> But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.

so is the only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?

For most authors the advances are pretty laughable, too. There is a very small percentage that publishers throw all their weight behind, offer generous advances to, marketing resources, etc. The rest of those they sign are more like "filler".

I can't speak for all writers, but here are a few reasons I have seen some authors going with a trad publisher:

* Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.

* Translations. There are some great untapped translation markets out there (like Germany). Some authors self-publish the English version of their books and sell translation rights to a publisher. The publisher then does the work of translating and republishing in the target countries, taking that effort off the author. The royalties are lower, but funding high-quality translations can cost a fortune and for many authors offloading that cost and effort can be worth it.

* Audiobooks. Similar to translations. Author may publish the ebook themselves and sell audio rights. Good narrators can cost a fortune, and many authors can't justify that outlay themselves. A trad audiobook publisher can get access to the best narrators and fund the entire production if the author doesn't have the means or desire to do it themselves.

I’d add (for fiction the only market I have exposure to):

- the editor: if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books. Many people seem to think editors are just marking up your punctuation. In reality they are more akin to product managers in software. They help set the tone of the books and ensure that the vision is adhered to.

- which leads me to copy editors. The traditional publishers employ all the best ones. You can hire independent copy editors but their quality is a crapshoot. And you don’t find out until it’s too late.

- the sales rep network. If reps like your book they will get it in front of people. Independent of marketing the boots on the ground factor can make a huge difference.

Now, you won’t necessarily get any of these benefits going with a publisher but you can’t get any of them self publishing.

> if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books

I've also heard about mediocre editors that waste a lot of author time, and bad editors that ruin the project.

My developmental editor for my semi-technical book was “fine” but he didn’t do any of the structural re-factoring I did for my second edition. The company was using a new set of copy editors for the second edition and they were much better than the first.

Overall I can’t really complain about the editing but I think the benefits were relatively modest.

The major publishers seem to have gutted their editing staff over the last decade or so, and submitted manuscripts changed little before publishing. The primary editor you get barely has time to read it, and an outsourced copy editor (who are probably the better ones, yes).

Do you think I could offer English->German translation services to indie authors as a reasonable side income?

Do you know a good place to get to know them or start out building some connections?

I have been doing it in the past (mostly for ads and other marketing content) but it paid very little (was working freelance for an agency) but I enjoyed it a lot.

To be honest I'm not sure. It seems like _a ton_ of work to put out a high quality translation. I do not know how much time and money translators spend on each project but can imagine it being a lot. For example, some authors may expect a legit highly-paid translator to work with their own German proofreader etc to ensure quality of the output.

(Tangentially, I think Germany has some special laws that you as the translator would need to be familiar with. For example I think the translator needs to grant rights to the original author to republish the work. Not 100% sure on this, but worth checking!)

Unfortunately there is not much information for this online (atleast from a quick search I didn’t find much) Most seems to be related to working together with publishing houses (I loathe the German publishing houses so that’s definitely no option).

I would prefer working directly with an independent author - when I have a bit more time I’ll check out how to best get in contact with them.

Not sure about the legal side of it, but I have a friend who works in German copyright and who could probably help figure that part out.

One place to get started might be the Alliance of Independent Authors: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in getting the lay of the land? They might have some information about how their authors tend to use translation services. Although I'm sure there must be some translator communities out there that could provide even more focused info.

Great advice, thanks! I’ll try out some stuff let’s see how it goes.

> Audiobooks ... Good narrators can cost a fortune

To be specific, between $200 and $300 per finished hour, and a finished hour is about 9,000 words. It can cost more if you want two or more narrators to handle male/female parts (there's a lot more editing involved).

I know at least one self-published author who does create audiobooks for some of their works, but does so at a loss. Even at $15 per audiobook sale (through bookfunnel, so there's little overhead), making back the $3k they pay for the narration is a pretty high bar for a relatively niche market.

> * Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.

