What Are My Publishing Options?
And is self-publishing as risky as it sounds?
A while back, a client texted me something that totally shocked me: “My sense is that self published books go nowhere.”
The irony? He was smack in the middle of a supported self-publishing process with a big box company.
I want to tread gently in this post, because there’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in publishing, self or otherwise. But I also want to get real about what publishing is and does.
You need to know that publishing is not the magic of being an author.
The sooner in the book-creation process that you know all forms of publishing are an investment, the better both the process and the book will be.
All Forms of Book Publishing Are Investments
There are more nuances than what we have space to cover here, but for now, let’s cover the three main publishing buckets and how I’ve seen them work.
Traditional Publishing
Refers to “houses”—the Penguins and Simon & Schusters of the world—that allocate resources to a certain number of books per year.
They vet those books by a number of factors that boil down to a good guess as to whether that book will have been worth the shelf space they gave it. “Worth” is determined by how many times readers exchange their own resources to read it, which the publisher and author then divvy up. The better the guess pays off, the more resources they devote to the author who can bring that book (and hopefully others) to the shelf.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but it’s meant to highlight the increasingly archaic source of these practices. Take shelf space, for example. Thanks to the internet, print-on-demand potential, and more, the shelf is now limitless. But the traditional publishing practices are still largely the same.
If a traditional publisher is going to invest in you, they’ll offer an advance payment based on your projected royalties, and they’ll cover the cost of book production and some distribution.
If you’re going to invest in a traditional publisher, you’ll do the initial legwork of shaping a book proposal that they might be interested, the ongoing work of delivering on that proposal in the way they agree it should look, and the forever work of marketing the book once it’s in the world.
Consider it a business partnership, where you do about 70% of the work and see about 30% of the cut. That isn’t to say it’s always a bad idea. It’s just the investment that’s required.
Note: Advances are notoriously low for first and second time nonfiction authors who don’t have a large, raving fan base. And production simply means the final costs of publishing—it will likely not include thorough developmental editing beyond what your agent or acquiring editor volunteers.
Hybrid Publishing
Refers to companies that behave in every other way just like a traditional publisher, except that the author pays for their production costs and does not get an advance.
Officially, there are nine criteria that make up a proper hybrid publisher—anyone doing less is providing self-publishing services. They could also be scamming you for big costs or low quality or both, so be careful whose shiny veneer you get caught up in.
Hybrids and all-in-one service providers know that shelf space is no longer a factor and that traditional publishing is missing out because of that. Pay to play or vanity publishing can get really predatory here, taking anyone’s money for pie in the sky promises. And anyone firmly in the trad pub mindset will point to them as evidence that only the old way truly vets authors and creates good books. There are truths and flaws on both sides.
You absolutely want to work with folks who are honest and will challenge you to make your book the best it can be. If you’re worried you have a yes-man team, get some outside perspective, STAT. (However, in my experience it’s the folks who don’t notice their yes man team who have a book that needs help. If you’re worried about it being good, you’re probably on the right track.)
The reality is that, in most cases, you get out the door of a hybrid publisher with a polished book in hand and decent support along the way.
If a hybrid publisher is going to invest in you, their label will be on your book. That means they should care about its quality and will connect you with folks who can make that happen.
It may also mean your book will be a marker of their success, which could put you on a timeline or process track that works for them whether or not it works for you.
If you invest in a hybrid, you will only have to interact with one team who will ensure you see the finish line…but it could cost more than self-publishing.
Self-Publishing
Refers to creating the publishing imprint logo for the back of your book and bringing together the production support you need to make it all happen.
Self-publishing takes one look at the industry Matrix and says “there is no shelf.” Everyone has access. But to utilize that access, the author has to bring all the resources to the table. In exchange for doing so, they get all the wins (or losses) on the other side.
As mentioned in the hybrids section, there are some “all-in-one” services that are not true hybrids but will house all of the specialists you need to bring your book to life. These can start as early as initial development and ghostwriting or only pick up once you’ve got a manuscript in hand.
As a long-time freelancer, I know a bit too much about how these houses run on the back end, and I can’t yet recommend a beginning-to-end service that I know will treat you well and take care of the workers who are making your book beautiful. Note: if you run one of these companies and would like to chat, I’d be happy to hear you out.
