Publishing Crash Course: Self vs. Indie vs. Traditional Publishers

So you’ve decided to publish your book? That’s great! Congratulations! Now how do you go about doing that? You may have seen lots of jargon thrown around in publishing like traditional or non-traditional, indie or self-published, but it can all seem kind of overwhelming even if you’ve gone through the process before. The good news is you’re in the right place because in this post we’ll be walking through the major options you have when publishing a print book (e-books are a completely different story).

#1-Traditional publishing

The term traditional publishing refers to when a publishing company pays you for the rights to your book and in turn pays you royalties (which is like a percentage of the profit) for your hand in writing the book. This is the type of publishing that’s most familiar and heard of where an author sends in a submission in a form of a query letter (more on this later) and/or work to an editor at the company who reads through it and either decides to continue or reject it. This whole process can take months as a lot of the big name publishers receive hundreds, if not thousands of submissions. Which brings us to our next point, the two types of traditional publishing.

First, there’s the one you’ve most certainly heard of, major publishing houses. These are the big shots like Penguin-Random House, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan (as well as a few others). It’s estimated that in 2015 just these five companies published a whopping 80% of books in U.S trade publishing. That’s a lot of books, and of these books, the majority are big name titles.

Now, I know what you’re thinking “I see a lot of other publishers for big-name books. What about them?” A lot of the time (not always, but we’ll cover that later) these are the same companies using a different name. These are called imprints and they are usually made to divide the company into categories. For example, Alibi is a part of Random House that publishes e-book thrillers and mysteries. Del Rey/Lucas Books is under Random House as well, but they handle Star Wars themed books. Now I’ll be honest, this isn’t my area of expertise, so if you’re really serious about taking this path, you should definitely do some more research after this, however to my understanding the process is something like this.

First, you send a query letter (which is like a one-page summary to grab attention and sell your story idea) to an editor at a company or imprint of a company (there are rules of etiquette with this too. Don’t quote me on it, but I believe it’s considered rude to send your query and/or story to more than one editor at an imprint and/or more than one imprint at a company at a time. This is partly because of the chances that more than one decide to run with the idea only to find out that another person/imprint received it as well and can hurt your chances) if they like it they’ll let you know and you send them your whole story. If they like that then they’ll offer you a contract with a percentage of the royalties for you. (Sometimes you might receive money immediately for signing the contract as well, but not always, and this amount is rarely a huge amount like you hear about from already famous people/authors). From there, the publisher usually handles everything else from the editing to the cover design. As the author, your job is to be the face of the book and help with publicity via social media. This whole process can take a long time, especially with the whole query and submission step, however, the benefits of being published by a major publishing company often make it worth the wait.

Pros:

• Not much cost to you

• You’re with a big company so they have connections, you’ll be in bookstores, a professional will design your cover etc.

• You don’t have to do much other than write and publicize a little

Cons:

• Little control over the final product

• Takes a looooong time

• Very selective

“But wait! Is there another option if I want these benefits?” Yes! There is another method of traditional publishing called Independent or Indie Publishing Houses/Presses/Companies (this term is interchangeable with Small Publishing Houses/Presses/Companies. However, independent publishing is NOT the same as self-publishing). This covers most all the other traditional publishers that aren’t included in the big 5. Remember what I said about when you open a book and see a publisher that’s not one of the major publishing houses or an imprint of them? That’s usually these guys. Indie presses operate almost the same as big publishing companies only on a smaller scale. Indie presses are almost like imprints in that they usually have a focus in a certain area, for example, Bellevue Literary Press handles books about things like medicine and illness. This is a really great option if you have something for a specific market that fits the theme of an indie publisher. Independent publishers know the ins and outs of the business because they’ve done it all before. Also, since the volume of submissions are lower the chances of them choosing your book are usually greater, while their response time is quicker.

Pros:

• Little to no cost to you

• You don’t have to do much other than write and publicize

• Know the market

• Quicker turnaround time (generally)

• Higher chances of selection

• More royalties (possibly)

Cons:

• Smaller audience than big publisher

• You probably have more control over your final product here than with a big publishing company, but still not much

• Smaller book runs (generally)

#2 Non-Traditional or Self-publishing

Self-publishing is exactly what it sounds like, you publish something yourself- sort of. Self-publishing has gotten a lot of attention lately as it’s gained momentum and it’s become a highly controversial topic for publishers and authors (more on that later). More people have made the switch to it because it’s got a lot of things on traditional publishing like better pay for authors and more control over the final product. The way it works is there are publishing houses like Ingram Spark, Lighting Press, and Amazon’s Create Space. As an author with a story, you would contact one of these places and submit your book.