I think it's a validation thing, largely. If you get trad-published but the book does poorly—well, at least you got trad-published, so you must not be too awful (although... if you're in certain "hot" niches, there's some real crap put out, that looks like it was barely even edited), but your book just didn't land well. It happens. But you're an author, for sure.

If you self-publish and your book doesn't do well—did you market poorly? Would it have done better with a trad publisher? Are you... in fact so terrible at writing you shouldn't call yourself an author, and it didn't sell because it's total crap? You may never know!

Since there's not real, real money in it unless your book's such a hit you get movie deals and such (with rare outliers who make it big-enough purely on book sales but don't get adaptation interest) it's largely about being an author, so having that validation up-front has real appeal.

It's probably the prestige. Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

Most new authors are subsidized by their day job. It’s a huge moment in an authors life when they start making money exclusively from writing. A moment most never get to.

Same deal with most board game designers. The vast majority are subsidized by their day job, and aren't ever going to make serious money from designing games.

I know a guy, for example, that worked two years in his spare time on one game, got picked up by a publisher, ended up in Barnes and Noble and was considered a success by the publisher (they even requested and released an expansion), and the guy got only $9,000 in royalties (with no advance) for all his efforts.

Pretty much the only people making enough money for it to be their sole form of income are either hired directly a publisher or are out there hustling constantly and signing like 8+ game designs a year, or have insanely cheap cost of living (one game designer mentioned how he made net income of $12k one year and was able to survive off that because they live super cheaply), or have somehow landed on a massive evergreen hit, like Azul or Carcassonne.

[1] https://twitter.com/JPacCantin/status/1647455444884156417

> Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

You think most new authors have wealthy families?

That is a very odd assumption, given how hard it is to write a book... and given how low the returns are... and given how many other ways there are to achieve prestige... and given how little people regard authorship these days as a measurement of it... and given how unlikely it would be for wealth to have an outsized representation in a career generally associated with poverty... and how all old authors were once new authors which would imply that most of them are wealthy too, which, not so.

I'm talking about contemporary literature. It has been this way historically and nothing about it has changed.

What historical data do you have?

Wikipedia. Most authors in the western cannon are descendants of aristocracy.

"Most authors in the Western cannon" as a group is not representative of most authors, Western or otherwise.

They are the representation of the _successful_ authors, though. Because they are the cannon now. So the OP is right.

He is not right. His original claim was that new authors are mostly wealthy. All he did was weaken his claim until it was (more, but not actually) supportable.

Further, to address your own point, they are not even the representation of successful authors. There's thousands and thousands of successful authors that aren't even near to being close to the gates of the Western canon.

Of course he is right. It's similar story to the early scientists whom all were independently wealthy. And your claim about 'thousands and thousands of successful authors' is just ridiculous when an average person doesn't even read a thousand books in his lifetime let alone considers most of the authors of these books 'successful'.

That's such a silly standard of success to think that one must be entered into the Western cannon to be considered successful. The number of authors that have made good money writing books far, far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the number of authors in the Western cannon.

In the 20th century, there have been hundred of thousands to a million different titles published. If even 10% of those authors made enough money to be considered a living wage, it absolutely dwarfs the number of authors in the cannon, which is on the scale of 100s, not thousands.

If the cannon is your standard, your standard excludes almost the entire industry.

If your standard of success is 'making good money' instead of leaving lasting impression and still being read hundreds of years after the author's death then you are still wrong. Only a tiny amount of all authors were able to make _any_ money from their books, let alone enough to live comfortable lives. Book publishing is like professional sport or entertainment, only the very top make any money. Hence if you are already wealthy you can keep trying and maybe finally you make it big. If you are poor you don't have that luxury.

I know plenty of authors and none of them are subsidized by wealthy families. All of them do it part time in the evenings out of a labor of love.

