Why I Chose to Self-Publish Apartment
Why Am I Self-Publishing Apartment?
It's no big secret that Apartment is self-published. I've talked a lot in the past on various social media platforms about how I will be self-publishing my books - and at least for now, that's the plan. But I understand that deciding to self-publish is a pretty significant thing, and one might even say a very risky decision. Before we get into my personal reasons, though, let's take a look at what self-publishing has going for it, and what it has going against it.
Widely-Accepted Reasons to Self-Publish
If you do a quick search of why you should self-publish, you'll find a lot of people saying a lot of the same things. Here are just a few of them:
- Self-publishing gives you all the control. You can make whatever decisions you want to make regarding your book, how to market it, where/when to release it, etc.
- You get to keep all the profits with self-publishing. Ideally, if your book can become a bestseller, or at least sell very well on various platforms, that means that you'll be keeping a sizable chunk of what would otherwise go to someone else.
- It can technically be done totally free of charge. With all the publishing platforms online today, and with all the free alternatives that writers can set up, you can self-publish completely for free and start earning money.
- There are no gatekeepers in self-publishing. In other words, there's no editor or publisher sitting at their office desk going through a slush pile and rejecting the vast majority of it - your book included.
We should probably talk about the downsides to everything I've just mentioned, to give you a balanced look at the dilemma I was faced with as a writer, as I understood it.
- On the one hand, self-publishing gives you all the control, and that's not a bad thing if you know how to manage a project - in this case, you book and its launch - and, if needed, delegate tasks to people who would be better able to do it than you are. But if you don't know how to manage this project - and this kind of project has a lot of stuff going in and out of it - this control can also quickly turn into an overwhelming mountain of tasks. You stand at the foot of the mountain and wonder how in the world to best climb it without bringing the whole thing down with you.
It's also very much about your ability to take the right decisions. You're in charge now - of everything to do with your book - and your choices, whether in writing the book or with regards to how you want to market it - can make or break your story. If you're planning to sell a lot of books and become a bestselling author, this is something you want to keep in mind. - Depending on what platforms you're using to sell your books, you can keep a much larger chunk of book profits than you otherwise would with traditional marketing. But a lot of factors go into this. Traditional publishers can reach a huge population and have a well-established marketing network, well-trained professional teams working on every book launch, and trustworthy reputations built from decades or centuries of history, so even if you have lower royalty rates than you would in self-publishing, you'll probably still end up making a lot more because - well - more people would probably be buying your book (ideally). Still, you do need to earn out your advance in order to get royalties with traditional publishing, which is hard enough to do (although, on the other side of the coin, in self-publishing there are no advances).
If you're still interested in going the self-publishing route after hearing that, you do have to understand that you will most probably have to spend some money on your book in order to get any significant returns - money for the editor if you plan on getting a second set of eyes to professionally edit your book, money on the book design if you can't do it yourself, money on the marketing and advertising and paid promotion to get your book out in front of people, and money for any other elements that may require someone else's expertise. So you might get most of the revenue from your book sales, but you're also going to have to break even and make back all the money you've spent before you make any actual profit. - Self-publishing can probably 95% be done free of charge. If you're not interested in paying your own website domain and having an official author website (if you're okay having a website on a free site platform like Google Sites or Wix), if you're not going to be paying an editor to go over your work, if you're not going to be paying a designer to design your cover and book interior, if you're not going to pay for marketing or advertising - then you probably won't be spending a heck of a lot of money. But these are all things that a lot of people would advise you to shell out some money for, because the idea is that they will make your book more marketable, and an overall better read.