All self-publishing houses are different. Some take a percentage of your royalties while some don’t. Some offer extra services like editing or warehousing while others don’t. For example, one of the big sells for Amazon CreateSpace is their free ISBN service. An ISBN is an identification number and virtually all books and all their different versions need them (there are a few exceptions such as ebooks, manuals, and books that won’t be sold). In the United States, there’s a huge monopoly here and only one company sells them. This causes a large price inflation, especially for authors looking to just buy one (one ISBN goes for $125). But authors publishing with CreateSpace get a free ISBN, a huge incentive. However, this ISBN is registered under the CreateSpace brand so they show up everywhere as your publisher which a lot of people who are trying to build a brand don’t like (however, there is an option to use your own ISBN as well with CreateSpace).  It’s all a matter of your personal preference which publisher you decide to self-publish with. (Beware, there are a lot of so-called self-publishing houses that take advantage of hopeful authors by charging lots of money with little or no return of a product. They might also steal your rights to your story or offer superfluous packages for every little thing to try and up sale authors with no experience in publishing. Make sure you verify the authenticity of a publishing company before paying them or handing over your manuscript)

The wonderful thing about self publishing is it totally cuts out the whole query/submission process. That’s because you pay to have your book published, so obviously they wouldn’t pass you up. You also have complete control over your book, which is just another way of saying you do everything yourself. That’s where the self in self publishing comes in, everything from the layout of the book to the cover design to the book sales is in your hands (of course you can hire people to do this for you, but that cost is also on you). A lot of people find this liberating, while others think this interferes with being an “author” because you have to do more than just write. That’s where the main rift in the publishing world is right now.

While I didn’t self publish, most of my expertise in publishing is in this category because the path I took with Princess Pretend and The Not Knight was very similar, and from personal experience here’s what I can tell you. Whether you find complete control empowering or impeding on being a writer, this path is A LOT of work (there’s only one other path that surpasses the amount of work here but we’ll discuss this later in this post). Not to undermine the difficulty of the other options- because everyone’s doing the same thing in their own way, but the difference lies in the number of people. With traditional publishing you tend to have lots of different people doing lots of different things, especially at big publishing companies with hundreds of employees. They have experts for cover design and typography and publicity and editing and everyone does that one thing (in case you were wondering that's the reason for the royalties difference, traditional publishing houses have other people to pay as well). Again this is self publishing so all those jobs from all those different people are now all your job. That’s a lot of work for one person, but it can potentially have huge payoffs in the form of larger royalties and what not.

Here’s the thing though, because self publishing generally lacks a traditional staff of people who went to school and trained to publish books, there’s a huge stigma that the books aren’t of the highest quality. Sadly, this can be true as the the books printed by authors self publishing are usually done in smaller batches (because you pay). Smaller batches of books are usually printed via POD (Print on demand: when someone orders a book, a book is printed) and/or digitally (Digital printing: think like a larger scale computer printer, lower quality than the alternative offset printing. More on this on Wednesday). Also, authors are rarely trained in things like book design and often lack the means to do a good job, though I believe this can be a learned skill (this will be covered later posts). That said, self-publishing puts power in the hands of authors who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Pros:

• More royalties (by a lot)

• More control (by a lot)

• Lot of learning opportunities

Cons:

• More work, not just an author

• Pay out of pocket

• Stigma

• Easy to mess up

“So what about the rest? Surely there can’t only be two methods!” You’re right! There are lots of smaller, less taken paths as well such as transitioning from self-published book to traditionally published one like 50 shades of gray. You could also get a book deal by doing something really cool or having a large social media following.

What did I do?

#3 Indie-Self Publishing?

I don’t believe there’s an official term for this one yet, though I’m not the only one to have done it. It’s a hybrid somewhere between independent and self-publishing. Remember what I said about (probably) the only path harder than self-publishing? This is it. You see Princess Pretend and The Not Knight is a picture book, so when I wanted to publish it a lot of the self-publishing options were eliminated because they only did novels (the exception to this was CreateSpace, but they had a high cost for hardcover books which I insisted on having). There were other companies you could go to, but they tended to run on the sketchy side and there was not much to show they weren’t scams. Also, and be warned because this is stupid logic that I blame on my inexperience as a 13-year-old, I thought waiting on publishers to approve my manuscript and publish it would take far too long- 18 months was the timeline I think. So I shot down the middle and created my own company, Krown Picture Books, to publish my book- which ironically ended up taking longer than that 18 months I didn’t want to wait. This is essentially self-publishing with a layer of business piled on top. However, it gives you the legitimacy of a publishing company as well as providing a name to publish things under in the future. If this sounds appealing to you and you’re down for a lot lot lot of work, maybe consider this path. Feel free to contact me as well for any help.

Pros:

• As close to 100% control as your gonna get

• Lots of learning experiences

• Even more royalties

• Company

Cons:

• You pay

• Lots of work

• Did I mention work?

Remember, publishing in any form is a rewarding process despite the up and downs and it’s something you should be proud of. And whether you choose to be an author or an author and publisher, the whole experience can teach you a lot regardless of which path you choose to take. Anyway, I hope this post helps sort out any of the confusions you may have been having! If you want to learn more about the different types of printing (POD, Digital and Offset) come back Wednesday!

Have you tried one of these methods or are you considering publishing with one? Got something to add? Leave it in the comments below!

Additional Resources/Sources Used in This Post

https://www.lightning-press.com/

http://www.ingramspark.com/

https://www.myidentifiers.com/

https://www.createspace.com/

http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/post/big-5-financial-reports-reveal-state-traditional-book-publishing/

https://www.autocrit.com/blog/2017/12/13/write-winning-query-letter-traditional-publishers/

http://www.randomhousebooks.com/imprints/?ref=2B4575AB81AF

https://thejohnfox.com/2017/09/30-best-small-indie-literary-publishers/