It is worth pointing out that there's nothing particular odd if it were the case that writing was subsidized by wealthy families. For the vast majority of the history of writing, writing was subsidized an left to monks, philosophers or aristocrats. It's only been in the relatively recent time period that writing was a potential occupation for anyone interested with enough skills/talent.

In my experience, in NY, the majority of people working in contemporary literature publishing are ivy leage graduates, mostly women, and they live off of their parents. I'm not judging, just stating my observation.

Literary fiction, yes. That market's so fucked that the vast majority of literary magazines don't pay at all and you'll often get sneered at for asking about pay.

Anyone trying to make any amount of money at writing writes genre fic of one sort or another. Fantasy or maybe sci fi, and probably "juvenile fiction" (tends to sell better to adults, too). Romance (which may or may not actually be straight-up porn, basically). Airport thrillers. Not lit-fic. Never, if your goal is to make any money at all.

And yeah, the publishing-side heavily favors people with money, lit-fic or not, for the reason that making a living at it requires excellent connections to get you directly into a high-paying part of it, or else years and years making less than it takes to live on in places like New York, to work your way up the ladder. Either way, that probably means family money. This phenomenon been mentioned, directly or obliquely, in IIRC all of: Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2018), Fussell's Class (1983), and The Official Preppy Handbook (Birnbach et al, 1980).

a traditional publisher will distribute your book through all of their sales channels. if you self-publish, it's very hard or near impossible to sell your book at a proper bookstore. the sales reps will also push the books onto independent booksellers, who might love the book and want to handsell it.

> only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?

A few really important things come to mind:

- Editing. I'm not talking about mere copy editing which you can get done reasonably cheaply, but rather having an editor that is reading through everything and giving feedback is hugely important.

- Layout and printing of the book There's a lot that happens between writing and having a polished book in your hands. You can contract all this out but it adds a lot of work.

- Distribution. While the burden of marketing a book has increasingly fallen upon the author these days, if you want your book to be on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble, then your much better off going with a traditional publisher.

- Prestige. Like it or not, the vast majority of people on Earth still look down upon self publishing. For some types of books this is less important: technical books and fantasy fiction books can go without in many cases (but if you want to use your book for credibility in something like consulting you'll still want a traditional publisher). But if you want to write on a serious topic it helps a lot to have an academic press publish your work, or if you want to really pursue writing literature you at least want some publisher that is recognized in your relevant community.

Currently I think the only really good use cases for self publishing are the fantasy fiction and niche technical book markets assuming you already have an audience. And even in those cases there are plenty of reasons to go with traditional publishers over self publishing.

Not sure why you’re getting so many downvotes. The first two are definitely real issues with a lot of self-published work.

I did not downvote, but just wanted to mention that the first two do not require a traditional publisher. In fact none of them do, but especially not the first two.

It is true that there are real quality issues with a lot of self-published work because you don't _need_ an editor to publish your book. Heck, you don't even need to do a self-edit pass. Write it and hit publish! But it is increasingly an expectation that you have one, because quality expectations are extremely high, especially for competitive money-making genres.

I started out self-editing and now pay for three professional edits for each release: developmental, copy, and proofread. Professional editors are not exclusive to traditional publishing houses.

I never claimed that they "require a traditional publisher", in fact I explicitly point out that you can pay for these yourself (though I can't imagine putting together a good team of editors without having prior publishing experience).

My point was that, in response to the parent claiming there's nothing traditional publishers offer, these are things that traditional publishers do in fact offer an author. If you write for a traditional publisher you mostly have to just worry about writing, and, unfortunately, marketing these days.

Correct on Distribution & Prestige. If you claim trad publishing isn't necessary at all, then explain to me how you get:

1) placed in bookstores

2) on the "upcoming books" circulars that the trads send out to likely "author talk" venues

3) reviewed in mainstream media

Ingram Spark provides global book store and library distribution.

In practice, that just means if someone walks into a bookstore and asks for your book, they can buy it without going through Amazon.

