Sunday, June 30, 2013

To Be Or Not To Be: Making the Leap to Professional Publishing

This week, I'd like to a minute to discuss the pro's and con's of traditional publishing from an indie author's perspective. So far I've published three books as an indie on Amazon and Smashwords with some success. I hear from other authors via Twitter and blogs about how great being an independant author is, but I can't help wondering as I move forward with my own writing career if traditional publishing might be the better way to go.

There are certain advantages to being an indie author. I am the captain of the ship. That means I get to make all the decisions and reap all of the rewards. That means I also have to make all of the decisions and incur all of the costs, which are honestly not that bad. The ability to set pricing, have the final word on editing, and make changes to already published works can not be overstated.

Royalties are much larger as an indie, usually around 70% versus a traditional author who, I've heard, makes between 3-7%. This allows indies to underprice traditional books and still make more money for the author on a per book basis.

However, the biggest advantage to being an indie has to be the speed of publishing, which can be done in a few evenings once a novel has been finished or even quicker after the first few books as you get acclimated to the process. These things allow the indie author to do in months what takes a publisher two or three years to do. For example, if I would have gone the traditional route and submitted my first book to an agent, then a publisher and was published it would only be coming out now if I was lucky. In that same time I published an entire trilogy on my own.

Those are some compelling reasons to be an indie. So what are the downsides? Well, in my case I am stuck working on an island, because I don't have any writer friends to bounce ideas off of or to look at my work in progress. That can make putting a book or series out in the wide world a scary proposition as I have know idea how people are going to react. As a traditionally published author, there is a world of people who know the writing industry and can assist the author in navigating it.

There is also the problem that indies are considered to be inferior authors by some readers and they generally do not have large audiences due to this reason and a lack of marketing. This is the area that traditional publishing provides its largest benefit by being able to get a book out in front of more eyeballs. However, I have also heard that traditional publishers don't do much marketing for unkown authors preferring to throw their money behind the more established names. So there may not be an advantage there.

In the end, the question becomes is it worth it to give up control to attain a potentially larger audience and will that larger audience be greater than ten times what would be possible as an indie from a financial perspective? For me the question is still out. I am happy as an independant author, but as I start work on a new book, I can not help wondering what if...?