And the pros and cons of being traditionally published
If you’ve been following along with my 10 successful self-published authors series, you know that independent (indie) authors are breaking the stigma that self-published books can’t be commercially successful. That’s why I was stoked that Publish & Prosper did an episode on why more indie authors are landing traditional book deals.
It makes sense—if a self-published author is selling a lot of books and can do it again, why would a publisher bet on a first-time author with zero built-in audience? Here are my takeaways from the episode.
Media influences publishing trends
In the last five years, the myth that self-publishing is a poor way to go is being debunked because of the rise of the romance genre and the subgenres that have spun off from it in the last five to six years. TikTok and BookTok helped to instigate the rise in romance popularity. There are probably 75 romance subgenres and there was an explosion right around COVID.
Traditional publishers are now really viewing these indie romance authors as more credible. When they’re hemorrhaging money, they have to go where the dollar signs are.
In the same way that we’re seeing a rise in movies and TV shows that are all spinoffs or sequels 20 years later or remakes or adaptations of a book, studios are less willing to take risks on unknowns because there’s no guarantee of return. They’re much more willing to take risks on something that they can see a clear market for.
The big five publishers are owned by media companies. They’ll test an idea first at their publishing companies through imprints. If it tests well as a book, boom—it gets kicked up the chain. Those media companies own TV and film production houses. It’s all about content.
Whether you are a fiction or nonfiction author and you have any interest at all in securing any kind of traditional publishing deal or media rights deal (TV, film, even audiobooks), pay attention to deals and announcements in places like Publishers Weekly or Publishers Marketplace. You will see trends like if a book went to auction.
That means that multiple publishing companies were quite literally at auction fighting for the rights to secure this deal because they all wanted it. That tells you something about the popularity or the projected popularity of that book. Maybe it’ll tell you something about them shopping around for this type of content. Because remember, these deals are happening 12 to 18 months before the book is going to market.
It’s a good indicator of what’s going to happen in the next year or two in publishing. You’ll also see things slipped in there that these deals included film options. Sometimes these things happen in which a book will be optioned for film rights before it’s even published. So pay attention to stuff like that if that’s something that you have any interest in.
The myth of the self-publishing stigma
This first myth is that if you indie publish, that a traditional publisher is not going to want to touch you. Above, we touched on reasons that really disprove that. Building your own brand, your social media following, and an email list where you have an owned audience is attracting traditional publishers right now.
They almost look at your brand first and your content second. They’re going to come knocking on your door because somehow or another you got their attention through your marketing efforts or your audience. It’s no longer just a game where you have to get an agent and you have to submit to whatever imprints and publishing houses you’d like to work with.
They are being more proactive. Publishers are reaching out to authors and not just the other way around. Publishers are actively going out there and saying, “We need to fill our title list.” Or, “We need an author that’s going to serve this role. We need to find somebody who’s going to speak to this market.”
And they will go out and find people to fill that gap. And the place that they’re finding those people is in these self-published and indie-published authors.
There’s two sides of that coin. The same way that you can get noticed, if you’re not doing all those things, you won’t get noticed. And if you’re not doing all those things consistently to the best of your ability, that’s going to get you either not noticed at all or noticed in the wrong way.
If you’re not doing things that demonstrate your brand has longevity, that’s not going to go well for you. So if you are interested in landing a traditional book deal, make sure that you’re establishing some longevity and really paying attention to building your brand, and not just focusing on titles or serials.
Jane Friedman said in her newsletter recently: “an author who does a ton of online marketing is more likely to receive enthusiastic interest from multiple publishers.”
The myth of untouchable books
There’s also the myth that publishers will not have any interest if an author has already self-published a book. There are plenty of cases where that’s not true. It happens all the time where a book that has a really strong sales momentum and the possibility to very obviously kind of repackage or reposition that.
If you have a bestselling title that you’ve only published as an ebook but you haven’t published it in print or audio, they may want to secure those rights. If you’re going to go out there and proactively pitch a title you wrote that is already out in the market, that’s the perfect scenario.
The Apple TV show Silo is based on a book called Wool by Hugh Howey, which was self-published on KDP in 2011 and 2013. So clearly, this has been going on for some time. Howey signed a print-only deal and he was offered seven-figure contracts for complete rights, including his ebooks.
According to an interview he did with The Wall Street Journal, he turned down any offer that would include his digital rights because he was already earning more than seven figures from his ebook royalties.