Yup, and if they think it'll sell then book stores can stock up more. Many book stores don't stock unless the book is distributed as returnable (in case it doesn't sell). Whether self pub or trad pub, unsold books returned by stores come back out of the author's cut. In many cases it doesn't even make sense for the author to physically reclaim returned books as the shipping and storage are more expensive, so they get destroyed.

the funny bit is, you have to set a "retail price" in every country they operate in, and if you set it too low, the bookstore has a loss on each book. So you have to keep increasing the price until the margin is positive.

just in case someone in Australia goes to a bookstore and asks for it :)

No. I think the actual answer is "real-life SEO."

Say you have a Mexican restaurant in NYC. There must be hundreds of them, right? But imagine that someone in NYC googles "Mexican restaurant," and your restaurant is the first search result that comes up. That's worth a lot of money.

Self-publishing is like opening your own restaurant, while being published by a major publisher is like being on the first page of Google. When, say, CNN wants someone to be a panel expert, they might call you. You can get invited to conferences on the strength of that credential, and then build up to greater opportunities from there. In essence you've been socially validated.

That's worth quite a lot of money, though it's up to you if it's worth the cost. If you didn't have any fame going in, then I think it will be.

I read some reddit's post regarding to this topic.

The main takeaway was that living, or higher profits came only if you were being aggressive with ads.

Something like reinvesting 50% of the profits in digital ads (google, amazon).

If your book reaches near top #1, you've done it. Now I realized that most of the books I read published on XXI century had been very popular, top of the chart books in some genre, during some years and I found them trough reddit/forums recommendations. Books that you would still find regarded as best in Amazon.

Internet it's pushing Pareto principle to an extreme. The same goes for music, digital art, cinema, teaching, etc. Small artists are sheltering themselves in services like Patreon because they beat the giants in terms of selling.

Also I think people are reading less. My friends don't read. They pay +15/30 USD a month to Netflix and other services. That's money and time "taken away" from reading, books.

I know quite a few authors making a living without paying for any ads, but it's definitely a different type of effort. You have to really hone in on social media, getting large review teams, etc to get visibility for your books without ads.

IMO someone starting out is probably best off not spending money on ads. They have too many other things to perfect as they learn, which can only be done by publishing over and over. At least with fiction, you're looking at building a backlist - it's not a "write one breakout book and live off of it forever" kind of thing. After a few books published it can make sense to start setting an ad budget, and using ads successfully is a whole other learning curve to dive into.

It makes sense.

Do you have any advice to someone who would start writing fiction books?

I write a lot but only for myself. I don't care about money but I would like to persevere to some day be able to produce quality works in my own language.

I suggest starting by deciding what you do care about, since it's not the money. What does "producing quality works" mean to you? How do you measure it? If you write only for yourself you can be your own judge of quality. Or do you intend to measure your success in readership, or reviews?

If you decide you care about getting people to actually read your work, the next step would likely be narrowing down your genre and checking out what is doing well in that genre and niche. Look at Amazon top 100 lists for your categories, for example. What's selling? What's getting good or bad reviews? Open the Look Inside previews of the books. What POV are the stories written in, are there any patterns you notice in successful covers or blurbs, etc?

If you don't already read in your chosen genre, you probably want to start. At the same time, you can start writing. I'd personally suggest starting with short stories or novellas. Something you can finish and put out there asap to get the feedback loop going. Self-publishing is low barrier to entry, but there are a lot of balls to juggle. Each thing you put out will provide more information for your next book.

Before publishing your first book, decide if you want to go into Kindle Unlimited (Amazon exclusivity) or "wide" (publishing to all retailers). There are huge pros and cons of each, and some genres are better suited for one or the other. KU can be easier to get traction and start seeing page reads with, but it has its cons as well.

Also, decide if you want to use a pen name.

