It never fails. Every time I venture out in public, someone wants me to give them an introduction to a traditional publisher; tell them how to find a small press publisher; or some exotic combination of the two.
My statement that I’m now — happily — indie published is usually met with disbelief. And when people believe it I get something like “Well, that’s very well for you who already have an audience and–” and then they explain how they tried some small press and were sorely disappointed/rudely rejected and therefore only the biggest of big publishers will work for them.
This post is my attempt at laying down why I think — right now — indie publishing is better than either the alternatives, and how to start going about it.
I’m not going to detail my experiences with traditional publishing. They are an artifact of place, time, and my own personality. However there are some things I can tell you right now about the big 4 (3? I haven’t kept up on which fish ate how many.)
1- Yes, you could be picked up and become a massive overnight success. Chances for this are greatly increased if you either have the contacts in the industry; are already famous anywhere else and in any other field; have indie published and made it a big enough success that you’ve proven your ability to self promote and write product that moves (both are needed.) Can it still happen if you don’t have any of those above? Sure. People win the lottery all the time. I just wouldn’t bet on it.
2- Traditional publishing is diminishing all the time. Look, it’s as my friend Charlie put it: they’re in the paper brick distribution business. I’ll wait until those of you who prefer paper books calm down. Yes, I know. I actually like to own a printed copy of books I really enjoyed, and no one has come up with a good way to sign ebooks. HOWEVER for distribution of story, ebooks are faster and easier. And the super-readers who are the backbone of your reader fund, unless you have the money and personnel to create a publicity storm and get the one-book-year-readers, read mostly ebook. I know this because not just mine but everyone else’s sales are pegged at 10% printed matter (for indies, who can see the back panel.) And because I’m one of those super readers and these days the only time I buy unsigned fiction in paper is when it’s not available in ebook. Which means the strength of trad pub is competing for that 10%. A shrinking 10% as outlets for paper bricks shrink.
What Charlie Martin said, lo these many years ago is that the most efficient means of delivering product always wins out. It’s an inevitable law of economics. Paper bricks is not the most efficient means.
You can see the pinching in the shrinking of advances and royalties, and in book publishers becoming ever more sort of exotic jewelry worn for status by international conglomerates. This is reflected in the books they publish, which brings us to point 3.
3- In traditional publishing you won’t own your own mind. Yes, I’ll explain.
I was never one of those writers who didn’t want my words touched. Heaven (Possibly. Or maybe the hotter side of things) knows I typo as I breathe and sometimes become enamored with a word for a month or two. Heck, I’m not even one of those writers who holds on to her plot twists through thick and thin. By the time I finish a book, I’ve lived with it so long (even if it’s only two weeks, the experience is intense enough it feels like a life time) that I can’t judge whether chapter 20, in which they go collecting mushrooms, is needed or a mere affectation. And as for knowing whether Lord Rumplebottom is sane when he decides candles will help the rocket land, that’s beyond me. It seems logical from the inside, but that’s from the inside. This is why now, as an indie, I not only have a bevvy of first readers, but often pay a structural editor to figure out if I’m lost at sea without a boat. Mind you, two weeks later, when I look at their opinions, I might have cooled enough to be objectivish and might reject half of them. But I want to have them, anyway. And I do take a lot of them.
So what do I mean by my mind being my own?
There is range of “saleable” that you can sell to traditional publishing. Here I must say that range is larger for Baen, because they don’t have a “political line” but it is not infinite. It should not be. They are investing time and treasure into distributing your book, so you have to have a book they feel they can distribute.
The problem is that this gets in your mind. It took me years of going indie (TBF I’ve been sick or moving for about five years, and very little writing done) to realize that they were in my head, fully. I.e. I would come up with a book idea and pre-reject it, not because I didn’t want to write it, or something was wrong with it, but because I thought it wouldn’t sell. Not to the public, but to the publisher.
