Self-publishing experiences: the good and the bad

[Brian G Turner]

I think it's time we set up a thread here where self-published authors can relate their experiences - primarily:

1. To relate of specific hazards and mistakes you had to learn from
2. To relate of specific advantages you learned to exploit

If there's enough interest in this thread then I'll set up a general guide to self-publishing on the main site, underlining some of the key points raised, so to help other self-publishers or aspirants avoid making the same mistakes, and indicating where points of focus have really helped other people.

I figure a point I want to raise immediately is one of rights - I'm told that PublishAmerica will insist on exclusive rights for about 7 years, which if true is not a policy I see benefiting the author - so highlighting places that demand exclusive rights will probably help with compilation of places to avoid, whilst also indicating recommendations to places that offer a non-exclusive contract.

Also, I've heard of problems with AuthorHouse, so if people can state what those were that could be helpful.

And so on...

 

[Stargazer1976]

Although I am not published in any way, I just wanted to give my thumbs up to this thread and encourage those who have self published to add their feelings and advice on the subject here.

 

[Stormflame]

When I was fresh out of high school and my dreams about writing and being a published author inspired me to aspire in any means possible, I was reading through magazine when I came to the back 'wanted ads' section. Wow, I said to my mother as I read that the prestigious Carlton Press, Inc. was wanting authors! I had written several novels and went right to work editing like h**l and getting a manuscript transversed from long-hand to typed. Man it was work, but, the several hundred page novel that grew out of the wood work made me smile.
A letter came in the mail. Man, when I opened it I was in awe as the great New York company told me that my book had gotten rave reviews from the editors and staff. They told me that in a matter of a few weeks I would be getting another letter regarding if I was actually 'accepted' or not. THE NEXT MORNING the mailman dropped off a letter. A bit thick letter with the Carlton Press seal on it. I dropped to one knee on our porch as I read a hefty contract that sounded as if several attorneys had sat down and written it up. I felt like SOMEBODY.
All the I would owe was a little over $12,000, and being fresh out of school and eyes wide to a new world, damn, I wanted it more than life itself. I had this lawyer friend, who apparently in the end didn't know what the heck she was reading. I went and had my mother take out a $2,000 dollar loan for the opening down payment. I was on my way!
Carlton had sent me a distinct timeline of what would happen as I sent in payments and that timeline showed me to expect in the mail. I got a bit worried when the book jacket did not show after a few payments, and when my lawyer friend was on the phone with them one evening, they DIDN'T even want to talk to me...the writer.
To make a long story short, I backed out of the contract within a year to save myself some dignity, but, the six thousand that was lost came to me as a learning lesson.
Carlton Press folded the following year. Their lawyer sent me a letterhead stating that if I wanted my manuscript back, I needed to send ten dollars for shipping and handling. Damn, what happened to the six grand I sent them?! Couldn't they even show me a little dignity and send me the book back. The letter head told me that if I DID NOT, it would be discarded in the trash.
Nice.
I suspect that Carlton is out there under another name, probably after they had filed bankruptcy, screwing and banging other innocent people out of their money and throwing ice on their hot dreams. Yea...I learned on heck of lesson out of this!
IF YOU ARE NOT PAID FOR YOUR TALENT AND WRITING ABILITIES, DON'T BE STUPID AND PAY SOMEONE TO PRINT A BOOK FOR YOU. PRINTING THE BOOK YOURSELF WOULD BE CHEAPER BY FAR, THAN, BY TAKING IT UP WITH A PRESS THAT SAYS THEY WILL MARKET IT FOR YOU. IF YOU ARE NOT SMART ENOUGH TO GET AN AGENT OR SEND A SUBMISSION IN TO A 'REAL' PUBLISHING HOUSE, THEN YOU ARE ASKING TO BE SHOT IN THE BUTT AND TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF.
TALENT=PAYMENT
NOT
PAYMENT=TALENT
-
EARN IT. IT WILL TAKE YOU FURTHER.
P.S. EDITORS DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE BOOKS PUBLISHED BY SELF-PUBLISHING, VANITY PUBLISHERS, OR ANY OTHER MEANS, EXCEPT THE REAL WAY UP!
GO ON AND BE IGNORANT ENOUGH TO CHEAT...LOL. IT WILL GET YOU NO WHERE ACCEPT IN A HOLE.