Let's say you forego spending any amount of money on your self-publishing journey (if we also disregard associated costs, like WiFi and the frankly alarming amount of time that goes into writing and publishing and marketing a book yourself, along with some other costs). You technically could do that. But if you're using a marketplace to sell your book - like Amazon or Kobo, for example - then the fees they charge will be deducted from your sales, per book sale. In that sense, self-publishing will cost you some money. Even if you want to sell your book directly via your website, some form of this will happen because you'll need to use a third-party app or system to take care of the transactions. - There's a lot to be said about how gatekeepers in the traditional publishing industry have abused and exploited their privileged position. They have used it to reject people whose voices they did not want to support, for example. But ideally, a gatekeeper is not always a bad thing. They're supposed to be there to make sure that whatever their publishing company is working on is going to be something relevant to their publishing mission and of the highest quality, or at least something very promising. They're supposed to help the publishing house get access to books that are most probably going to be their next big hit. In other words, they're the first line of defense. And, the truth of the matter is, they are sorely needed, and their job is to be picky, especially when so many manuscripts and stories that are sent in are not always up to par for whatever reasons.
That being said, though, it can be frustrating to have to jump into the complex mechanism of traditional publishing. You need an agent first - and you hope you can get a good agent. Then your agent has to go pitch your manuscript to editors at publishing houses - and you might have to wait months or years to hear a favourable response from one of them. It takes a lot of thick skin, because you'll probably have to slog through a bunch of rejections before getting an acceptance in the mail. And, if you're a minority or a member of a group of people who have historically and presently been snubbed by traditional publishers and the system at large, you might be worried that there may be some bias working against you (though, of course, how can you be certain?).
These points, while not exhaustive, are compelling to me. I've read a lot of articles and have gone back and forth with myself over this decision to self-publish. What did it mean to me? Was it really very important that I self-publish and do everything myself? Was I really that much of a control freak?
It turns out, the answer is "Yes." But let me explain.
My Decision to Self-Publish
I've taken stock of all the pros and cons. I've read articles aplenty to educate myself on why I should or should not publish my books myself. I've looked into traditional publishing processes and self-publishing alternatives. And, at the end of the day, even with everything it has going against it, I prefer to self-publish.
Writing was never about money for me. Everyone would like to do what they love in order to make an income reasonable enough to live on, but I'm not interested in getting rich off of my books. I don't even want to be famous. And, if I am to believe some more experienced authors, self-publishing is where literary fiction goes to die. So, selling a lot of copies is nice, but I'm not in this game to make it big. I'm here to share my stories. Regardless of whether my decision was to self-publish or traditionally publish, money wasn't going to be a major factor.
From a more practical point of view, I wanted to be able to get an inside look at just what it takes to successfully publish a book in the modern era - but even that isn't something that you can learn from just one sole project. The experience is great, but it's not going to give me the expertise I wanted to learn.
For me, in the end, it is in many ways about values. I value my intellectual property. I dislike the idea of giving the rights over to a traditional publisher - no matter how in-line with my ideology and beliefs they might be - because that would mean I essentially forfeit my control over how the book is published and brought to audiences. What if the cover is horrible? What if the marketing is misleading? What if the pricing is outrageous?
Like I said - control freak.
But it also has a lot to do with my debut novella just happening to be literary fiction. Apartment is a weird book, and very experimental for me. It's not going to be for everyone, and it was written to engage discussion and deep thought, so it's not the usual pick for commercial entertainment (though there have been many great literary pieces that have made it into the mainstream with a lot of success).
Because it's not going to be for everyone, Apartment was a big question mark for me. I remember thinking - and sometimes still go back to this thought - that I'm okay with Apartment being my one-off self-published piece because it's so very different from anything I've ever written. I don't know if I'll ever write anything like it again.
It means a heck of a lot to me, this book. I might have been alright handing the rights over for another one of my writing projects, and probably might go the traditional publishing route for some of my other books, but this one is different. Maybe because it's personal. Maybe because it's my first completed book. Maybe just because I happen to love this book, no matter what future reviews might say. But it's mine, and I want to make sure it stays that way.
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If you'd like for a follow-up post about how Apartment is doing and lessons learned post-self-publication, please let me know either in the comments below or via Twitter!
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