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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing

Dr. Joel Orr

joel@joelorrcoaching.com

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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT & LEGAL NOTICE:

You Do NOT Have the right to reprint, resell, auction or re-distribute The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing. You May NOT give away, sell, share, or circulate it or any of its content in any form. The copy of The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing you have received is for your own personal use. The e-book is fully printable and one printed copy may be made for your own personal use. You are also welcome to copy the e-book to a CD-Rom, zip disc or other storage media for backup for your own personal use. Electronic books and reports, also known as e-books, are protected worldwide under international copyright and intellectual property law, the same as printed books, recorded material and other literary works. Under copyright law, Literary Work includes computer, computer program, software, and all related materials sold online, including electronic books (e-books) and Adobe Acrobat PDF les. Copyright infringement, trademark infringement and theft of intellectual property are serious crimes. Copyright infringement is a felony and civil nes for conviction of such infringement now begin at $150,000 per infringement. Criminal nes for infringement begin at $250,000 and may also result in up to ve years in prison. Please help stop Internet crime by reporting illegal activity to: info@joelorrcoaching.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: No part of The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system, without express written and signed permission from the author (with the exception of brief quotations as used in reviews or discussion groups, with attribution to the author and source).

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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

Should You Self-Publish Your Book?

The short answer: Probably. But why? This brief report discusses the pros and cons of self-publishing, and lists alternatives to doing so. Technology has caused major shifts in the publishing industry. Before, authors were at the mercy of publishers. Books were published strictly on the publishers terms; the author The balance in recent years has shifted in favor of the author. In this report youll learn: A brief history of publishing The traditional relationship between authors and publishers The role of the literary agent What has changed and why What this means to you How to learn more There are reasons to work with traditional publishers, but they are no longer compelling for most authors. Read this report and understand your options. Best wishes!

www.joeltrainsauthors.com Copyright 2011

The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

A Brief History of Publishing

My parents were printers when I was growing up. They had one of the rst offset print shops in Puerto Rico in the fties, and then in Israel. So I grew up knowing something about printing and publishing. Typewritersmanual and electricwere a fact of life for me, and I learned to type at a young age. The notion of putting words on paper, laying them out attractively, having ways to produce large letters in different stylesall of these and more were part of my early awarenesses of the world. I learned that the then-current world of publishing was descended from Gutenbergs fteenth-century invention of moveable type (which was actually predated by hundreds of years by a similar invention in China; but Gutenbergs is what caught on in the Western world). In short order, writing and publishing became clearly separate professions. Over time, the capital-intensive part of the book businessprinting and publishingbecame its center of gravity. And up through history, until the 1990s, the publishers held all the cards. An author had to petition publishers to have his or her work published. The whim of the publisher determined whose works did or did not become books. And for those fortunate souls whose manuscripts were accepted, the publishing contracts were very one-sided. Basically, the publisher acquired all rights to the work, and gave the author (at best) 10% of any protswith the determination of what constituted profits left to the publisher. This is still largely true today.

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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

But for most of the world, publishing and all of its intricacies did not begin to become familiar until Apple came out with the Macintosh, and popularized desktop publishing. The Apple LaserWriter was what made it possible for anyone to generate pages that looked comparable to commercial productions, such as books, newspapers, and brochures. Todays technology has rened and integrated those concepts, and added automatic machinery. There are now machines for publish on demand, which can print a book of up to 300 pages, print a color cover, and bind the bookat a cost of about $5 for a 200page soft-cover book. This is what manufacturing production people call, economic order quantity one; that is, you can economically produce a single copy of a book. Publish-on-demand companies like iUniverse, BookLocker, and Xulon Press bundle in some other services to create packages for which you get some help and a few copies of your nished book for a few hundred dollars. Other companies, notably Lulu.com and CreateSpace (an Amazon.com company), let you publish for free and simply take their share from each books sale. Specialized printers now offer mass production prices in small quantities; I recently ordered 500 copies of a 5.5 x 8.5 220-page book with a color cover for $3.15 each. This changes the economics of publishingand with it, the options available to an author.

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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

Publishers
WritersMarket.com lists them all, and lists their requirements in terms of proposals. Some only accept proposals through agents; thats important to know, of course. I heard a publishing industry expert talk about the fact that a publisher may spend $20,000-$30,000 promoting your book. What she didnt mention is that they may not, regardless of what you were told during your contract negotiations. You may discover you have. like Esau in the Bible, sold your birthright for a mess of pottage. Its not that they are intentionally deceptive. Its the way things work: The vp of marketing has a budget, and at the beginning of the year she or he decides which books on the list get how much of that budget. It is not a negotiated amount; it is a command decision. As an author, you have no control over it. Another point she made was that in your book proposal, the publisher wants to know just how you are going to promote your book. In other words, you are expected to promote your book. Well, if youre going to invest in book promotion anyway, wouldnt you rather get most of the revenues from sales than receive the 10% the publisher will give you? If it sounds as if I hold publishers in less than the highest esteem, its because I do. No offense intended to any particular publishing executives. Its a system that developed in a time when an author had no alternatives, and thats how it works. Today, you have alternatives. At the very least, self-publish and demonstrate a market for your book. Then get a good negotiator to act on your behalf with a publisher.

