9 Huge LIES about Self Publishing Nobody Talks About

there's a ton of misinformation out there about self-publishing and in this video we are going to set the record straight these are nine huge lies about self-publishing that you don't need to believe anymore one self-publishing is for authors who can't get traditionally published gez that is so 2008 seriously stop thinking in a hierarchy between those two I would argue that both are good choices depending on what's right for your book and what's right for you as an author and I've counseled clients to go in either direction and it is not dependent upon the quality of

their book for example if you're writing literary like you definitely need to go traditional publishing there's not really a good Market in the self-publishing world on the other hand if you are writing in a specific genre a very Niche genre that is perfect for self-publishing because it's really easy to Market and really easy to gain devoted readers and you also have to ask yourself what is right for you right if you don't have a year and a half to 2ear Runway to publish your book then traditional publishing is definitely not for you if you want

to publish in the next couple of months or even in 6 months from now then self-publishing is the right option personally I'm self-published and traditionally published my first book a collection of short stories was traditionally published and it was a lovely experience and my second book was self-published because I already had the audience I already knew how to do all the backend stuff so I'm like why shouldn't I do this on my own and keep more of the Lion Share of the profit for me my next book I am going to traditionally publish but in

the future I could definitely go back to self-publishing as well it all depends upon the book so let's look at two authors who were traditionally published and then decided to self-publish instead Barry Eiser was a former CIA operative and a black belt and Judo he' published seven books with penguin and random house and had hit the New York Times bestseller list and after that point it was offered another deal for two more books with St Martin's press Barry said no thanks I'm going to self-publish instead what he had done is he ran the numbers and

he knew that he could make more on his own or look at a big- Time author like Brandon Sanderson he had traditionally published for a really long time and then he decided hm I think I can do this on my own he set up a Kickstarter and raised $ 41.7 million to self-publish his own books I haven't checked prices for self-publishing lately but I think that's going to cover it really the next thing on the horizon isn't just self-publishing it's selling direct forget the middleman of traditional Publishers and of Amazon you go straight to your

readers you sell straight from your website the second lie is traditional publishing does your marketing I have talked to so many writers who are like well I don't want to self-publish cuz I'll have to do all the marketing I think I'm just going to go traditional publishing because then a publisher will take care of that for me for the vast majority of traditionally published authors their publishing house doesn't put a huge amount of energy into promotion and marketing for them I know it's kind of the dirty secret in the industry but they have say 10

or 15 or 30 books coming out that season and they'll pick one or two to put all their effort behind to make like a major marketing push Advertiser money publicist but the rest of the books sort of get the crumbs traditionally published authors have to work just as hard to do marketing as self-published authors do so if that's a lie you've been telling yourself that is not a good reason to choose between self-publishing and traditional publishing either way you are the final one responsible for doing the marketing now traditional Publishers do take some of the

weight off of You by sending out art copies for example or at least allowing you to consult with the in-house publicist or marketer so you get some like directions on where to go but in general no matter what your publication route you should expect that you're going to have to do a lot of marketing the third lie is self-published books can't be high quality I feel like this is very much an old school mentality like Circa 2010 the truth is that self-published books can be INE quality right from impeccably superb like traditional publishing level to

pretty much rubbish now what we've seen over the last 15 years is that there's been an incredible buildup of the freelance Network for authors who are self-publishing I'm talking about a great network of cover designers of copy editors of proof readers of formatters now those do cost money right and the more money you put into the book on the back end the better your sales chances once it actually gets published and at least in my experience the main thing that separates self-published books from traditionally published books is copy editing once I was in a writer

for him and this guy complained like he was so angry that he got a bad review his very first review on Amazon from someone who complained that they found typos and he had posted the very first chapter of his book and I took a look and I'm like you have three typos on the first page as a reader if I'm finding three typos on the very first page of your book that does not make me want to continue look I know a lot of you are good storytellers right you can create good scenes you have

great interaction but it is a very highly specialized skill set to be able to do good copy editing so if you want yourself public book to be the type of book that is regarded as high quality you absolutely have to invest in a really good copy editor so there's a copy editor who works with me at book Fox her name is Danielle dial she does incredible work seriously she's like a genius on the page and we'll catch a billion mistakes that you did not think were in your book and she's like well here's the fix

but what I love about copy headers is in the end they make you look good and I know that it feels bad to find all those little red marks on your page like you want to believe that your writing is PR and perfect but either you find those mistakes now or readers will find them and then they're going to give you one star and what Danielle excels that is making you look really good really professional I'll put a link to her copy editing page in the description and I would highly recommend that if you have