The other big one that helped bust open the floodgates was Fifty Shades of Grey. What many people don’t know is that book was originally run through Lulu. Or that series. [Sandra’s note: I don’t see anything that confirms this; only that The Writer’s Coffee Shop initially published James’s series; it’s possible it used Lulu’s platform to do so.]
It wasn’t until those books and the subsequent ones started getting attention, and then there was a publicity effort put in place where EL James appeared on Good Morning America or something like that.
That’s when a traditional publisher approached and said “Hey, shut down all your indie outlets. Let’s repackage this. We want to pick it up. We’ll buy it.” Those titles had already been in the market through Lulu. They were going through traditional indie publishing and distribution channels, and that didn’t stop a traditional publisher from coming along and picking those up, repackaging them, and putting them back out into the market.
There are definitely examples of this happening with one-off titles, but predominantly, major books that are getting scooped up through traditional or hybrid deals are part of a series. And it is usually the case where some of the series is out yet, and they’re seeing like really good success and momentum with the first few titles.
And then a traditional publisher will come in and say, “Hey, we want to publish the remaining titles. And we will also repackage and republish the ones that are already out while we’re waiting for that next big release.”
Don’t devote all of your efforts to framing yourself as the writer of one title. Build your author brand, build your audience base. Do everything you can to own as much of that content and those email addresses. Because that’s just going to better position yourselves in front of a publisher.
Why secure a traditional publishing deal?
In the cases of Hugh Howey or even Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel), there are so many examples of this with hybrid-published authors that have done a little bit of both. Why would you have any motivation to sign a traditional publishing deal when you’re clearly doing just fine on your own?
A lot of authors really want that. It may have been part of your dream writer journey to sign with a Big Five publisher. That’s totally valid. There are also plenty of strategic and logistical reasons.
Now we have these advantages where you bring the audience, you bring the brand, and you have more leverage to negotiate more favorable contracts. Back then you didn’t. It was either give them all your rights or you don’t get a contract.
You have more leverage and more momentum built up where you don’t have to just take whatever contract they put in front of you. So even if your goal is to say, you landed a traditional publishing deal for at least one of your books or series, you have much more power today to do that in a way that’s comfortable for you, but also financially viable that makes sense.
There are still ultimately some things that traditional publishing will give you access to that self-publishing never will in terms of opportunities. You’re going to have an in-house team that you’ve never had access to before on your own. Even things like the formatting or the editing—all those things that you might outsource to freelancers to do.
Or maybe you’re interested in expanding with foreign rights, but you don’t really know where to get started with that.
It’s a trade-off. They’ll take it over, but you’ll lose control of it. If you’re looking to scale and for new ways to expand and grow, and you’ve kind of maxed out on what you can do right now, traditional publishers can expand for you.
The biggest advantage that comes with being traditionally published is the brand expansion component. So the effort they’ll they pump into expanding your brand, i.e. getting your titles out there in the world, is the huge benefit.
So their distribution network, their ability to suddenly have your book on a bookshelf potentially in a bookstore somewhere in the UK, outside the US or where you currently live. Or vice versa, if you’re in the UK and you’re trying to break into the US.
Everything else is a disadvantage; it’s all stuff you could do better and cheaper. But there’s no denying that what the publisher affords you, what they bring to the table after many of them being in business for 100 years or more, is that global expansion effort in terms of physical proximity in a bookstore or at a book signing.
Understanding publishing deals and author brands
It’s also very key to understand that when you work with a traditional publisher, you are not just offloading all the work onto them. Whether you view that as a pro or con, a traditionally published author is absolutely expected to do marketing and publicity work. Reach out to their own audience and sometimes have their own strategy for how they’re going to launch.
Even if you’re submitting through an agent, you better also be submitting a marketing plan or sales plan. If you are a debut author trying to secure a traditional publishing deal and you have no background in any kind of publishing, they are absolutely going to be looking at details.
Do you have an existing audience? If not, are you somebody who has a social media following of some kind? Or do you have a newsletter that regularly emails people, even if it’s not related to the topic of your book? You have an opportunity to reach out to people that are already fans of you. They are not just looking at the content and quality of your book; they are looking at your ability to sell that book to people.
There are benefits to the publisher participating in brand building with the author. It’s why it’s so important that they sign authors and they curate authors and brands that already exist, but in many cases, align with who they are as a publishing company or that particular imprint or whatever that might be. That’s why you see so many niche imprints these days, too.