Which is a problem and limiting, because even if I were still partly traditional, indie exists. (Granted, I think Baen would have objected to my publishing No Man’s Land on the side, even under a pen name. Heck, I should object to my publishing No Man’s Land on the side, under my own name. Will no one think of my other series and their suffering?) And indie means if I publish a novel that does badly, I published a novel that does badly. I can shrug it off and write other stuff. And if I have a hell of a year, 2023 for instance, and only finish a novella, I can put that novella out, and it will sell. (That it made me novel money is only added gravy.)
The point is in traditional publishing you’re working for them, even when you’re not. In indie you can write the things you really want to write, and damn the torpedoes.
Yes, it might fail, but 90% of trad pub books/series fail, by design or accident.
So, okay, you say, that’s the case with trad pub and the big houses. What about small presses?
My problem with small presses, and it’s largely mine and I’ll not stop anyone from working with them, is this: They won’t give you a heck of a lot more lift than you can give yourself. Some of them — please, DO research and don’t sign stupid contracts — will hold you down.
There is a very good reason to have small presses “in the mix” of your publishing options, and one only: The best way to get publicity is to get picked up in a batch of other authors that someone else already likes, or in a theme/series that someone already likes.
Back in the day, I read a lot of Marty Greenberg anthologies. You know them as well as I do, if you’re old enough to have bought most of your books in bookstores and from browsing: the themed anthologies. Stuff like “Black cats” Or “Mermaids” or “Sorcerers.” I tended to pick up those anthologies before flights across the ocean, because single books were a problem. Even known and loved authors wrote the occasional dud, and it never failed that’s what I picked when I was going to be in the air for eight hours. Chapter 2 and I couldn’t read anymore of it, and would sit there bored for the rest of the flight.
Those anthologies are gone, but Raconteur Press does a good job of a similar set of anthologies, and I do intend to write more for them simply because it gives people a chance to stumble on my story and go “Uh. I like this. Let me look at her other stuff.”
In the same vein I can see (and might dip my toes into, provided I’m not the editor, because editing takes me forever. I CAN do it, I just don’t like it) a small press publisher who does book series, where the first two or three are done by names/semi-names, and then the rest are by hopeful beginners, overseen by the known quantities. A sort of shared worlds.
You’d be giving 50% to 60% of your earnings to the small press, but it would be worth it to get the publicity of readers stumbling on your book 3 of Amazing Shared World and going “Wow, Mr. Bobkins did a great job in this book. What else does he have out?” (Of course this is irrelevant if you have nothing else out. Remember that.)
Anyway, that’s a use for small presses. Just make sure you read the d*mn contracts very well, okay?
And then there’s indie. Sure. It’s a risk and you’re jumping into the unknown.
Look you, at least no one has tied an anvil to your feet. Which is most of my — and others — experience of trad pub.
Will you fail? I don’t know. Depends on what you’re writing, how often you’re writing it, and what you do for it.
Obviously if you’re doing this for money, some market analysis is in order. Look at K’lytics for some of that, and just go to Amazon and trawl the positioning and number of comments and such information. I can tell you, off the top of my head, that Romance sells better than mystery, which sells better than fantasy, which sells better than science fiction.
Which might or might not mean anything, because writing romance would drive me bonkers, while I rather like writing science fiction and at least trad pub my sf numbers beat my fantasy all hollow. (Yes, I can guess why, but anyway, numbers aren’t everything.)
But if you’re doing it because you have to, although thank you and please, you want to, or need to make money at it, the landscape shifts.
Some of the advice I’ll be giving you is advice I haven’t taken (though I intend to, in due time and shortly at that) but with Amazon right now being the huge market, it seems like the algorithm favors frequent releases.
The advantage is that releases can be in short stories. So a short story every two months can keep your numbers afloat while you write the next novel.