Try not to get too attached to the first stories you publish. They will probably suck. Personally I would not bother spending money on an editor or cover designer when you start out, but it depends on the genre and your own budget/priorities.

From there it's basically about iterating on what you have with every new book. There's way too much to cover in one comment and more specific genre-based strategies depending on what you're writing, so this is more like a dump of my general thoughts for someone starting out.

Thank you a lot.

This is great advice! As someone who also is starting out writing fiction and does care about making money in the long run (let's say I have about a year of runway) would you add anything else to the above advice?

Well for monetization, take all of the below with a grain of salt because my books only pay for themselves right now. My primary work is programming, so I'm by no means making a living off my writing!

The common advice I hear that resonates with me is to write "the most to-market book of your heart". If your _primary_ goal is money, it may be worth writing in a genre you know makes lots of it.

That's romance. Romance sells. Personally, I wanted to write sci-fi, but I also wanted to sell, so I write sci-fi romance. You don't _have_ to write romance to make money. I hear Thrillers is another popular category. I'm confident you can make it in pretty much any genre you choose, some might just take longer.

Genre fiction often has quite well-defined reader expectations. The trick is to figure out what readers expect in your chosen genre and then write that. A good bet is reading in the genre. Find other books that are doing well (Amazon and other retailer top-100 categories are good for this) and use them as examples. Watch out for outliers in the top-100 lists, though. Some authors are just so popular that their books will sell even if they're off market. I bet if Ruby Dixon released an off-market book, she'd be a best seller regardless. So it might be good to focus on high-to-mid-list authors who are not _huge_ staples but nevertheless consistently sell well.

I recently read a book called "7 Figure Fiction" by T. Taylor who talks about the concept of "Universal Fantasies": things that make a reader _feel_ something acutely when they read it. In Narnia, the fantasy of stepping through a closet and into a completely new world just invokes something in you. Just the thought of it kind of gives me goosebumps! Portal fantasy readers want that scene that makes them feel that. In sports romance, _something_ about having the main character wearing their love interest's jersey invokes an acute positive feeling in a reader of that genre. I bet if you read a bunch of sports romances, most of them will have that kind of scene. For the craft side, learning to recognize and put in those kinds of "Universal Fantasy" scenes can be helpful.

Then there's the marketing, which I suck at but which is unfortunately very important. One of the first things you'd want to do is start a newsletter. You can write a short "reader magnet" (can just be a short story or novella), sign up for BookFunnel, and use it to collect email addresses of potential readers. If you don't go with a reader magnet, you should _at least_ write something like a bonus scene that you offer readers at the back of your first book in exchange for a signup to your NL.

Once you do decide your genre and work out the technicalities of KU vs wide etc, before publishing you probably want to give away advance review copies of your book. Readers are more likely to click on your book if it has a star rating, so having early reviews of your new release can be very helpful. There are places that can help with this (Booksirens, Booksprout, etc), and you can also build a private ARC team (using something like your newsletter, or joining relevant FB groups where you can invite people to sign up for free early review copies).

If you listen to podcasts, there are _lots_ of author podcasts out there. One that I really liked is Six Figure Authors. They are on an indefinite hiatus now, but have a huge back catalogue of great episodes. The highlight of the podcast for me was Lindsay Buroker, a very prolific author who writes high fantasy and sci-fi. I think she dabbles in romance as well, but that wasn't her primary genre.

Thanks for that. I'm not dabbling in writing, but I love to hear the thoughts of people behind that.

Once again, thanks for such a thoughtful response. You’ve been a great resource and inspiration!

Also, its very difficult to make money on just one book. Most indie authors start seeing better sales after 5-10 books, having built up a loyal reader base.

I will say that I think succeeding as an author requires business skills that most of them appear to lack.

Amazon has started getting better at notifying me that there are new books available by an author from whom I've previously purchased books, but for a long time, and even now, I'd say most authors that I read aren't even getting me on an email list to eg tell me there's more stuff of theirs that I can buy. That's really business 101 and they're just not doing it. It's weird.

