And debunking their misconceptions
The good folks at Lulu’s Publish and Prosper podcast did this rad episode on myths & misconceptions about self-publishing, because, let’s face it—the era of shitty self-published books is waning!
Self-publishing is not just an option but my recommended option for authors who can’t or don’t want to go through the process of being a traditionally published author. So let’s debunk the myths around self-publishing now.
1. You won’t make any money self-publishing
While most people don’t make any or very little money regardless of how they publish, that’s by design. Most people aren’t publishing just to write a book and make money off of it, or at least not directly from the book. Books are now content created for a different purpose. It’s to support their brand or grow their business or some other type of action or activity.
You’re not guaranteed to make any money from whatever publishing avenue you choose. Even if you went after a traditional contract and you got one, it’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a huge advance or an advance at all. It’s actually common these days for traditional publishers to not give you an advance.
If they give you an advance, it’s not like it used to be. You won’t get a $500,000 advance; that won’t happen for 99.9% of the people that get traditionally published. Talk to anybody who has been traditionally published. Mostly, they’ll tell you the publisher didn’t do much marketing for their book.
Publishers choose authors based on the audience they already have and how much they think they’ll be able to sell off that author’s content. Then they rely on the author to do a lot of the marketing. Well, why not just cut the middleman out?
If you’re gonna do the marketing yourself anyway and you’re going to rely on your audience that you’ve already been working hard to build, why not keep all your profits, royalties, rights, all your creative control, and your audience for that matter?
Money is directly tied and relevant to the effort that you put into it and what your goals for that book are. If your goal is to make money from a book, you can make it in self-publishing.
If you’re selling a print book directly using Lulu Direct plugged into your website, you’re keeping 100% of the profits on those book sales. Host Matt had a conversation with somebody in his office about someone who uses Lulu and is literally making hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month, not per year.
While self-published authors don’t get the advance that some traditionally published authors get, they pocket their revenue immediately. When a sale comes through, it’s automatically attributed to the author. If you’re utilizing distribution, you won’t see that money for 60 to 90 days. But if you’re traditionally published, you won’t see a dime after the advance until you earn out of that advance, which could be never.
Self-published authors keep the rights to their work. It is up to you then how you choose to repurpose that, reuse it, or re-monetize it in different ways. So if you want to add a new revenue stream by adding a different format, maybe publishing an audiobook version of it, doing exclusive editions, stuff like that—you don’t have that kind of creative control over your product availability as a traditionally published author.
Every channel on the planet is now doing their own original programming, but half that content is coming from either self-published authors or screenwriters who have read or scouted some self-published work or have done it themselves. It’s a great time right now to be involved in creating content and having the rights to shop it to places like this, or hire somebody to help you shop it.
People in the industry have done the math. Jane Friedman and other people put out things where if you’re doing everything right, more than likely, nine times out of ten, you will probably make more money in the long run self-publishing than you would, you know, in any other format. You can’t ever hope to attain the financial levels from traditional publishing that some other people have done.
The only truth to the myth that you will not make any money self-publishing is if you put no effort into the books that you self-publish. The more effort you put in, the more money you’ll make. The less effort, the less money you’ll make. Zero effort, you won’t make any money. That’s going to be true of any publishing path.
2. You have to spend a lot of money to self-publish
Self-publishing, by definition, implies you’re doing this all yourself. And technically, yes, you can write, publish, market, and sell your book all on your own. And you might even do a great job of all those things potentially. But the reality of it is you should invest some money in your book.
You should spend some money to self-publish, but you can absolutely do it for almost free. And certainly you don’t have to spend a lot of money.
The goal really should be to put out a piece of quality work. If that is the case, there are going to be some costs. It’s up to you what you prioritize in your budget to spend money on.
Lauren talked to an author recently at Author Nation and she said she sat in all these sessions that talked about different tools and software that you could use to format your book and do your cover design. Everybody was getting really excited about them and she asked, “Do I really need to spend money on all of these tools?”
Lauren said, “These tools are designed for people that need help with formatting their interiors. How much experience do you have with page formatting?”
The author said, “Well, I’m a graphic designer.”
“Yeah, ma’am, you don’t need any of these tools. If you’re already a pro at InDesign, you don’t need to go buy the extra software or hire a freelancer. Save that money for something else in your budget that you don’t feel confident about your ability to do, like hiring an editor. Or a publicist to help you with your pre-launch plans.”
