindle Direct Publishing. This program makes books available for sale on Amazon Kindle and print-on-demand for both hardcovers and paperbacks.
Amazon isn’t the only contender—or necessarily the best—but it may be the easiest and most accessible. For those who want their book to be more widely available, or who want a different package of services than what Amazon KDP has to offer, there are tons of options.
IngramSpark is a good solution for those who want to package ebook and print distribution without using Amazon (can be used in addition to Amazon KDP).
BookBaby is known for providing editorial, print, and distribution services to independent authors.
Rakuten Kobo’s WritingLife is a lesser-known self-publishing and distribution service for ebooks from a major player in the digital book industry.
All of these options will help you out with distribution—that is, making your book available for sale in the places where you expect to see it. This usually means online retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s website, and potentially other online retailers like Bookshop.org.
While many of these services will also make your book available to libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores, keep in mind that most won’t stock self-published titles.
Sell It Yourself
This option is not for the faint of heart. Only the bravest and boldest among us should consider going it alone—but self-publishing can be done without any distribution help at all. People do it all the time, in fact. This works best for folks who already have an audience looking to buy content or who have a means of directing traffic to their site—since your book won’t appear in traditional bookstores or online retailers, there’s little or no opportunity for organic discovery.
So how do you do it? If you’re content with an ebook, all you need to is create your ebook file and set it up for sale on a site that manages digital downloads, like Gumroad. You set up your account, make your ebook available for download at the price you’ve chosen for it, and direct users to purchase your book.
If you want to sell print copies of your book, first make sure you actually have an avenue for selling them. People who go this route successfully are often those who exhibit work at conventions (like artists) or give presentations to audiences who might want to buy their book. Imagine giving a TED Talk and then the audience all goes by a table of your books afterward and has a chance to buy them. That sort of thing.
To do this, you will need to work with a printing press. You provide the specs for your book, the print-ready PDF of the interior and cover, and the funds, and they will ship books to you. You can then sell them at your events, your yard sale, out of the trunk of your car, or anywhere else you can think of where you won’t be illegally soliciting. Although the unit print cost of a book is much less than the unit retail cost of a book, you’ll still be responsible for hefty up-front costs. Most offset printing presses have steep minimum orders (likely more than 1,000 copies); digital (sheetfed) presses have lower minimums but higher unit costs
As I said, this method is not for the faint of heart. The other solutions in this article involve publishing and distribution partners but don’t require a big outlay of cash up front to purchase a pallet of books. That said, if you’re absolutely sure you can move the units (and the units do sell), this method is likely to be the most profitable at the end of the day, because you don’t have to give a cut of the profit to anyone.
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