a book coming out you should definitely use her fourth lie that we often hear is self-published books don't sell you know what else doesn't sell traditionally published books there's an off decided number that the average book sells 3,000 copies but average actually doesn't tell you very much right cuz that's being pulled upwards by these Harry Potter bestsellers while the vast majority of books aren't moving that many copies a more realistic number would be median sales meaning half the books sell under this number half the books sell over this number and I've seen various numbers on

this the lowest one I've ever seen is 250 meaning half of all published books sell under 250 copies I've also seen a number that's a little bit closer to a th000 so you know you can pick your number but ultimately most books do not sell over 1,000 copies and being traditionally published there's no guarantee that you can actually move copies of your book there are tons of flops in the traditional publishing space as well as the self-published space so I'll just say there are tons of examples out there of self-published authors who are selling tens

of thousands of copies hundreds of thousands of copies and I'll also say that writing skills and marketing skills are very different skill sets just because you can write doesn't mean you can market and just because you Market doesn't mean you can write your goal really is to get better at both there actually are a lot of advantages that self-publishers have that traditionally publish authors don't have one you have the ability to price your book I cannot emphasize how amazing this is I was just checking out a publisher who they charge $38 for a hardback and

$22 for a paperback how many copies of your book do you think you're going to sell at those price points the publisher is going to make a ton per book but the author is only going to get about five readers as a self-publisher you can price your book at a point that makes it an easy entry point for authors who are just like huh this looks interesting sure I'll try it it's five bucks two self-published authors can control sales in other words they can say hey my book's onale sale for 99 or $1.99 go and

buy it and they can send out emails or post alert on social media to let everybody know hey like here's a sale and really Drive traffic with a traditional publisher you don't get to control the sales price like that and lastly you can do things like BookBub BookBub and there's a whole host of other imitators out there are basically discount sites for books where you say hey I'm going to Discount my book to say 99 Cents they include the book in their email and you get a couple thousand readers yes it does cost money but

I find that most authors tend to recoup their money in the very first first round of sales and then if those authors go on to buy more of your books then that's all profit but if you're watching this and you're thinking you know I don't think I'm that good at marketing well you can get better and I would recommend that you take my course your first bestseller there are 45 videos teaching you step by step by step how to get your book into the hands of readers who will enjoy it that's one of 11 courses

in my book box Academy and the link to that I'm going to post below the fifth lie is you can't make a living self-publishing this is a real head Shaker and honestly I don't know why this lie persists cuz there are tens of thousands of writers out there who make a full-time living sometimes quite lucrative off of self-published books now if my sole goal was to make money and I had to choose between traditional publishing and self-publishing I would definitely choose self-publishing by the way my sole goal is not to make money by the way

but just in case yours is and that's because self-publishing allows you so much more control over the product it's so much quicker and you get to keep most of the profits yes there are some literary Superstars that traditional publishing definitely worked out for them obviously right but for the average person you have a better shot of striking at Rich through self-publishing is usually $1 to $2 with a traditional publisher while with self-publishing like every book of mine that I sell I get $4 to $5 that's anywhere from 2 to five times as much revenue yes

there were more upfront costs I had to pay a copy editor I had to pay a cover designer I had to pay a formatter but in the end I recoup those costs the very first day my book went on sale and from then on it was all gravy so if you want to make a living with self-publishing I'll give you a seven-step process really quick here it is one you choose a niche something like like cozy romance or hard sci-fi or Christian ya you're looking for a niche with hardcore readers who consume massive amounts of

books in that genre and you should actually enjoy reading in this genre too you can't just like pick one opportunistically and be like I'm going to make a lot of money on this you actually have to love the genre of course of course two write in a series right Standalone books don't earn money you want to earn money write a series ideally the series is going to have the same characters and the same world that way you don't have to make it all up every single time you start it's also a better hook for your

readers because they want to revisit your world and see those characters again I'll also say that it's better to have an episodic series rather than a Continuum series an episodic series is something like Sherlock Holmes or another detective story at the beginning of each book you basically start over and it's a new case and it's a self-contained book a Continuum series would be something like Game of Thrones right where you have an overarching story that carries through seven books it's very fast to turn out episodic books and readers get hooked on them very easily three

release books regularly to do this well you have to write quickly I'm talking about two to three books a year and remember these should be shorter books you don't get paid more for writing longer books you get paid the exact same amount regular short books gets you into the money fourth step discount the first book in the series to 99 it's really best to do this once you've already published three or four books because then that 99 cent book is working as a hook or a loss leader to bring the reader into your world and

