Traditional vs Independent Publishing

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking lately about indie publishing. There are some aspects that I find appealing about it. For one, you publish your novel the way you want. You don’t risk some editor, who doesn’t necessarily care if you’re happy, messing with your work. I haven’t thought about that until now because one of my best friends has been editing my novel.

I like that indie publishing is quick. If you know what you’re doing, and you’ve formatted everything properly, you can have your novel on a nook or a kindle pretty quickly. That’s definitely appealing because I don’t like waiting.

However, as far as I know, it’s not easy to go from an independently published ebook to have your novel in print. I want my work on paper. I don’t want to only accommodate half of the readers out there. I, myself, prefer a book to an ebook simply because I spend too much time looking at a computer screen as is.

With indie publishing every bit of advertising lies on your shoulders. With traditional publishing, the advertising lies mostly on the publisher. Advertising all by yourself isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Not everyone has thousands of people subscribing to their blog or 60,000 people following them on twitter. I have 467 twitter followers, and while I appreciate them a lot, that’s not a big audience for my work.

The traditional publishing company gets to pick your book cover for you. Now, I’m sure you get to give input, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you want. If I publish independently, I can hop over to sites like http://www.everything-indie.com/ and tell them what I want in the cover. For a small fee, they will make me a book cover.

That brings up another issue: Money. It is my firm belief that money is the root of all evil, but there’s no surviving in this world without it. That being said, paying for a book cover and maybe editing, if you’re publishing independently, is not always an easy task. I have no money at all. That doesn’t make it easy to pay for things. I’d find a way to pay for it if I decided to publish independently, though.

So, I’ve discussed this with my editor and we’ve figured out a pretty solid plan. If by September of 2012 I’ve exhausted all of my agent querying resources, and no one wants to represent me, I will seriously consider indie publishing, which has always been my plan B.

(Original Post on June 16, 2011 at: http://dft.ba/-BSMeyers59 )