You can also trade for that stuff. Matt’s talked to plenty of people that trade for things and they’re creators. The whole goal is to get your content out there, but sometimes you’ve got to get creative with how you do that. If you have a skill set that somebody else might need, and they have a skill set that you need, why not?
Invest in some good editing at the bare minimum. There are several areas where, if you can afford it, you should invest. First, there’s editing, secondarily, cover design, and then thirdly, if you need the help, formatting. But there are a lot of free or low-cost tools out there that’ll help you with formatting.
That’s not necessarily something you have to have a lot of creative ability to do; it’s more of a technical thing. Editing and cover design, for sure.
These are things you can do one at a time. Most times you can pay with a credit card or they have some sort of payment plan if it’s a large enough amount. This isn’t stuff where you have to save up $20,000 before you approach the work at all by any means. Every year the Editorial Freelancers Association publishes a schedule of what average rates should look like.
So you’ll have an idea of if you get a quote from an editor and whether it falls in line with what the industry standards are.
There are other costs in self-publishing. Again, it will depend on what platform you use ultimately to take your book to market. Obviously, the best one is Lulu. Very few fees involved there. There are print costs if you’re doing print.
You want to order a proof copy for yourself to make sure it looks right. So that’s going to run you anywhere from $5 to $10, depending on what kind of book you’re creating. And then every time somebody orders a print book from you, there’s a cost to print it, but it’s basically a pass-through cost. So it’s not necessarily coming out of your pocket immediately. That happens regardless of where you are or how you’re doing it.
There are plenty of ways that you can market your book for free or for very little cost. But this is something that it is going to be as expensive or inexpensive as you choose. This is something that you are going to determine from your budget. If you have a marketing background and you think that you’re really good at this, you can handle this on your own without spending too much money on it.
If you already have a dedicated audience of fans and followers and you’re publishing a book to monetize your existing content and better connect with your fans and followers, then maybe you don’t have to spend as much money on marketing because you can get away with just some really well-timed emails and social posts to your existing fans.
You can break down the different areas where people think they may have to spend a lot of money. When you dig into each of those areas, you actually don’t have to sink a lot of money. If you search hard enough, there’s a lot of great free to low cost or no cost ways to do these things and marketing is definitely one of them.
There are lots of low to no cost options for tools you might need or things like publicity and running your author business. It involves doing your homework. But, this idea that to self-publish successfully, you have to sink a lot of money into it, that’s just not the case.
3. There’s no credibility in self-publishing
It’s a lot better than it used to be in terms of the stigma. I think even just in the last three or four years, it’s gotten even ten times better. That’s propaganda that’s been perpetrated from years of traditional publishing models. But there are so many great self-published books and almost nobody cares if that book was self-published or traditionally published.
Most people can’t tell the difference if you put in the work or time or money to have a professionally designed book and have it printed by one of the more reputable print-on-demand companies. Their methods of printing them are more or less the same. The machines they’re using are more or less the same. Everything about it, the quality, the standard, all of that is the same.
Lauren: “When we go to conferences and events and you’re going to speaker sessions, more often than not, the speakers will have a book that they have published. I’ll check to see who the publisher is in their books and I’ll be disappointed if they’re traditionally published. I bet they could have self-published that and sold it directly from their website to build their brand even further.”
Matt: “On the flip side of that, I read a lot of nonfiction books, especially marketing related ones. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a book on some form of marketing or marketing that was traditionally published by some well-known marketers, and the books are just absolute garbage. Just flaming dumpster fire piles of garbage. So, I think that goes both ways, too.”
There are a lot of books out there that are traditionally published that shouldn’t have been. They either got that deal because of who they were and it was ghostwritten—it wasn’t even written by them. Or they wrote it and that’s where these big piles of garbage were produced.
Just because you’re so and so and you had some stroke of luck on some early stage startup or whatever that might be, that doesn’t mean you’re qualified to put out a book on some topic.
We’re seeing authors ranging from The New York Times bestsellers to entrepreneurial experts, like the people Matt was talking about. Marketing experts to Taylor Swift herself, choosing to go with a more direct self-publishing route. Even if it’s hybrid publishing or something in the middle of that.
We are even seeing authors that started out as traditionally published authors and eventually, once their contracts end, are looking into the self-publishing route instead. We see more and more of that happening lately.
If you can self-publish a health and wellness journal, a really cool piece of content and make $5,000 a month off of it and work less at your cubicle or whatever that might be, why wouldn’t you?
Need a book coach, ghostwriter, editor or formatter to help you write or publish your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!