 

[aurelio]

That sounds horrible, Stormflame. I'm sorry you got ripped off.

My experience was thus (the good, the bad and the ugly):

I went with AuthorHouse. I didn't look around at the other self-publishing alternatives nearly as much as I probably should have, and in retrospect, I would have shopped and compared prices more. However my initial fees with them totalled just over $1400. This included registering with the Library of Congress, copyright registration, distribution through their site, Amazon, B&N and others, and set up of the actual text and cover. I did my own cover design and they let me, which was a creative plus, although their price includes a cover design by them if you wish.

The actual typesetting and galley process was fraught with errors on their end, and it took forever to get them to create an acceptable galley. This didn't raise the cost, but it was time consuming and aggravating. I dealt with at least 7 different "account managers" before I finished. Apparently the turnover of staffing at AuthorHouse is huge, and with the exception of the last one I had, most were incompetent. But, you get what you pay for, so be prepared to insist on satisfaction and to practice patience.

$300 of this $1400 was for their "standard promotional package" which I feel was almost completely wasted money. They wrote me a terrible press release (they even misspelled my main character's name in it) which I had to discard and rewrite myself and with the help of a friend of mine who worked as a professional publicity person. If I had it to do over, I'd simply do this on my own. Their press release distribution also yielded no responses from the press at all. This fee covered their supplying review copies of my book to reviewers when they are requested however, and AuthorHouse has been doing that without hesitation, so perhaps it was worth it anyway. I'll say the jury is still out on that one.

I had one extra charge of about $250 near the end of my galley process because I made my own last minute editorial changes, so if you self-publish, be sure you are COMPLETELY locked in with your text beforehand or you will run up extra costs.

Here's the upside for me going this route:

1) It didn't cost me very much. (In my opinion.)
2) My book looks and reads exactly as I wanted.
3) I have world-wide on-line distribution.
3) I could sell my book in my own way without interference or argument.
4) For me, it has been a foot in the door to becoming a known author (but I've had some lucky breaks, so this is not a given).

The downside:

1) There is a deeply rooted prejudice against self-publishing within the literary community, so be prepared to deal with it. Reviews are hard to get and it takes a lot of extra work to get your book read. I discovered that most major newspapers and publications have blanket policies prohibiting the review of self-published books (this info is through a friend that works at The LA Times). Is it fair? No, but it is the reality self-publishers face.

2) There are no guarantees of return on your investment. You should really look at it as money out the door that you will never see again. I saw it as buying myself a gift rather than a way to make money. If the sales yield some money, great, but don't count on it to make you rich or to even break even.

3) EVERYTHING falls on you. You have to do it all. The self-publishing companies will not be able to sell your book for you, no matter what they claim. You are one in a vast sea of unknown and ignorable "writers."

I think what has worked the best for me was my website. Making it unusual and entertaining has gotten it listed all over the net, and has worked as a nice calling card with potential reviewers and the public. My site still gets around 150 visitors a day and has had days where it has been in the thousands. I had the benefit of being able to animate and put on a show there, so if you want to go this route, I recommend finding extrordinary ways to draw people to your book or site. Despite the popularity of my site, it has not directly translated into massive book sales yet. (It has built a lot of awareness of the book and me, however and definitely helped me get reviewed.)

I also did this in the hopes of eventually being published legitimately, more as a stepping stone rather than an end unto to itself. Self-publishing doesn't get you into bookstores where the bulk of book sales are made. Internet sales are climbing, but if you want to sell lots of books, you need to get a big publisher with clout.

My book has only been out about a year, so I'm still just at the start.

 

[Stargazer1976]

So If I understand correctly, the $1400 was for the manuscript to be on file and the book to be printed in an on demand fashion?

Not that its any of my business, but if you don't mind sharing with us... How much do you think you've made off book sales to this point.

Last of all, how long does Author House keep you book available for before it drops from their list and also Amazon and B&N lists.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Well, Aurelio, that does bring up one good point of self-publishing: You can keep your book in print for as long as you want, and while the window of opportunity to make an impression on the world at large is a lot smaller, it stays open much, much longer.