www.joeltrainsauthors.com Copyright 2011

The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

Agents
Over time, publishers could not handle the ood of unsolicited manuscripts. This gave rise to the profession of literary agent, a person who would be retained by an author to pitch their work to publishers, in exchange for 10-15% of royalties. For the author, this meant that the challenge of nding a publisher was replaced by the challenge of nding an agent who would undertake to represent them. Agents, however, can be as difcult to engage as publishers. An author typically queries an agent, with a packet of information customized according to the agents request. The agent often takes weeks or months to respond, and may not respond at all. In the past, agents frowned upon multiple parallel queries; today, that is more accepted. Many agents have been slow to move into the Internet age; some still have no Web presence, and many still will not accept electronic submissions. This is a eld in upheaval. Do you need an agent? If you are intent upon standard publishing, then Id say you probably do. For a few dollars, register on WritersMarket.com and get access to their database of agents and publishers. For your membership fee, you also get an on-line system for keeping track of what you sent to whom, and when. Check out guidetoliteraryagents.com, too.

www.joeltrainsauthors.com Copyright 2011

The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

The Pros and Cons

Before the advent of all the new technology that supports these production options, there were two ways to get published: Standard publishing, and vanity presses. A vanity press simply produced your book for you at your expense. The vanity, of course, is a reference to the fact that you are the only judge as to whether your book merits publication, whereas getting a deal with a standard publisher implied that your book had made it through some vetting process. While there is something to the argument, there is less than meets the eye. But there are many myths, mysteries, and cultural norms in standard publishing, and many of them persist, despite the fact that standard publishing is crumbling before our eyes. Similarly, the stigma associated with the vanity press persists in the eyes of some aspiring authors, especially older ones. Theres a lot of drama and sociology that can be explored in this subject, but this is not the place for it. Instead, I would like to make a simple recommendation: Self-publish. Here are some pros and cons for self-publishing. Pro: Time to market. You can have a nished manuscript and cover turned into an available-for-sale book in a couple of days. Standard publishers take months to over a year. Revenue potential. Depending on exactly how you do it, you can keep up to 80% of the retail price of your book. With a standard publisher, its 5-10%. Control. You own your copyright. With a standard publisher, there are issues around intellectual property.

www.joeltrainsauthors.com Copyright 2011

The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

Con: Money up front. A small-to-non-existent matter, in the light of Lulu.com and its ilk. But a standard publisher produces your book without any cash from you. You will still have to buy any copies you want at wholesale, which is 40-60% of the cover price. (But forget about advances; today, they are at best token for new writers, and often non-existent.) Entree to distribution networks. Standard publishers know the buyers and how to present your book to them. Editing. A publisher will do a great job, and also, of course, look after all the details of book design and printing. But here is a simple resolution to this apparent dichotomy: Selfpublish rst, and sell some copies; then approach a standard publisher. By taking this path, you eliminate two big risks for the publisher: Will the book proposal ever become a manuscript? And is there any demand for this title? If you self-publish and sell a thousand copies, you are presenting a viable commercial property to a publisher. They may want to edit it and redesign the cover, but a thousand copies sold means there is a demand. Youve reduced the probability of loss for the publisher, and this can be reected in the contract you negotiate with them. As author and publisher, you can produce your book in multiple forms: Print. Standard book, soft or hard cover. Electronic. E-book, usually PDF. One burgeoning market: The Amazon.com Kindle electronic book reader. Audio. Recording, usually MP3. You can market this as a CD or a downloadable le. Post it on iTunes, or sell it via Audible.com or

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The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

other audio libraries. Lulu.com and others allow you to publish CDs with no up-front costs, too; there are also CD-on-demand companies. Standard publishers used to have exclusive access to distribution outlets. This is no longer the case. Amazon.com will accept your self-published book in its Advantage program. Several large book distributors have their own publish-on-demand services. In sum: There is no reason NOT to self-publish today, even if your ultimate goal is for your book to be picked up by a major publisher.

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www.joeltrainsauthors.com Copyright 2011

The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing!

Dr. Joel Orr

Next Steps
Once you have your manuscript, just head over to Lulu.com and publish it. If you dont like the results, you can change it. There are numerous other publish-on-demand providers; use your favorite search engine to nd them. Want to nd out if my coaching can help you nish your book? It takes about 20 minutes and we can do it on the phone. And youll get your questions answered. Email me for an appointment: joel@joelorrcoaching.com.

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