I do trust Rose Friel at Foreword Lit Consulting to help you navigate these decision or help you piece together the freelance network who can take you to the finish line. There’s also a lovely network at the Media Alchemy Guild, and if you’re working with someone on the early stages of your book, they should also have connections for you in the later stages.
The point is, self-publishing is not wading through Fiverr, hoping you get quality work in hand. There are loads of folks out here, happy to help, and able to make your experience as smooth as possible.
And making sure your book doesn’t “look self-published” is well more than half the battle. I promise. Even though it seems like self-publishing means carrying all of the marketing weight on your own, I hope you’ve seen by this point that traditional and hybrid presses need you to do that anyway.
If you don’t have a marketing plan, you’re not likely to get picked up by a trad press once and certainly won’t again. If you don’t have a marketing plan, you’re not going to recoup your costs or feel like you accomplished anything once your hybrid book is done.
If you don’t have a marketing plan, no form of publishing will make up that ground for you.
If you’re going to invest in a self-published book, expect to spend more up front. You’ll see more direct returns because you don’t have to split the royalties with a publisher, and you’ll be more motivated (I hope) to create larger returns with something other than book sales alone.
You’ll also own the process and the outcome, with complete freedom to speak to your readers as you want and share your work with them as they need.
If you’re going to invest in a book at all, you need to believe in the book so much that you’re willing (and able) to do what it takes to give that gift to their readers.
“If just one person is changed by my book”…will carry you so much further than hoping the book goes viral for you and changes your world.
Winning at Publishing Always Comes at a Cost
People love to talk about the guess and the gamble of publishing in terms of hitting it big.
If I get a big advance.
If I get on the best seller lists.
If I gained a cult following.
If if if.
And the industry LOVES that narrative. It keeps people sending them tons of books they can skim and release until they hit their best odds.
I don’t want to fully paint publishers as The House, in casino terms, because they’re not. There are lots of cases where a trad pub deal is the way to go. They are dream makers and supporters and shelf-space-clearers.
But they are, ultimately and realistically, just investors.
When you pitch a book, you are pitching for an investment. And to get an investment you have to show promise of ROI. And in a subjective field like book-making and selling, that’s not easy to do.
To carry the comparison out, hybrid is more like a collaborative investment, where you’re throwing in seed money and startup energy.
Self pub is the authorpreneur putting all their skin in the game.
In all cases, investments are being made, not gambles.
Maybe a 7-figure deal or best seller list or cult following feels like hitting the jackpot, but so does landing a huge deal on Shark Tank. A lot of work happens before and a lot has to happen after in order for that deal to a) happen and b) mean anything. And plenty of businesses do very well without ever landing that sparkly investor.
The point is that in any and all cases, the author is responsible for making the deal happen and making it mean anything.
Even in 7-figure advance cases there is work to be done (usually for celebrities in nonfiction, though newbies, usually in fiction YA, get that call). You don’t just get the jackpot and go live in Malibu. You now owe them a product that will live up to all 7 of those figures, and that’s not easy weight to carry.
The person who convinced the publisher to make that investment is carrying that weight too, so everyone else on the shelf loses marketing energy so that the 7 figures can hopefully be recouped.
That isn’t to say a publisher doesn’t help you, but it explains why nonfiction authors have to prove they have an audience or a pathway to creating one if they want to get picked up at all. The shelf may be unlimited, but their chips are not. And they are spreading them out in ways that you or I, who just want to bring a powerful message to an audience who needs it, would not.
In hybrid scenarios, you may get a nudge of marketing help, especially if you’re in a royalty sharing kind of situation, but the lack of investment on their part also creates a lack of interest in…effort. At all. You’re part of their portfolio and perhaps their promotion schedule for themselves, but anything else is probably an add-on service.
And however you publish, you can make it onto bestseller lists. But it’s because you have that audience eating you up (or you can buy your way in, but that’s another conversation). Not because someone else did it for you.
If you don’t hit a list on launch day but become a cult classic later, it's because you put your work out in front of the people who will need, love, and share it. (Otherwise known as marketing.)
In all cases, investments are being made. Smart ones, hopefully.
You can’t publish a book without taking self-ownership of your space on the shelf, no matter who made that space for you or how limited or infinite the shelf seems to be.