 

[aurelio]

So If I understand correctly, the $1400 was for the manuscript to be on file and the book to be printed in an on demand fashion?

Not that its any of my business, but if you don't mind sharing with us... How much do you think you've made off book sales to this point.

Last of all, how long does Author House keep you book available for before it drops from their list and also Amazon and B&N lists.

The $1400 was for all their services on my behalf: preparing the copy and cover for print, the distribution set up, registration of the title, and the "publicity package."

It's print on demand. The initial contact carries me into July of 2006, at which time I can continue having them provide POD copies by renewing for $20 per ISBN (I think that's per year). Once it's set up I guess it's pretty cheap and easy for them to keep the book available.

I haven't really added it up closely yet, but I'm probably in the black on the AuthorHouse costs now, however, I made more investments of time and $$$ in the website stuff too, so I have to figure that in. I was still well in the red when I did my taxes at the end of 2004 and haven't really looked at it all again yet. I'm owed the last quarterly report on sales from AuthorHouse this month, so I don't yet know my sales for the past three (actually 4) months. The lag time on sales figures is hard to get used to.

I think it's going well overall and sales are actually building. I'm working on my next novel now, and my optimistic hope is to have resonable sales figures on EVE by the time the new one is ready to go. If they are good enough, I may go for a conventional publisher on that one.

But, as said earlier, if you are looking to make a lot of money at this, the odds are against you. You have to realize with self-publishing you are building an audience from scratch without the aid of a publisher or agent to push your book. Mark did several of these before he got a foot in the door, so I think he demonstrates patience is part of this path.

And Rome wasn't built in a day.

 

[aurelio]

Well, Aurelio, that does bring up one good point of self-publishing: You can keep your book in print for as long as you want, and while the window of opportunity to make an impression on the world at large is a lot smaller, it stays open much, much longer.

Yeah, I never really thought of that, but I've heard of publishers pulling people's books early if they fail to sell right away. I've also heard that even some A-list writers are going with smaller publishing houses and vanity presses to get their older books BACK into print.

I don't know what the general run of a conventional book is or their shelf-life. Do you know how long they generally leave them out there on a first novel?

A practical part of POD is you don't have buybacks or storage fees, and it saves on trees. Maybe in the future bookstores will simply have display samples and big machines that spit out your books as you buy them.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

But the bookstores like the whole return for credit system (which may explain some of their reluctance to go with POD). The publishers hate it, but they're sort of stuck with it.

As to how long a traditionally published book has to make it's mark, that's partly dependent on the format, the publishers, and probably a lot of other factors I don't know about.

For mass market paperbacks, I was told by a reliable source that most bookstores would only keep the books around for a couple of months unsold before they'd strip them and send the covers back for credit -- but this was before the proliferation of larger bookstores that we've seen in the last few years. The big chains of super-sized bookstores, like B & N and Borders, do seem to hold onto the books a few months longer. Once the book-covers start pouring in, the book isn't OP yet, but it's essentially dead in the water, because no one is ordering it. Most publishers will wait a few months to a year after this, holding on to stock against some unforeseen development, and then declare the book out-of-print and dispose of their stock.

BUT a few publishers, and DAW is a prime example of this, make a habit of supporting their authors by promoting their backlist with every new book. So long as an author sticks with them and keeps writing books that they want to publish -- at the rate of one every year or two -- that author can depend on his or her previous books staying in print indefinitely.

Hardcovers and trade paperbacks (this usually means the large format paperbacks) have a different history. Because they are not expected to move so quickly and because it's more of a bother to send the whole book back for credit, they have a longer lifespan, maybe nine months or a year.

But if sales warrant it and a mass market edition comes out later, the book gets a second chance and a whole new life.

None of this applies, of course, to books that sell really well out of the gate, or to those really popular older titles that continue to sell year after year.

And it's a whole different story when books are sold in grocery stores or drugstores -- where it's either the distributor's sales rep, or even the person who makes the deliveries, who decides what stays on the shelf and what goes.

****

The upside of all this is that even if the author is unknown, if the book comes out from one of the larger publishers, the chain booksellers are likely to make an initial order of at least two or three copies per store. This adds up to a lot of books in a lot of places.

