To Publish or to Be Published

That is the question.

I'm facing an intriguing dilemma. I've been reading a lot of differing points of view and considering the opinions of many.

Self-Publishing evangelists like Joe Konrath do the hard sell on how to self-publish and be successful at it. But he also doesn't mention the fact that he did very well through traditional publishing before switching to the self-publishing model that he now espouses.

Joe's interview with Barry Eisler - who turned down a $500,000 contract with his publisher to self-publish is held up as a wonderful example of the truth of self-publishing. What this doesn't mention is that Barry made enough money writing books through traditional publishers for them to offer him $500,000 for his next book. Nice that he could afford to spurn that.

Consider that the publishing house spent a lot of money creating the Eisler brand - his jumping ship and going self-publishing is not as gloriously rebellious as he makes out.

So if I work hard and fluke getting an agent, who flukes getting a publishing contract and they all take their big slice of whatever retail price they set for Tankbread and i get about 14% of that at the end but they pay for everything.

Or I can self-publish.
ISBN numbers are around $250 Australian (closest to NZ$)
Formatting and producing an ebook or a POD through a service like Lulu is either free or next to nothing.
Cover art is coming courtesy of Billy Tackett and I'm paying for that.
The rest is begged and bartered. Editing, proof-reading, marketing etc.

Writing the book is easy - like getting accidentally pregnant - but once the book is "born" you have to raise it - just like a child and that takes a lot of time, patience and energy.

Problem #3: Traditional Publishing Is Not Dead

They call it "Brick and Mortar Publishing" for a reason.


Publishing is a global industry. It's nestled between porn and legal drugs for the amount of money it generates every year.

Porn = $14 billion a year.
Book Publishing = $23-28 billion a year
Pharmaceuticals = $235 billion a year

Which is a lot of money. For the last few hundred years all this money has been tied up in standard print inventory for the main publishing houses. They are the ones who select mostly really good saleable stories, edit them rigorously and then market the hell out of them.

This is an expensive process for a story. Investing a lot of money on a book project means that publishers are very picky about what they consider. Which is where agents came from. Agents are now also very picky about what they consider - which is why the self-publishing industry and it's evil twin vanity publishing - have evolved. That and technology for both production and sale of books.

A lot has been said about how traditional publishing houses are dying out - book stores are closing, publishing houses are also closing. But a lot of them are not. A lot of books are still being bought and read and new best selling authors are being discovered every day.

Best selling authors are discovered much like Columbus discovered America - they've always been there - doing their thing - and it wasn't until someone with a lot of money to invest realised that they could make huge profits out of them that they got any attention at all.

So traditional publishing isn't going to die out. Ebooks will change the way we expect to buy books, but the Big NYC Publishing Houses will continue to produce product and maybe they will eventually embrace the idea of ebooks to the point where they will stop pretending that a revolution on the way books are produced and consumed isn't actually happening.