When self-published books “go nowhere,” it isn’t a fault of self-publishing. It’s a feature of publishing in general. It’s just that you are the only investor. You don’t have anyone in your corner with you, shouldering the weight of the good-guess-gone-wrong. It feels personal, and that feeling can spiral into more inaction, and so the cycle carries on.
It’d be like someone throwing a bunch of money on just one stock, then pulling out when it didn't perform after a few months. Then maybe never speaking of it again. This is not necessarily a flaw in the system. It’s just a system, and you get to decide whether or not you want to work within it.
To make your book a success, you have to play the game to make it happen or redefine success and learn to play your own game.
There is no fairy godpublisher who will pluck you out of obscurity and turn a pumpkin into a marketing plan. You've gotta get yourself to the ball, baby.
Publishing's Not All Bad
Trad publishing can be incredible for folks who need the support, attention, and traditional validation that comes from an outside entity partnering with their work. If you can get an advance to cover your time writing, it can give you a bit of space and energy to focus on the writing rather than fitting it in around your life. Or you can use that funding to boost your marketing efforts pre- and post-pub.
A good partnership can turn into recurring writing space, if that’s what you’re after. And when you’re with the right publisher, they will create room on their shelf for you and partner with you in marketing and bringing the work to the people who will love it.
Just know that partner is the keyword here, and it’s always going to be an uneven relationship. You’ll need to do a lot more of the heavy lifting than you realize, especially on a first book.
Hybrid publishing carries the stress around publishing support and connections. You won’t have to vet every last person who comes to the project, because they will have done that for you. After all, they do want you in their portfolio and should put in the work to make your project look fantastic. Should being the operative word here.
Because they have less skin in the game regarding book sales themselves, they’ll take less control of your content, which works well for the person writing to a mission rather than trying to become a writer by trade.
Self-publishing of course keeps all creative control in your hands, and if you’re in the right network or can get into one, there are plenty of people to help you steer that ship toward your desired outcomes.
Because you're making the full investment, you get to decide the outcomes you’re after and how you’ll achieve them. One person's "didn't go anywhere" is another person's "A single reader was changed forever and I am so glad I did that thing."
Instead of vilifying self-publishing as risky, vain, or inaccessible, I think it's more helpful to think of levels of "supported self-publishing," where even traditional publishing falls on the most supportive end of that same spectrum.
If you're trying to decide which end of the spectrum you need to fall on, consider this: if your publisher is not actively helping you sell books, they're good matchmaking and a nice logo. Nothing more, nothing less. If that's okay with you, the field is wide open for you to curate your ideal publishing support structure based on time, money, and who you want to partner with.
Because the process of publishing itself can be done by literally anyone, and you can find folks who can support you anywhere. (And if you can't, send me a message. Seriously. We have people.)
The Author Makes the Book
Trad pub uses their connections to put books on literal shelves and hopes you’ll be able to sell them. Hybrid uses their connections to bring you people to make a book and you hope you’ll be able to sell them, on whatever shelves you get on. Self-pub asks you to make your own connections from start to finish, hopefully without burning you out so much that you get sheepish about selling or doing the leg work to get on shelves.
In all cases, the actual “publishing” part is now down to an upload and a click of a button. That's it. That's the work of publishing.
Anything strategic around that button—bookstore connections, metadata and keywords, pre-sales—comes down to networking and hire-able support.
And no matter what, once you hit go, you’re effectively on your own. It literally does not matter how you got to market once you get there. Yes, maybe there’s marketing support in the package you bought or the deal you negotiated, but when all of that ends, yours is the name on the book.
Anything short of an agented, traditional deal is effectively self-published for what authors expect that to mean, and all authors would do well to act self-published when it comes to taking responsibility for their ROI.
I’ll prove to you that this is all that matters: Ready? Name your top 5 favorite authors. Now tell me the publishing imprint for 3 of them.
If you could answer, congratulations, you’re in the publishing industry. If not, welcome to normal human readership.
The author is who matters, not the publishing house.
The book is what matters, not the deal that made it happen.
No stamp of approval can stand in for the confidence in your message and energy for transmitting it that only you can provide.
You’re an author when you say you are.
Everything else is just play space on an imaginary shelf.
Want to dig into this topic further? Reply or comment with your questions and thoughts, and it may become a podcast episode or workshop in the future.