From beginning to end, there’s alignment on the content and the audiences. When you have a large publisher, let’s say Penguin Random House, it doesn’t behoove them to just take in all these different types of content and then try to publish those out into the world under that brand of Penguin Random House.
You want to have these smaller imprints where the entire staff of that imprint focuses on that genre or that subgenre. They live and breathe that. They understand the market economics for that genre, and they’re going to make sure that they get the best return on every title that they acquire and then put into the market.
So having an established brand is super important, but also knowing and being aware of the imprints that exist related to the genres and subgenres that you write in is really important, because if you choose to go at this proactively, those are where you’re going to start with. Those are going to be the ones that if they’re going to look at you, it’s going to be the ones that line up with your genre.
You can’t just go straight to the front door of Simon & Schuster or Penguin Random House, because they’re not going to open the door.
An imprint has a brand and readers may be interested in what they’re sending out into the world. They’re doing that on purpose. Even if you don’t realize it as a reader, that is something that is strategic on their end.
That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about building a brand for yourself. The authors who are on your instant buy list are on there because you know that you’re going to get the consistency. You know what you’re going to get from them.
Whether it’s consistency in terms of quality of writing, what tropes are going to be in the book, you know it’s always going to be a happy ending or a mystery that’s going to have some kind of unexpected plot twist. Even if you’re looking for it, you’re never going to figure it out because they’re really good at burying the lead on that.
Whatever it is, they’ve built their brand. They have sold you on the idea that this is what you can expect from their content. Every author develops a formula. That’s what you fall into. That’s what publishers are looking for. And so are the readers. Consistent, sustainable publishing history.
Long-term brand publishers are looking for something that they can say, “We can see five, six, seven, eight, ten titles coming out of this.”
The first book that comes out, there’s a best friend of the main character. And the best friend is the main character of the second book. And then in the second book, the best friend has a younger sibling. And the younger sibling is the main character of the third book, and so on. And they build on each other in that way. That is something that has longevity.
So that is something that publishers are looking for. But they’re also looking for the consistency with which you publish your books. They want to see that you are putting out books regularly, that it’s not one in one year and then three two years later.
If you said you would publish in March 2026 but you’re not done with it yet, so you’re pushing that back to May 2026 and you do that four times in a row, that will not bode well for you. But they don’t want to see that you’re over-saturating the market either.
Putting out a book a month is not always a good thing. Because if your readers are used to that, the traditional publishing industry can’t keep up with that pace. So if your readers are used to getting one book a month from you and then you sign a trad pub deal, now you’re putting out one book a year, or even two books a year. There is a chance that your sales are going to drop off because of that, and that’s not actually going to be a benefit.
If your fans have to go from getting their hands on your content once a month or once every other month, to now having to wait six months every time for a new book, they’re going to get distracted by other authors and other things. Before you know it, you’re way down on their list of favorite authors because they found new ones that are sort of satiating that appetite.
You want there to be some demand and excitement to get hands on your book as soon as it comes out.
What indie authors need to know
Some people are going to be sitting there wondering, “All this is going on. I kind of knew this, but thank you for validating it. Should I get an agent? Do I need to get an agent?” We see it going both ways. Most of what was making its way to the traditional publishing companies was coming via agents. That was and still is the only way to get your manuscript into the hands of somebody.
It is up to the individual author. There are a lot of self-published authors or hybrid authors that are working with agents already. And if that’s the case, if you do work with an agent at the time that a traditional publisher is trying to secure a deal with you, they will work with your agent and not you. So if you already have an agent, they will negotiate with that agent and not with you.
But if you don’t have one and they reach out to you, they will negotiate directly with you. If it’s the other way around, where you are self-publishing still but you are starting to shop around to traditional publishers, you still need to have an agent to do that. Because most traditional publishers are not accepting un-agented submissions, even if you are somebody with a proven track record.
Unless they reach out to you first and ask you. But if you are hoping to attract a traditional publishing deal to what you’re doing, i.e. building your own audience and doing all these things, then it’s not necessarily something you have to have.
Worst-case scenario, an agent can always be there to just make sure that your contract is legitimate and that you are not missing or overlooking something. So it’s never a bad idea to have an expert involved. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessary.
Sales and direct audience data are very relevant and a very key selling point to attracting traditional publishers, or proving your longevity and value add to traditional publishers. Sales data can be great, not just for saying like, I’ve sold 20,000 books cumulatively.
