Let’s do the thing where we all get on the same page: What’s a value proposition, exactly? A value proposition is a statement that explains why a customer should buy a product or use a service. The business trying to sell the product or service pitches their offering by explaining the value potential customers will receive in exchange for their money. When a customer asks you, “Why should I buy this?” the value proposition is your answer.
Anyone in the business of sales needs to know the value proposition for what they’re selling. You can’t sell someone on anything without it. You can’t approach a potential customer and convince them to buy something if you can’t show them why whatever you’re selling is worth their money (unless the value is so evident that the product “sells itself”). Today’s Shelf Life is about the value proposition of the traditional publishing model (generally) or any given traditional publishing venture (specifically).
Again, to do the same-page thing, I’ll clarify that what I mean by “traditional” (or “trad”) publishing is the model under which an author submits a finished manuscript (fiction) or polished proposal (nonfiction) to agents (or directly to an editor at a publisher for some nonfiction); secures an offer of representation for the manuscript; goes on submission to editors at publishing companies with their agent; and then secures a deal with a publisher to exchange some of their rights to that manuscript for money in the form of royalties and maybe an advance.
Trad publishing does not refer to any model where the author publishes their own book (self/indie), whether under their own name or under a business name, or pays a publisher to publish their book (vanity/subsidy). For the purpose of this article I use “indie” to mean “an independent author publishing their book” and not “an independent publisher,” which refers to the ownership structure of the publishing company (not owned by a larger corporation). Independent publishers can be trad publishers! But if I use the term indie in this article I’m referring to self-publishing authors, who often refer to themselves as indie authors.
A question I see a lot of nascent authors struggling with is wanting to know what the trad publisher’s value proposition is:
Why should I elect to publish traditionally versus independently?
What is a publisher going to do for me that I can’t do on my own?
What are the real pros and cons of working with a publisher instead of going solo?
In short, what is the publisher’s value proposition for the author?
This is a bit of a sticky wicket. It’s not as simple as listing off the things a traditional publisher may do for a manuscript, such as: Development editing; copyediting; interior book design; page composition; XML conversion; metadata optimization; proofreading; indexing; cover design; printing; distribution; marketing; sales; and surely more stuff I’m forgetting.
That’s because the publishing company doesn’t actually do any of those things for you, the author. That’s not their value proposition for you. Because you’re not their customer. Again for the people in the back:
You, the author, are not the publishing company’s customer.
I have never worked at a publishing company where authors were not treated with great respect and deference— bordering on reverence, honestly. I don’t want to give the impression that the author is chopped liver, here. They’re not. Authors are a big deal for us. But they’re not our customer.
The person who is going to purchase the book at the point of sale is the customer. Sometimes that’s the end user (the reader) and sometimes not. Sometimes it’s the person who makes the purchasing decision and sometimes not. I’m talking about the person who exchanges cash money for reading material. That’s the customer.
Businesses provide value propositions for their customers. The publishing company’s value proposition to the reader? Well for one thing, that the book they’re getting has been copyedited, designed, composed, proofread, and so on, and so forth—all those things I mentioned above. Those services are performed on the author’s manuscript but they’re not done for the author. They’re done for the customer. The publisher doesn’t edit your manuscript so you can feel great about it (although you will!), but so the customer receives a quality end product.
The publisher’s value proposition for their customer is this: When you see this publisher’s name and logo on the spine of a book, that is a signal to you that the book is of high quality and likely to be an enjoyable read for you. It has been selected by experts who specialize in identifying manuscripts that meet the demands of the reading market. It has been vetted by additional specialists and subjected to rigorous market analysis. It has been held to high production and design standards.
The publisher is saying: “We’re gambling a significant amount of money on our conclusion that you—our customer, the reader—will like this book.” (Or the person you’re purchasing it for will.)
