There’s a lot of noise online about the future of traditional publishing and self-publishing. The most fervent of traditionally published authors would have you believe self-published ebooks will be the death of the publishing industry and quality fiction, and to some extent they might even be right, but their arguments smack of Stockholm syndrome and are hard to take seriously. On the other hand, extreme self-publishing evangelists envision a Utopian future where everybody throws failed novel attempts and old laundry lists on to smashwords.com and lives happily ever-after on the royalties.
It’s an interesting debate, even if it gets a little silly at times, and as with most debates the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The question that should occupy aspiring author’s thoughts today is:
What approach will work best for me?
The options, as I see them, are:
- Find representation, try for a publishing deal with a traditional publisher, and hope there is an audience for your work and that you can find it.
- Publish yourself and take on all the production tasks or outsource them, and hope there is an audience for your work and that you can find it.
There was a time when serious writers only considered the first option, but those times are over. We live in an era of youtube rockstars and social media gurus. Waiting two years for your novel to come out is like so 2009.
Self-published writers are developing their own audiences and going on to accept healthy book deals from New York publishers, and other self-publishers are turning down New York deals. Social media, constant connectivity, and the speed of light nature of the Internet are set to turn writing fiction for a living into a contact sport (it’ll just be bruised egos instead of bruised bones).
Both traditional publishing and self-publishing are acts of faith, and both have their advantages and disadvantages. There will be just as many failures in the new digital era as there were in the old, but the failures will be much more public.
For anybody contemplating self-publishing in this brave new era, Scott Nicholson’s The Indie Journey, a self-published book about self-publishing, is well worth reading.
The real question for an indie author with sales notable enough to be courted by a traditional publisher is:
Do you really need a traditional publisher now?