 

[Mark Robson]

I wrote a whole spiel on my experiences here last night and then lost the lot as I tried to post it! I'll try again later, but I'll write in word this time and cut and past to save my family the howls of anguish!

 

[aurelio]

Thanks, Kelpie. I didn't know any of that stuff. It all seems to make sense, even though the visual image of someone ripping covers off of writer's books makes me cringe.

I'm looking forward to your tale, Mark, since you are probably the one with the most experience at this self-publishing path.

 

[Mark Robson]

The window of opportunity to make an impression on the world at large might be small (to quote Kelpie) but that doesn’t mean you can’t dive through it, whether it’s been left open or not!

My experience of self publishing is very different from those above, because I did not use a self publishing company – I formed my own. I was so ignorant of the publishing world that I did not know that such companies existed – I assumed they were just vanity publishers under a different name. Some are. Some are not. Which are which I would not like to guess.


I must have made more mistakes than everyone above put together, but if I went into self publishing without doing my homework, I did get one thing very right – attitude. I did not go into publishing books thinking I would make my fortune. If anything, the opposite was true. I expected to lose money, but I treated it like a hobby. People spend money on hobbies, so I didn’t see the impending loss as a bad thing. The other thing that people do with hobbies is to get passionate about them. I was passionate about my books – so passionate that I threw all my spare time at the project and a huge amount of energy.

Mistakes I made:

I did not research my cover art sufficiently, so I designed and produced ‘dated’ covers. I have subsequently bitten the bullet and re-covered with more appropriate covers and the results have been instantaneous.

I did not research the pricing properly. So much so that I took a loss on every book that was sold through a bookshop on my first print run. I did, however, have a competitively priced product that was attractive to the bookshops because I was actively promoting it everywhere it was sold.

I did not think about storage. I had 1500 books printed on my first print run. I had boxes of books in every room of our 3 bedroom semi. I had coffee tables made out of boxes of books, I had a line of boxes up the side of the stairway, boxes in the kitchen, the bedrooms, I even had boxes in the WCs!

I did not appreciate or plan a sales strategy. I have subsequently had to learn the hard way.

I printed the books on such high quality paper, they were seriously expensive to send through the mail. This made distribution costs prohibitive, leading to further intial losses.

Things I got right:


I was enthusiastic, tenacious, determined and unstoppable. Once I had the bit between my teeth, I was not going to give up for anything. This was my baby, and I was not about to let a small thing like failure get in my way.

I self promoted relentlessly. I wheedled my way into bookshops to do signing events. I signed books at summer fetes, schools, Christmas fayres, table top sales and even car boot sales (though I wouldn’t recommend this!) If there was the sniff of a chance of a new reader, I was onto it. I knew no one in the publishing trade to begin with, but before long I started to meet people.

I networked. Boy did I network! I still do. See my post on Worldcon.

I did not let rejection stop me from being nice to people. I have sold 30 000+ books from home over 5 years by being nice. There is nothing more powerful in marketing than being able to be nice and to make people feel special no matter what they are like. Many people I meet have never met an author. They don’t appreciate the difference between traditionally published and self published, so I don’t enlighten them and ruin their moment of feeling they have met someone worth meeting. I help them enjoy the moment … then I sell them a book … preferably four books if I can!

Don’t get me wrong here – self publishing is not an automatic road to getting published by a major publisher. Sure, it’s happened to me, but from all I have gathered, I am the exception rather than the rule. If you decide to go down the self publishing route, then you must do your homework. You must be prepared to lose your money, and above all, you must be prepared for a lot of hard work if you are ever going to make it work for you.

My self publishing experience is now at a point where I’m supplying one major book chain on a national basis and hope that this will soon be two. I’m printing runs comparable with most small independent publishing companies. However, it is all still self funded. Sure, I’m in profit, but that does not take out the element of risk. I printed 20 000 books during the last 3 months. That costs a serious amount of money. I’ve already sold a quarter of them, but I still need to sell another quarter before I get my investment back.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Great pointers, Mark - and sorry you lost your former posts before being able to post it.

 

[aurelio]

Thanks for sharing, Mark. Your experiences are fascinating. You deserve a medal for bravery.