This is somewhat true of agents as well, by the way. Their customer is the editor at the publishing company who signs the book contract. That is the person they’re “selling” the manuscript to (on the author’s behalf). It feels like more of a two-way street with agents where they’re a middleman with a customer on both ends—the author on one side to whom they sell their service and the publisher on the other side to whom they sell the manuscript. But ask yourself this: When you are querying agents, who is selling to whom? Who is explaining the value proposition of what they have on deck, and to whom? Agents don’t typically cold-call authors looking for manuscripts.
There is way more supply of manuscripts than there is demand for them. This is true all over.
Anyway, back to the point. The author is not the customer in this scenario. The author seeking a publisher has a product on hand (their manuscript) and they want someone to give them money for it. That is the opposite of being the customer.
Frankly, if you encounter a publishing company that treats you—the author—like the customer you should run far and fast. A publishing company whose customer is the author is a vanity press or a subsidy press (or maybe a hybrid press—more on all those in Choose Your Own (Publishing) Adventure). That means they intend to get the bulk of their profit on a publication from the author and not from any other readers or buyers of the book. They may do this by charging fees up front to publish the book or by contractually requiring the author to purchase a certain number of copies of the book.
The first and most prominent sign of a vanity press operation, in fact, is that their website is geared not toward readers who might be seeking information about or wanting to buy books, but toward authors and what the publishing company can offer them. That might seem great on first blush—finally! A publishing company that puts me first!—but they are not in the business of publishing books. They are in the business of selling services to authors.
Trad publishing is a business, and the business succeeds by supplying want the market wants. The valuable commodity is not manuscripts—not even good manuscripts. The valuable commodity is book buyers. There are more manuscripts than there are readers wanting and willing to read them.
What does any of this mean for you, the author? What’s your role in this if you’re not the customer?
The author, the agent, and the editor/publisher are in partnership. They work together to bring a product to market that customers will want and love and tell all their friends about. When the publisher invests resources into improving the quality of a book in the interest of putting forth the best possible product to market, that benefits the author, too, though it’s not being done for the author.
Sometimes hopeful authors tell me things like this:
Whatever else the publisher wants, I’m not changing my pen name!
I’ll never budge on the title of my book.
If I don’t get front cover approval in my contract, I’m not signing
I have to tell you, while publishers often reserve those types of rights contractually (eg, they can nullify the contract if the author doesn’t cooperate), they are rarely enforced. I spent a lot of years working at publishing companies that never allowed authors to have contractual cover approval and, yet, every acquisitions editor made sure every author was happy with their cover, every time. While book title changes were suggested and encouraged sometimes, I can’t recall witnessing a situation where we had to let a book go because we couldn’t agree on the title.
Publishers want authors to be happy. If a trad publisher signs your book, it’s because they believe you have the potential as an author to drive a lot of sales their way. We want you to be so happy with us and so satisfied with your publishing experience that you wouldn’t dream of taking your next manuscript somewhere else. Because if our customers like your first book they’re probably going to like your next one and we want our logo on the spine of that one too.
That’s the value proposition of the trad publisher. Traditional publishing offers to make your book the best it can possibly be, not so they can sell you a service, but so they can sell as many books as possible to customers.
When is that value proposition not worthwhile? Every author decides that for themself, but off the top of my head here are some great reasons to forgo trad publishing and go your own way:
You want complete creative control of your project.
You already have a large audience or platform to which you can directly sell your book.
You don’t want to put yourself through the mental and emotional wringer of querying.
There are probably as many reasons to choose trad publishing or choose self/indie publishing as there are authors.
Before signing off, I want to make sure I haven’t implied that self/indie published books are of lower or lesser quality than trad published books—they’re not, necessarily. Self- and indie-published books can be of the same quality as trad-published books, or they can be of higher or lower quality. It really comes down to how much work and money the indie author is willing to put into producing and polishing that manuscript. Picking up a self-published book versus a trad-published book does not mean you are getting a lower-quality book. Rather, it means you might not know what quality of book to expect until you dig in; whereas with a trad published book you may like it or not like it at the end of the day but going in, the publisher’s logo stamped on that spine gives a good sense of what you can expect.
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