then they want to go on and buy the rest of your books fifth step do book bub or similar Services you lower the price point of your book to 9 some people say do free I don't agree with that philosophy I think 99 cents is better that way you get massive sales for that first book you get lots of reviews on it and a certain number of people are going to filter through and then read the rest of the books in the series which leads me to my six step that's when they buy the rest

of the books in the series and the longer your series is the more Revenue potential that you have and then seventh step is just to evaluate like what's going well is there some part of the chain that's breaking down does your first book is it not enough of a hook that it makes readers want to read the rest of it okay well that's going to be a problem do you not have enough books in the series or are there books in the series which are didn't get reviewed very well or getting low stars or something

anyway you figure out what went well what you could do better the next time and then you start the next series the sixth lie you can't get a self-published book into a bookstore okay so it is easy to get the possibility of distribution all you have to do is sign up with Ingram Spark It's not that expensive formatting and cover design can be a little tricky I've encountered a lot more problems with Ingram spark than uploading to Amazon but still like that gives you the possibility of distribution but here's the trouble the possibility is very

different than actually getting into a bookstore bookstores could order your book but what makes them want to and if you think about it it is difficult for traditional Publishers to get their books into actual bookstores as well let's just break down the numbers 3 million books published just in the United States alone every single year a regular average Barnes & Noble can carry about 100,000 books and of those 100,000 say 10,000 are actually titles published that year so do the math on this one right 3 million books 10,000 new books in a bookstore that means

1third of 1% of new books actually make it into a bookstore and the vast majority of those are probably going to be traditionally published books right the main reason being because they have sales reps who come and have a relationship with the book buyers and they say these are going to be the big books of the season and the buyer says okay we'll purchase those do you have a sales rep this is part of the problem for self-publishing but don't despair right as a self-publisher you do have some Avenues where you can get an advantage

one is to go local right if you go to local neighborhood bookstores they are usually Overjoyed that they can feature a local author and remember independent bookstores hate Amazon with a passion so if you go and offer to sell your books on consignment they usually say yes but lastly remember this important tip online sales are going to be your bread and butter it's your ego that wants to see your book on a bookshelf in a physical bookstore but that's not actually the best sales tactic physical bookstores is probably not going to make a huge bump

in your sales so push all of your marketing effort towards selling your book online and don't let your emotions Cloud good business sense seventh lie self-publishing limits your career prospects I do not think there is shame around this the way that there used to be shame I mean there are so many examples of self-publishing leading to traditionally published deals from Andy Weir to El James the membrane between self-publishing and traditional publishing It's Getting Thinner and thinner I mean if someone really looked down on me for self-publishing a book I would look at them and be

like are you aware what decade you're in it just depends on what you want as an author right self-publishing is not the right choice if you're going for Prestige it's not going to get you prestige no but there are a lot of good reasons why self-publishing would be the right option for you look at the example of hu ho right at first he did traditional publishing with wool and then he decided after a few books he's like I think I can do this on my own and make more money and do it better in the

end what he sold to Publishers was just the print rights and he kept digital rights for himself because he was making $150,000 a month on digital sales good decision Hugh really in the end what matters is Book Sales that's how the industry measures success doesn't matter if your self-publish or traditionally publish you move books that's successful eighth Li self-published books aren't taken seriously by readers honestly I don't think 99% will notice if you have a good-look cover that looks traditionally published and you have copy edits nobody's going to know what they want is a good

story they want a nice cover that promises the story will be good and they want reviews because it reduces their risk of purchasing if others liked it they probably will too take an author like Christopher palini who when he was 15 years old he wrote the first book in The Aragon series no one cares that it was self-published no one cares that he was 15 they cared that the story was fantastic and the ninth lie about self-publishing is you need a huge platform to succeed I do think platform helps more if you are publishing non-fiction

right you have some measure of authority so people are like ooh I want to buy their book but really for fiction All You Need is a gripping story and people will get hooked on your storytelling does flatform help of course it helps like you have a platform it's not like I'm going to tell you to throw that away I'm just saying if you don't have a platform you shouldn't feel terrible about it Jane fredman has an excellent newsletter called the hot sheet which covers industry news about writing in books and I'd recommend you subscribe to

it recently she analyzed 50 debut authors to see who had connections like how did they get published and she said 20% of them had no obvious connections they hadn't gone to a fancy school they didn't know an editor they hadn't published a book before and that's in traditional publishing so I would wager the amount of successful self-published authors who have zero platform at all it's probably much higher just remember this in the end your platform is your books