Trade, Self, and Vanity Publishing

Let's take a quick moment to review the basic differences between these things, as many people still confuse them.

In trade publishing (which is what the majority of the books on your shelves probably went through), you write a book, and the publisher pays you money for it. You retain copyright, and license some number of sub-rights to the publisher. They then pay other people for printing, cover art, copy-editing, etc, and when it's done they recoup those costs by selling the result to bookstores, who sell them to readers. You may be asked to participate in publisher-organized marketing, or choose to launch your own efforts. The overall financial risk is shouldered by the publishing company, and they split the profits with you, the writer, in the form of royalties.

In self-publishing, you act as your own publisher. You contract with people for the above-mentioned services necessary to produce your book. You retain copyright and (aside from whatever is necessary to get the books printed) retain sub-rights. Once you have books, you a) give them to family and friends (if this was done as a purely personal venture -- like, say, a genealogy) or b) start working your tail off to market the books to a larger readership. Bookstores will probably not buy them from you unless it's local history or some other niche market they have a strong reason to believe will pick your work up, but if you're really good at marketing you may still move enough copies to recoup your costs. The financial risk is shouldered by you, and you keep your profits.

In vanity publishing, you pay a company to act as your publisher. They provide variable services, depending on what you've paid for, usually at low quality and a fairly high markup (since they are now acting as a middle-man between you and the cover artist, etc). You have less control over the result than in self-publishing, and depending on the contract may have signed over a portion of your rights to the company. They may also require you, in that contract, to buy a certain minimum number of your own books. The company will not sell your books to stores; you have to do that yourself, and gain, they will probably not buy them from you. The company may sell you marketing assistance (again at a markup), or you can take on this burden yourself again. The financial risk is shouldered by you, but the company keeps some percentage of your profits.

By now it's probably obvious what I think of these various models. Trade publishing has its problems, certainly; I won't even attempt to deny that. Self-publishing has larger ones, if your goal is a wide readership and financial success. Vanity publishing is, to put it bluntly, a scam. A vanity press makes its money off writers, not readers; at best you're likely to end up with a readership you could have achieved via self-publishing, at a much higher price.

What are the problems of self-publishing? Let me say first that if you're performing a labor of love, this is a perfectly reasonable path. If, for example, your grandfather has written a memoir that you know his children and grandchildren would enjoy having on their shelves, then go to Lulu or a similar printing service and have some copies bound. As I understand their basic business model, you pay nothing up front; when an individual buys the book, part of the money goes to cover printing costs, and you and Lulu split the rest. Even if you decide to buy twenty copies yourself as gifts to those family members, your cost will still be lower than if you went with a vanity press.

But let's say you aim to make this a career. The fundamental difficulty with self-publishing (in the print sense) is distribution. To get into a wide array of stores, you need to be carried by a major distributor (of which there are very few), and they don't like picking up self-published books. If you can't get a distributor to take you on, then you have to contact each bookstore individually, and try to get the buyer there to look at your work. And they, like the distributors, rarely say yes.

Why is this? Because trade publishers, for all their problems, serve a very important function as gatekeepers. Their business mission is to identify what books readers are likely to buy, and then to produce them for the market. If they consistently guess wrong, they go out of business. As a result, bookstores trust their judgment -- at least to a greater extent than they trust the unknown self-published authors knocking on their doors. That crowd has no filter to separate the wheat from the chaff.

And in fact, bookstores assume (not without cause) that the SPAs are more likely to be selling chaff than wheat. Why? Because contrary to popular belief, trade publishers are happy, nay eager to buy good books from writers. Yes, it is absolutely true that this system isn't perfect; famously, J.K. Rowling was rejected by something like eight publishers before one of them picked up the first Harry Potter book. Publishing is an incredibly uncertain business. Sometimes the editor is just the wrong person for the story, or they like it but don't know how to market it, or whatever. But the truth is that the #1 reason a publisher rejects a manuscript is because the book just isn't good enough.

So bookstores look at self-published books and think, these are the ones editors wouldn't buy. Which isn't always true; some SPAs never submitted to a trade publisher at all. Still, from a commercial perspective, self-published books are a much larger gamble, and the risk just isn't worth the payoff. Estimates vary for how many copies your average SPB sells, but the numbers I've seen range from seventy-five copies to two hundred. For comparison, even an unsuccessful mass-market paperback probably sells several thousand. You can see why bookstores say "no."

Does that mean I think self-publishing is always bad? Not at all. Beyond the labor-of-love instances I've already mentioned, there's the possibility of the niche book. This could, for example, be a book of local history. A major trade publisher would have no reason to take that on; they need books that will sell throughout the country, and readers in Arizona are unlikely to be interested in the specifics of a Massachussetts town. It might sell really well in Massachussetts, though, so a determined author with a talent for self-promotion could probably talk local stores into stocking a few copies. If those sell, they'll stock a few more, and over time you'll have a good thing going. Ditto for something with a non-geographic niche appeal; if you know how to market your model-train book to model-train enthusiasts, you could do very well for yourself indeed.

This is where the Internet makes an enormous difference. Online communities make it much more possible to connect with your potential readership, but more than that, the Web also facilitates kinds of storytelilng that don't really work in the mainstream print market. Maybe your story is less a novel, more a soap opera: an ongoing serialized work with a large cast of characters whose narratives don't have clearly-defined endpoints. I've been following one online story of that sort, and it offers its own pleasures, that definitely wouldn't work in print. And again, if you're determined and good at self-promotion, you can leverage it for profit; crowdfunding is an increasingly common model for online self-publishing. Moreover, it doesn't involve the same amount of financial risk on the part of the writer as print self-publishing would.

So the situation boils down to this:

For more information on how trade publishing works, see the My First Novel essays.