The Publishing Quandary
Very exciting news - I got my last round of edits back from my editor last week! There’s a bit of tidy up required, and it still needs to go through proofreading (along with a dozen other steps before it’s ready to publish), but with regard to the manuscript itself the end is now in sight.
Which is both exciting and terrifying. The closer I get to publishing, the more terrified I am becoming. All the what-if’s race round and round my head and dread sits in my stomach like a dodgy curry. To be honest, that fear is part of the reason I started talking publicly about this project. If I’d kept it quiet, it would have been so easy to let the fear control me and I never would have finished it. By telling people about it, there’s some accountability. A consequence of following through that helps motivate me to overcome my fear.
I also have to remind myself why I’m doing this. The answer to that question has changed over the years, but it wasn’t until I started exploring publishing routes that I realised how much it had changed.
Whether to pursue self- or traditional publishing is a question most debut author end up considering at some point. There are pros and cons to both, and trying to decide which option is best can seem like an impossible task. There are a lot of resources out there in the wonderful world of the internet - author experience, industry expert opinions, sales figures and so on.
I hardly read any of it to begin with, and most of what I did read was only that which said what I wanted it to say. Traditional publishing was king, and the only option for someone who wanted to be a real author. Successful authors were all traditionally published, and a glance at my last profession will tell you how I’m wired when it comes to success. People kept talking to me about self-publishing and I just brushed them off. If I was going to do a thing, I was going to do it properly.
I eventually got over that particular period of pigheadedness.
I did my research. I learned things about traditional publishing that I didn’t like. I learned some things about self-publishing that I did. I learned more and more until I reached the point I’m at now where I view them with total equality. Neither is perfect and “the best option” just means the best option for each individual author - which (shock, horror) differs from one person to the next.
One issue I had during all this mind-altering research was that finding impartial and balanced information on the subject is extremely difficult. My observation, as someone still very new to this industry and community, is that people seem to be very entrenched in their camps and I’ve seen a lot of us-and-them mindsets. I get the impression this is changing as more and more authors end up becoming hybrid authors (a combination of traditional and self-publishing) but it makes it difficult to find objective guidance.
The best thing I read was this blog post on the Fantasy Inn (and I have to thank Anthony Ryan for sharing a link to it, because it also introduced me to the Fantasy Inn!) and I would highly recommend it to any aspiring author.
Even then, it took a while for me to reach a conclusion. There isn’t an obvious answer which I struggle with anyway, and once I’ve decided I care about something enough to curb my impulsivity, I’m then indecisive trying to find the “right” answer - even if I know there isn’t one.
Giving in to some of my more obsessive tendencies, I ended up writing out a pros and cons list to figure it out. I started with all the pros and cons I could think of, and when that didn’t make things any clearer, I highlighted the key points that were important to me.
There were eight items on my list, but when I looked closer, I realised that they boiled down to just three points. Financial, control over my work, and how I felt.
Financial goes to traditional publishing. Self-publishing has significantly higher royalty rates, but it also carries serious financial risk. All the costs are on me, and there’s no guarantee that I will ever be able to recoup that investment. Traditional publishing comes with an advance (even if it isn’t always quite all it’s cracked up to be) and no need for me to invest a substantial amount of my own money. Yes, I’d be responsible for a lot of my own marketing - but compared to the costs of paying for professional edits, proofreading, typesetting, cover design and whatever else I’ve forgotten about, it’s a drop in the ocean.
Control over my work goes to self-publishing. I understand the value of a professional opinion and if I was to go down the traditional publishing route, I would always listen to the experts. But there’s listening to and valuing the opinion of industry experts and using that input to form your own conclusions, and then there’s handing over total control of a project you’ve dedicated years of your life to people who potentially just see it as a business venture. Control over timescales was a factor - I’m impatient and I hate waiting on people - but for me the deal breaker was the risk that a traditional publisher might refuse to publish a sequel if the first one didn’t do well enough. I’m writing a series and to end up in a position where I couldn’t finish telling this story would break my heart.
In the end, the decision comes down to emotions. How do I feel about each option? It goes against the grain for me to make a decision as important as this based purely on feelings, but I’ve tried being objective and I can’t split them.
Success through traditional publishing means validation. It means that industry experts think my work was good enough and therefore, in my mind, that means I am good enough. As someone with a massive insecurity complex, this appeals to me. Particularly given that my last endeavour to prove to myself that I was good enough ended in failure.
And that’s exactly why I’m choosing to self-publish. I don’t want to feel better about myself based on the opinions of total strangers. I want to do this myself, standing on my own two feet. And yes, I know I’ll have help along the way. Nobody ever achieves anything by themselves. Name any athlete in the world and I guarantee you there’s a dozen people at least who helped get them where they are. I know I didn’t get what I have all by myself. I’m just exchanging coaches and physios for editors and proofreaders.
But I want to be the one driving this. The one calling the shots. So while I will have to get help where I need it, I don’t want to be reliant on anyone to make this dream a reality. When I get to the end of this journey, regardless of how successful or not it is, I want to look at the end product and know that I did this.
“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
And that’s what I have to keep reminding myself. I’m not doing this for anyone else. It may sound selfish, but this journey is about me. Telling the story I want to tell, in the way I want to tell it. And if nobody likes it then, yes, of course I will be disappointed. But I’ll still be proud of what I’ve created, and proud of myself for creating it.