Not just higher profits, but if you are self-published or have no reviews yet then your book is usually on the 400th page on anyone's search.

I have still told nobody I know about my book, it's kind of an experiment, because it would be easy for me to email blast everyone I know to like it, but I really want people to read it without pre-conception and so far no sales, even though it is free! (or 0.99 cents on Amazon as that's Amazon)

Not telling anyone you know is probably smart. _If_ you write outside of the genre your friends group usually reads and a bunch of them visit and buy your book out of curiosity on Amazon, it can negatively impact the categorization of your books.

"oh these people who usually read historical fiction are buying this new medical thriller. We will show this medical thriller to other people with the same buying habits!"

Only readers of historical fiction who aren't your friends probably won't bother picking up a medical thriller.

Regarding reviews, this is why many authors build ARC teams. Reviews are really important, so they send out advance review copies.

OT Do you have examples of self published authors that you feel really stood out.

Check out the romance top 100 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Romance/zgbs/digital-tex...

I point out romance because that's what I write, but it's just one example. At a quick glance through the first few product pages there, most of those books appear self-published.

To get to #1 in these general categories on Amazon (Romance, Contemporary romance, Paranormal romance, etc), you need _a crapton_ of sales or page reads (if you are in Kindle Unlimited). These authors all stand out because they are making bank right now, as indicated by their presence on this list.

(Of course this does not reflect expenses like ad spend, but that's a whole other story that is near impossible to measure without info from the author themselves.)

Really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I recently wrote a book as a passion project and have been sitting anxiously on a contract. I'm not concerned about the money (I don't think my book will be a huge thing). My main motivation for going trad is the credibility as you somewhat alluded to. Do you think this is misguided on my part? Basically just so I can point at it in the future and say "a professional in the industry thought my book was worth printing with their name on it"

First, congratulations on finishing your book and getting a contract! That is a huge achievement.

I do not think your reasoning is misguided at all. If you think a traditional publisher affords you more credibility and a sense of satisfaction, that is reason enough to go with trad - _especially_ since as you say you're not concerned about the money, so there is no reason to worry about a traditional publisher's royalty rates compared to other options.

I believe your reason for wanting to go with a publisher is perfectly valid.

I have a question for you both (drakonka and turkeygizzard): Would you ever sell all or a portion of the rights to future earnings for your already published books to a third party? We've seen in the music industry PE firms basically acquiring known catalogues for the residuals and I'm wondering why that doesn't seem to happen in the publishing industry.

It happens quite a bit! I mentioned it in another comment here, but one thing that publishers can be very useful for is audiobook rights and translations. These are very costly to produce and it sometimes makes more sense to offload that part to a publisher. That is definitely something I'd consider doing if the opportunity came along.

Interesting! Do you have an email or way to get in touch by chance? I'd love to connect and ask more as I'm both writing a book and considering trying to build some stuff in this space. Alternatively, I'm at jb2956 at georgetown.edu!

Sure! Feel free to reach out at me at liza dot io.

get on Reedsy. You can put work out for bid, and the quality is quite high, IMHO.

Yes! I just used an editor from there who gave some phenomenal feedback for a very reasonable price

I wonder how much longer this will remain true. Audiobooks and translations seem like near-term target for AI.

That's a good point. I'm already in the process of using voice synthesis to narrate one of my books. It is still a huge time outlay to get to the quality bar I want, but much cheaper than paying for a narrator.

One thing working in favor of human narrators is the fans. Audiobook listeners can get very attached to certain voices, to the point where they'll read _anything_ that narrator works on regardless of the book's author or genre. If I had the budget for it, I'd definitely favor a well-known human narrator over AI for the visibility aspect of working with that person. But most authors don't have the budget to hire popular narrators, which is where less popular or entry-level narrators may find themselves losing work to AI alternatives. The narration quality is still higher with competent humans at this time as well, but that'll change.

