Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop FAQ: Q. What about self-publishing?

Q. What about self-publishing?

A. Distribution is 90% of the game in all of publishing.

Self-publishing as a amusement or a vanity, if you can afford it, is not really very harmful -- just ignore that stuff about its making hair grow on your palms.

But self-publishing as a commercial enterprise, that is one that you intend or need to make money from, is certainly doomed to failure unless you have some special access to groups that have a particular interest in your subject and you are willing to sell most of the books yourself.

For poetry, for example, this means that you are already making the coffee-house circuit performing your work and you wouldn't mind carrying the books around with you. But if your plan is to drop a thousand copies off at B. Dalton and then to go home to wait for the checks to roll in, forget it.

If you are going to all the cons anyway, you might consider getting a booth yourself to sell your Star Trek trivia book (this one has been done to death), but Barnes & Nobles won't stock it.

Almost everyone who makes a success at self-publishing does it because he or she:

Is already a speaker who tours and speaks to groups with a particular interest in his or her subject. This might be a preacher in a small sect who travels to various congregations. It might be someone who is giving seminars--either the self-help or the business type.
Someone who has mailing lists of people particularly interested in his or her subject. The return rate on direct mail sales is astonishingly low and you are certain to lose your shirt on postage unless you have sucker lists that are very well tuned to your product.
Is selling the sort of small pamphlets sold through small ads in the back of magazines. As these are usually produced by photocopying as orders come in, you don't have to sink a lot into printing until you have some idea what the demand is.

What makes all of these work is that you find a niche in the market that is not being filled by the commercial publishers. Such niches are usually small.

For example, in the small booklet market mentioned above you might have a booklet on desktop publishing using the TI 99A computer. Since there are not many TI 99A's still in operation, no big publisher will touch the topic. Many of the relatively few people who own TI 99A's would be interested in your booklet because nothing is published for them by anyone else. The problem is how to reach them.

If you have mailing lists from half a dozen TI users' organizations, then you are in business. In this case a small ad in PC Week or your local newspaper won't do it. Because such markets are so small, they are quickly sated. If you reach the right people you will sell many booklets to begin with, but in a fairly short time everyone in your target market will have either bought your booklet or decided not to. To stay in this business, you have to turn up new little markets and new ideas and new products all the time.

Needless to say, self-publishing is not a reasonable option for novelists and story writers in general.

Perhaps the silliest rationalization for self-publishing is the thought that "big commercial" publishers are exploiters who will take too much of the profits from a literary effort. Whether or not conventional publishers make too much money can be disputed. What is certain is that an author will always make more money with commercial publishers than he or she will with self-publishing--provided a commercial publisher accepts the work. The author's share will be smaller, but this will be more than offset because the commercial publisher will sell many, many more copies of the book. The happy ending of the few stories of successful self-publishing is always that the title got picked up by a commercial publisher. Authors who make a success of self-publishing are always happy to sell their titles to commercial publishers when they can. Commercial publishers are not saints or philosophers, but criticism of commercial publishing when it comes from the unpublished is often spiked with a big bunch of sour grapes.