Because that doesn’t prove anything, because it could have been 19,000 book sales from one viral hit that you had ten years ago, and you haven’t come anywhere close to that ever since.
Unless you are exclusively selling direct and there is no sales data anywhere online that they can find, they have ways of checking that. But if you can say you’ve sold 20,000 books cumulatively over time and you can track the steady growth in sales over time consistently, and your brand is expanding—you’re like maintaining and generating new interest from audiences, if you have the ability to prove repeat purchases, that’s fantastic.
Maybe you have a Patreon that is proving demand. People get early access to your titles or people signed up to be potential beta readers. You asked for five beta readers, and had a hundred offers from random readers. That’s proving that these people are already fans of yours.
Repeat purchases are a great thing to prove. And then the direct audience and the direct sales, having that kind of customer data is really powerful because we’ve talked about why you want to be selling direct.
If you can pull up the number of people you have on your newsletter list, your open rates that prove you have a lot of dedicated readers that read it regularly, and you’re going to do a big pre-order thing with a special edition packaging or whatever…You can very heavily imply that amount of your dedicated audience will see that.
You can actually do that with your social media stuff, too, if you’re tracking it properly. If you’re running a Google Analytics or tag management, anything that you’re able to show whenever you put something up for sale on your store, 36% of the purchases are coming from social media traffic.
You can piece together a narrative of your sales and where those come from. And that gives a traditional publisher a general idea of what to potentially expect when they help magnify and amplify that audience by degrees. Regardless of what kind of data specifically it is, just know that it has to be relevant, provable data.
While there are definitely fanfiction authors that have dedicated followers and readers, there are also plenty of people that are reading fanfiction that are not looking at who wrote it and are just looking at the title or the tags. It’s all about the topic. It has nothing to do with who actually wrote it.
Most of the major fanfiction platforms these days do not allow you to put in the author’s notes on fictions. You can do things like link to your social media, and then say that you have a real book and not just fanfiction, but there have been some massive titles released in the last year that have been overtly, blatantly fanfiction turned into traditionally published books. And those are obviously the exceptions.
When authors say 10,000 people liked their fandom famous fic, that’s a cool stat. That means you’re probably a good writer. That doesn’t mean those 10,000 people are going to buy a copy of your book. So it’s a vanity metric and not a real piece of data.
Recap
- Get a flexible contract and something that works better for you. Don’t sign a contract where you give away all your rights. That’s a terrible model on both sides of the fence. Seeing that flexibility happening right now play out in real time in ways that it never has before is really cool.
- Sell direct if you’re not already, so you have that customer and audience-building opportunity. Even if you do not already have an email newsletter, you need to start one yesterday. Prove that you can remarket to your audience and build up a loyal fan base.
- Do everything you can to build direct connections with your audience. Maybe it’s a community, maybe you have a Patreon or a Circle community or whatever it is, something that you can prove there are people that are interested enough in you that they are not one off, one time buyers, but are actually invested in you and your brand.
- Somebody shouldn’t hit your page or your social media and have to wonder, who is this person? What is their brand? Are they nonfiction, writing about copyright law, or are they actually sci-fi fantasy writers? Your brand should be very clear on who you are, what you do, and who your intended audiences are.
- Part of building a brand is also what will attract traditional publishers, which is publishing consistently, which doesn’t mean oversaturating the market. If you say something’s going to drop on this date, make sure it drops on that date.
- Think like an entrepreneur. An authorpreneur if, if you must. You need to approach this like it is a business or a brand. Not like you are just writing books based on vibes and putting them out there when you feel like it and hoping for the best. This is a business model. You are building a brand and you have to treat it that way.
If you’re lucky enough to get singled out and approached, try to maintain as much of your rights as possible while being fair at the negotiation table and understand that you’re going to have to give it something, or they’re just not going to want to talk to you. Knowing what that is ahead of time is really helpful, too.
If your goal is to get a traditional publishing contract, you should make certain that you already know what you’re going to the table with. Don’t go into a contract negotiation without any clear cut ideas of exactly what it is you want to maintain control of versus what you’re willing to give up. If you don’t have that clarity around that, you’re going to find yourself walking away, probably, with the short end of the stick on that one.
Ensure that your existing rights are not tangled up in something. So if you’ve already optioned your audiobook, foreign, or even ebook rights and somebody else currently has access to those rights, you need to be upfront with that with the publisher before you go in there, because that might be a deal-breaker.
Need a ghostwriter, editor, or formatter to help you 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!
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