For translations, I don't think I'll ever trust AI entirely (just like I don't trust myself as a human writer entirely!) I'd still be hiring a native-speaking human editor and proofreader if generating AI translations. Or more likely, I'd be hiring a human translator who is able to charge competitively by using AI in their workflows (and is also able to handle the quality checks etc for me).

True. On this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU

100% of the commenters are Matthew's fans. Did that lead to any sales for me? Not clear.

Audiobook natation isn't that expensive - the same narrators being used by publishing houses can do it for $200 an hour with it being 10-12k words per hour. Audiobook production is a few thousand for most books under the current system.

For most self-published authors, a few thousand dollars is a lot to drop into a project that may never pay out. And in many cases if they do have the money, it makes more business sense to spend that budget on editors and cover designers across multiple books.

But there are definitely people who fund their own audiobook production. And narrator royalty share options exist too, which some use (I would personally not). It's just not the default option or choice for many.

Accurate. Go on ACX and audition narrators. Also Voices.com.

The "per hour" rate usually means "per finished hour" not "per hour that they spent doing it."

Congrats. Is it fiction or non-fiction?

can you link some of your work? I'd like to give it a try :)

Afraid not! I write under a pen name. It's not a huge secret, but not something I advertise either for various reasons (the main one being that I'm still not as good as I'd like to be... but I'll get there).

Yeah, I wish not only self-publishing one’s own work, it also creating a small journal for publishing other writers was the first instinct of young writers, especially young writers of fiction, rather than seeking publication through more traditional outlets. I think small collectives of dedicated writer and self-publishers and self-producers is literature’s best hope for a new epoch of great writing.

So how do I find you guys? Because that's the biggest problem between the two of us. It should be based on my reading history, but goodreads is pretty useless, storygraph is better but still not that great.

I've been recently finding most good books by lengthy talks with GPT4 since I can explain in detail what I want, what I enjoyed and what I didn't, but that only works for books which are already popular (and even with old books, there are some great ones which are niche enough to never become really popular).

Unfortunately discovery still usually comes down to some manual sleuthing. It really depends on the genre, but I think you'll find that many ebooks on distributors like Amazon, Kobo, etc are self-published, so we're pretty easy to find! Check out the top 100 category in your favorite niche and you'll _likely_ find a good number of self-published titles there. If you come across an author you really end up liking, most have newsletters and/or a social media presence.

You can also sign up for ebook deal sites like BookBub, which send out deals for books in your preferred genre. They often feature self-published works. BB tends to be quite selective with what books they work with, so hopefully you'd find some nice quality work there (but of course it can always be a bit hit and miss).

On Substack, someone gave me "Legends & Lattes" which is a recent book I'd never have known about.

fyi: it's a "high stakes / low conflict" book. Yes, there are orcs, elves, and so forth, but they're kinda incidental to the plot. Not really sci-fi IMHO.

I've found myself enjoying more and more self published books. I wish a LITTLE more care was put into cover art and small details though. The cover art and book quality seem to be the two things that stick out like a sore thumb on self published works.

Even knowing that a lot of my favorite reads every year are self published, I am sometimes skeptical of a new book because the cover art looks like it was done poorly by someone in 15 minutes in photoshop. I guess I'm quite literally judging a book by its cover here but... In a world where you get a cover and a 2 paragraph blurb about a book... That is a significant factor.

I've advertised on Reedsy and gotten an excellent illustrator. It costs. You can query "Albert Cory" on Amazon and judge for yourself.

All the designs I got on 99Designs were crap.

Inventing the Future is you?

Yeah these are right on the cusp. Maybe I'm too discerning here. The font seems to blend into the background a bit more than one would expect and, "a novel" is way more faded than you would ever see in trad publishing.

But tbh most people might not even notice that. I don't really know. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what stand out sometimes.

that's me.

