Should You Self-Publish

Or Go To A Publisher?

[Part One]

Some authors prefer not to use publishers, or cannot get a publisher to handle their work. Self-publishing is what we call it when an author decides he does not need a publisher and simply handles the job himself.

Think about it. Why do authors need publishers at all? There are normally three basic reasons.

First, the cash outlay to publish a book is considerable. It could vary from R20 000 for a small black-and-white book to several hundred thousand Rand for a large full colour book. (This takes no account of the value of your own time, or the cost of warehousing, publicity, marketing and distribution.)

Few authors have this kind of money.

Publishing also calls for a certain amount of expertise in editing, design, printing and so on that few authors have. It is possible to acquire this expertise if you have lots of time but self-published books often look like home-made umbrellas – they can do the job, but they look funny.

However, by far the most important reason to use a publisher is for marketing. It is time-consuming and hard to sell one book to hundreds of booksellers across the country, hard even to get an appointment with the book buyer. You need warehouse space, an invoicing system, a debt-collecting system, etc. Do you really need all this in your life?

So why would anyone want to publish his own book? It might make sense if your book has a narrowly focused niche market that you can easily reach yourself. For instance:

• You are the chair of the Bonsai Hydroponics Society and publish a book on bonsai hydroponics. It should be easy to sell the book back to your own society’s members, and they might be the only ones interested in the book.
• You have done a book on the history of the Van der Merwe family and you can get your hands on a database with contact details of all the Van der Merwes in the country.
• You are a motivational speaker and you know that you will be able to sell a book to every one of the 500 people you give speeches to every week.
• You have lived in a small town all your life. You work in the local museum and know the history of the place intimately. You can market your history of the town by selling it at the local curio shop, garage, etc.
• You are a member of the local yacht club and the management committee has appointed you to prepare a publication to celebrate its centenary with a view to supplying all members and ex-members with a copy.
• If you are a bored housewife, or retired with lots of time and money on your hands, it could make life interesting and be fun.

The first common motivator is that every possible publisher has turned you down. You are tired of rejection, and desperate to make your work see the light of day. Often such authors discover belatedly how sensible the publishers were to turn them down.

Some authors also believe that publishers are bloodsucking capitalists and that they, the authors, are going to get rich out of publishing their own book. All I can say is: make sure you do not use borrowed money to publish your own book. It may ruin you financially.

Other authors think publishers and printers are the same thing, and simply approach a printer for a quote, thinking that once they have a book printed, their problem is solved. In fact, it is only once you have a garage full of books that your problems really start.

So are self-publishers ever successful? Of course some are. Just think of Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – all originally self-published. In our own country there are many examples. The one I particularly enjoy is that of Mrs IJ de Villiers of Bloemfontein who published her own cookbook Kook en Geniet (Cook and Enjoy It) which went on to sell well over a million copies. Every publisher she approached initially turned her down. A commercial publisher later took over publication, but by that time the book was well established.

Every famous author can tell stories of how many times he was turned down before his first work was accepted. Publishers do not have crystal balls. They are often wrong.

Here is the story of John Grisham, as told by him.

He wrote his first novel in bits and pieces in between working at his law practice, over a period of three years. He called it Deathknell, but it ended up being published as A Time to Kill (the seventh title change). The agent who eventually took his work was the 17th he had approached; the publisher who took his work was the 13th.
The book was published by a small press (5 000 copies) and sold well only within a hundred miles of the author’s hometown. Sometime later he finished The Firm, which was taken by major American publisher Doubleday/Dell, and his writing career took off. Later the first book was republished and sold millions of copies.
John Grisham might easily have given up somewhere along the line and never have become the household name he is today throughout the world. Or he could have self-published and disappeared off the radar screen completely.

Publishing is a high-risk business, even for professionals. The problem with publishing your own book is that you cannot be objective about it. Obviously an author must believe totally in his book, otherwise he would never finish writing it. But you do need the eye of an experienced third party who is not emotionally involved to judge the merits of the book.

Unfortunately there are a number of people who prey on authors with a desperate urge to see their own book in print, come what may. They are called “vanity publishers” .

However, you should not confuse vanity publishers with professional editing or packaging houses that will turn a raw manuscript into a book on request and for payment, often for companies, NGOs, government agencies, and even for publishers. There are many professional outfits and freelancing editing/production people who can be of great help if you do want to publish your own book.

There are also some self-help books around that will help you to publish your own book if that is what you really want. You can order hundreds of titles from the US over the Internet but they are unlikely to be of much use here. There are also a couple of local titles available of mixed usefulness.

A vanity publisher or vanity press is a publishing house that publishes an author’s work in return for payment from the author. Vanity publishers seldom market or distribute their publications.
They tend to advertise their services very widely in newspapers and on the Internet, luring unsuspecting authors with their plausible-sounding marketing babble.

These days a lot of their publishing is Internet-based: they try to persuade you that you will make far more money from putting your book on the worldwide web than from selling printed copies.
Be careful. These people are not really publishers. They are bloodsuckers living off other people’s desperation, the literary equivalent of the quack who promises a cancer patient a clean bill of health if she would just buy his very expensive concoctions, or of pyramid scheme salesmen preying on ignorant widows.

So how do you tell vanity publishers from real publishers?

To Continue...

Basil's book, Get Your Book Published in 30 (Relatively) Easy Steps, is avaialble at Exclusive Books