After having gotten into self-publishing, I’ve seen a lot of people talking about getting into it, too, and read about a lot of their techniques and a lot of their results. Self-publishers seem to fall into three camps, all of whom I’ve been paying attention to with interest.
In camp one, we have the all-outer, the person who cashes out their retirement fund and quits their job to get that first book off the ground and out into the world. They generally have spectacularly flashy book covers, and a lot of blog and forum posts that read like this “spent $5,000 on self-publishing first book, so far nothing, what am I doing wrong?”
Weeeeeeell, I don’t know what you’re doing wrong with your advertising or if your book is actually any good, but I know you’ve chucked all your eggs into one basket there, and that just seems a mistake. I am not a business owner, I’m not even successful at this self-publishing thing (yet!), but I have worked for several small businesses and none of my bosses would ever have dreamed of dumping 5k into one item like that and then hoped to make enough profit on that to do it again and then pull in a living besides. People often hear that I wrote a book, and then they assume I’m living high on the hog from my artistic profits. I think the all-outers are suffering from the same delusion — one book, well-edited and with a beautiful cover = total instant success. Any small business owner/small business considerer can tell you that’s a fantasy.
Then in camp two, we have the slap-dashers. The “eh, I wrote a book. I self-published it last week, now I’m working on two more, I’ll probably put those out next week.” These people generally don’t have an editor, or if they do, they expect that person to fix everything they get wrong and otherwise don’t worry about it. Cover art? Well, that doesn’t matter as long as the book is good, right? Spelling? I personally had one slap-dasher tell me he tried to work with an editor once, but they wanted him to spell things correctly. He rolled his eyes in disdain telling me the story.
These people don’t give a crap about what they’re doing, they don’t care if they succeed or not, or they care passionately but figure they don’t need to actually learn anything or improve anything in order to do that. That writing is an art, and art can be done any old way, and artists succeed or fail based on dumb luck and nothing to do with skill. I think they might suffer from the same delusion as the all-outers — one book = success. If you wrote a book, that should qualify you for instant success. The cover and editing don’t really matter, what matters is you wrote a book!
In the final camp, we find the in-betweeners. These are folks who spend time and money on good cover art but don’t go overboard getting the absolute most amazing thing money could ever possibly buy. They get editing, but they do it how they can, and they try to learn every time they get an edit back so they can improve and do better next time. They put out a book and then work on the next because they love what they do and they know that no matter how important that one baby was to them, there must be more. These are the researchers, the entrepreneurs, the people who advertise and make sure what they put out is quality but affordable for them and can earn back the investment.
I’d like to say that one camp seems to succeed over another, but it seems like there’s no solid state. It kind of depends on what you think success is, too. I’ve talked to slap-dashers who sell 5 books a month and think that’s rad, and all-outers who can’t sell a single one but feel the product was worth the money. And each of them have get-lucky stories.
The in-betweeners do seem to have the most steady rate of success, though. Almost none of them broke out with a crazy hit, almost all of them have felt like failures, and almost none of them have given up. Lots of them make modest livings at this, and lots of them didn’t with their first book, their second book, or even their third.
I will be keeping my eye on them.