There are various schemes of publicity, but what I have found is that they strike me the same way as the “get published” workshops back in the day. They work, sort of, for a tiny minority and for a short time. And then the field shifts. And they can steal a lot of your time, and take up a lot of your treasure. If it’s the type of thing you enjoy, do go for it.
Being me, I have plans, but they consist of going at it sideways and upside down, and doing it “my way” which inevitably works, but shouldn’t, and offends most people by doing so. (When I started my blog blogging was “dead” and yet there it is, still twitching.)
Anyway, the “publish often” works, and getting a few blog reviews also works. Getting seen about town as it were.
Yes, there is advice on the quality of the writing, how you should at least get a copyeditor (indie ones are cheap) and at least talk to someone about covers, or look at the covers in your subgenre, and what’s selling well. All our posts on this, on this blog are outdated and we probably should redo them in our COPIOUS spare time. But it’s not happening this month. Etc. etc.
You will have to do a lot of work, yes, but I can honestly say it’s not more than I did for traditional publishing. And if you think trad pub will “promote me, so all I have to do is write.” go look at the first set of objections to trad pub. Most of them do not in fact promote you in any noticeable way.
All you’ll get is MAYBE (sometimes I didn’t get that) a book or two on a shelf in the rapidly failing bookstore system. Trust me, it’s not enough to justify taking 90% of the profit on your book. Not ragging on them, distributing paper bricks is expensive and fraught and a dangerous business. Just speaking from the writer side.
Anyway, I’m not your mother. I’m not even the ultimate voice on this. There are a ton of others.
But for me? I’ll remain happily indie and mean it. Unless and until things change radically.
Mad Genius Club 
38 responses to “Into The Unknown”
There are up-to-date cover posts here at the MGC. Read them. Even if you plan to hire someone to do your covers, you need to know what a good cover is, to be sure you get one out of the artist/designer. https://madgeniusclub.com/2023/10/07/what-goes-on-a-cover/
Oh, good. But I kind of meant on all of it, a beginning to end hand holding how to go indy. Which we used to have, but is out of date.
Yep. I did a checklist last year, but the page link is DOA and the whole thing needs an overhaul.
Oh, link to the checklist, because easier to find: https://madgeniusclub.com/2024/02/03/begin-at-the-beginning-2/
I’m indie and like it. And It’s always my first impulse when asked for advice.
You might add to #1, “If you’re a big-shot politician, or close to them, you can get an advance of $millions for a book nobody will ever want to read.”
I think those are bribe money, really.
[gasp] Say it isn’t so! 😛
It pains me to tell you so. I was shocked too. THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE.
“It pains me to tell you so. I was shocked too. THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE.”
You should be getting royalties for that. I keeps seeing people using your shocked face all over the internet!
I know. I have to have it re-faced on the regular. Sigh.
FWIW, I first heard it from LawDog. I’m not sure where it started from.
I don’t either, but I’ve seen it used on Kim DuToit’s page, Ace’s place and The Other McCain.
It started at instapundit. and all the guys jumped on it.
A thing to look out for in small presses is reversion rights. As in, under what circumstances does the copyright revert to the author. Those need to be clearly spelled out or, in the case of a small press going under, nobody knows who the stories legally belong to. (The one-and-only book I have, because I am not a writer*, is published through a small press that has those clearly spelled out for the simple reason that the person running the small press had to deal with the copyright nightmare of a previous publisher of hers going under, and she didn’t want that sort of thing happening to anyone else.)
*In my mind, a person who is a writer must write or they go bonkers. I am more of a general creative, who is far more inclined to art and short form like song lyrics. The fact that I got 60,000 words out on a single storyline is still somewhat amazing to me. (Or as I also put it, I am a reader who occasionally overflows.)
DO look at reversal of rights for trad too. Last of those contracts I had, if they published hard cover or trade they got to keep the rights for the life of the copyright. While I’m sure this is illegal in point of fact (no, seriously. This has been tested before) you can’t fight it if you don’t have money for lawyers. And we live short on money as writers. So, I repeat, don’t sign stupid contracts.
