In August of 2011 I had what I believed to be a complete manuscript in my hands. I'd revised and fussed over it, on and off, for months. I was back in Vancouver with no project for the foreseeable future, so I pulled it back off the shelf (well... let's be honest here. I exhumed it from the landslide of papers that surround my desk) and started to look for people to submit it to. Then I went to a party.
It was a sunny afternoon and time for E's yearly backyard birthday party. Also at the party was a local author that I knew was friends with the hosts and had seen at some of their other events. I had wanted to speak to him for ages because I really enjoyed his books and found him an entertaining speaker when being interviewed. Finally the introduction came and we all settled into a very pleasant chat.
I asked how his books were doing and he started talking about his experiences and the publishing industry in general of late. I could have substituted "music industry" or "movie industry" for "publishing industry." The comments were all very familiar.
"Everyone is afraid of losing their jobs. No one wants to be seen to be taking risks. Everything is a rehash of things that were successful before. The budgets are shrinking every day. No one is sure what to do about the new technologies. Piracy and self-publishing is eating away at the traditional publishers." Of course I'm paraphrasing. Hopefully I haven't said anything here that he didn't say and doesn't agree with. My point is this - as music and movies have gone, so goes the book world.
I wasn't particularly surprised, but it did seem an opportune moment to ask the question that had been dogging me for months.
"So if, say, one were hoping to publish one's first book, would you recommend that one self-publish or look for a traditional publisher?" And yes, I did put it in the royal third person. I didn't want to ask "what do you think I should do?", I wanted to get a more general impression. It was clumsy, but it seemed to do the job.
His response was "go with the self-publishing." There was no hesitation in his voice.
He said - and I'm paraphrasing from ancient memory again - that even if you do manage to get extremely lucky and get picked up by a publisher, there was a good chance that they wouldn't give it much attention, and as soon as the numbers started to die off they would relegate it to their back catalogue or let it languish. It would take a long time to get started and odds were extremely good that my time in the limelight would be breathtakingly short. He felt it was better to do it yourself, and that one would likely earn more money from selling a few copies and keep the bulk of the proceeds, than selling a few more through a publisher and only getting a tiny fraction. If it became a huge success there was fun and money to be had, but for a new author without some kind of pre-existing public interest it was just as likely to become a huge success as a self-published book.
As it happens, I had recently become aware of a BookBaby - a new division of the venerable CDBaby. CDBaby is well know in the independent music community as a business that manages the process of getting your indie music release into places like the iTunes Music Store, and managing all the messy contracts and accounting. For musicians they've been a god-send. You send them a few copies of your CD, they handle everything and cut you a cheque whenever something gets sold.
BookBaby was promising the same thing. Send them the manuscript and they would convert it to the various eBook formats and get it onto the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Nook, and Sony eReader.
I made the decision. Given that there was no reason why I couldn't pull a self-published title back and give it to a "proper" publisher later, should someone show an interest, I figured that there was absolutely nothing to lose in getting the book out there as an eBook without further hesitation.
What I didn't anticipate at the time was how much easier it would be for this particular book to be produced as a physical book than an eBook. Of course the story is hardly over at this point, but so far the "real" book has been much more rewarding than the eBook for me as the author. This has as much to do with the eBook format as anything else. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next few stories will be about my experiences with on demand printers and BookBaby. Stay tuned.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Adam
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