(It’s a great deal for the publisher, because even if it’s out of print and you only make $10 a year ebook, if they have 10 thousand of those, that’s a neat income. And ten thousand is easy to get to for the big boys. They already have tons of the people before ebooks that signed those rihgts away because it was never going to happen.)
Not to be picky, mind you, but the woman in the illustration seems to have two left hands. AI seems to have a bigger problem with hands than many artists.
she has one hand turned backwards. It’s plausible to stand like that, but not usual.
I just dind’t feel up to putzing with it in post. It’s not a book cover.
Nope, she definitely has a left hand on the end of her right arm.
On the other hand 😀 I still remember that on the cover of Jim Steinman’s 1981 ‘Bad For Good’ album, the axe-wielding barbarian has two right hands and that’s long before AI art. The axe is a pun, too — it’s an electric guitar, AND has an axe blade.
You know, that’s incredibly easy to fix, I just felt lazy when I did this.
One added point and a comment.
If you go with a small press — having seen MANY small press trade paperbacks, assume the small publisher will print your manuscript exactly as you submitted it; errors, misspellings, typos, grammar mistakes, names changed halfway through, and all. YOU must ensure your manuscript is as clean as you can possibly make it. They might not.
We have a relationship going back 10 years with our local bookseller (Cupboardmaker Books in Enola, PA; They’re fabulous). When we first met Michelle, she was a trad pub stalwart and assumed that indie was what you did when you couldn’t get a contract.
Now, she tells ALL her local authors (she’s developed quite a stable) to go indie as their first pick. Because, unless you get a six-figure deal, you’re going to do all the work anyway and you cede control to Publisher. AND, based on her experiences with her ever-growing stable of local authors, she no longer recommends going with ANY small publisher unless you read the contract very carefully. She’s heard far too many horror stories about rights grabs, no royalties, etc. etc.
I’ve only done trad-pub for academic non-fiction, and that’s a different world again. I’ve gotten spoiled by 1) fast payment, 2) clear bookkeeping, 3)ease of correction/revision that comes with indie publishing. Among other things. Academic press royalties tend to be low, because so many are in the “publish or perish” slot and need the publication almost more than the royalty income. (Academic journals … the less typed, the better for my blood pressure.)
Is there a good source for sales figures for indy books vs. trad publishing?
I don’t remember where, but I know there is. Anyone else?
Well, there’s testimony under oath.
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
Or at least that’s what was tracked, mind.
That is a valid consideration, since they literally pay for estimates of proxies of a third party telling them how many books to pay authors for.
Yes. They pay for Nielsen reported sales, only. But still even if that’s a third of the sales, that’s still low.
I think some studies track by ISBNs, which anyone going Indy on Amazon only, doesn’t need.
And I’ve never sold less than a dozen copies.
It’s a reassuring statistic.
I mean, Indy, I’ve never sold less than 250 copies, and that’s for reprint anthos.
I would imagine that Indie is also the best choice if you write stuff that doesn’t really fit into neat categories, like space opera horror with a supernatural tint?
Very yes.
Thank you.
Speaking as someone who writes tactical romance – that is, mil-SF thrillers with romance arcs – no trad pub would touch me without making me shoehorn into a traditional genre. I have a hard enough time figuring out how to market it – they wouldn’t know how, so they wouldn’t take it.
A sign of how Traditional pub. is losing markets is Costco just stopped selling books. They took too much employee time to stack on a table. They don’t sell enough of any one book to run a skid of them out on a fork lift.
I sold $1,000 yesterday – but it took me four years and ten books published before I made more than a few hundred dollars a MONTH. No traditional pub would have kept buying my books and stocking them until I had a following. You are an instant success or they will cut their loses on you. Unless you are a politician or notorious. Both preferably.
Mine are now starting to take off, but I need to publish MUCH more. I mean, more regularly. Carp.