Trad publishers use offset printing, I believe. I'm not enough of an expert to know what effect that has. In self-publishing, you just provide a PDF.

They look good to me.

This is actually a huge factor - both the covers and the blurbs are hugely important. Self-published covers in competitive genres now have to be on-par with trad covers for a reader to bother clicking on them.

Niches where there may not be much trad coverage can be more forgiving. If you're writing in a small niche that not many other authors cover, you have more wiggle room with the cover art. But very popular genres with a high ceiling really benefit from a professional cover designer (or a professionally-designed premade).

Luckily, there are budget designers out there who are decent. I started out publishing short stories and doing my own covers and editing. My first works _sucked_ and I'm glad I used them more for practice and did not put money into them. Gradually as I started making more, I began investing those royalties in peripheral services: editing and covers. I now pay for covers, developmental edits, copy edits, and proofreads for each new book. I've improved a lot and am steadily building a readership, but my books still barely pay for themselves with the outlay required.

Not sure what your standards are, but a notably bad cover also shows the author has invested essentially $0 in their book. You can get passable quality work from sites like GetCovers for ~$10-$30 (I think I paid $25). Though it’s possible these are the kinds of covers you’re reacting negatively to.

“Real” covers from US-based artists start at more like $300, which is a more substantial outlay for a project that’s unlikely to pay it back.

Yeah I guess the issue is that there is a huge gap between notable bad, good, and what seems to come from trad publishing.

I dont think most of the covers are that BAD. They just stick out and its clear this book is self published.

I don’t think your impressions are entirely off-base here. If the author is so bad at judging the quality of the cover art (or, for me, the typesetting) I think it’s possible that it suggests a similar lack of judgement of quality for the writing (or, perhaps, editing) itself.

I would disagree - those skills (cover art, typesetting) are orthogonal skills to writing. These are some of the things (I assume) publishers would do for you.

Also, there are many things that I can judge to be good or bad, but that doesn't mean I can produce high quality examples myself. And getting high quality work from others isn't cheap, so it might be out of reach for self-published authors. Even if they know that the cover art isn't good, they might still use it, if they can't do better themselves and can't afford to hire someone who would do better.

That’s a very good point.

It's not about skills. It's about taste. Nothing wrong with getting someone else to do a cover or two. The question is whether the author had even the judgement to ask someone else for better work (in their taste). Same for typesetting. Same for proofreading.

And then there's the french publishers who prefer a text-only cover (and minimal at that) as a matter of their taste (and I guess, expectations of their customers - since not all french publishers go text-only).

Anything is possible, but I don't think judgement of visual aesthetics maps at all to quality of writing.

I'm a damn good technical writer and can break down complex ideas into clear and understandable prose, but I don't know the first thing about fonts or typesetting.

Sure. But only to a point. If it looks laughably bad, then sure it probably doesnt bode well for the quality of the writing. But if the cover is fine/good enough but clearly not something that would come from a trad publishing house... That is when the cover might not be reflective of the work but still hold people, myself often included, back.

100% this. I would so love someone artistic to have created my book cover, but the book was a passion project for me to make a Sci-fi book my daughter would have liked, and is being sold for $0 so paying anyone was outside my budget. I have since talked to an artist and we may do an illustrated version together.

Use Midjourney for a cover and ChatGPT for a synopsis

A few years ago I had beers with a NYT best selling author using trad publishing. Millions of copies sold on multiple continents, translated into many different languages, etc etc. You've heard of him, or at least his one big hit.

He said, at best, over his entire lifetime he may make $200k from that book. He basically has to write a book every single year just to make his mortgage payments, and its a grind.

When I told him I make $8/book self published he nearly fell out of his chair.

A typical royalty is 10% of the retail price. If the book is $30 (cheap these days), then a million copies sold (an extremely rare feat, even for a best seller, but...) is $3 million dollars. How does this story add up? (Foreign rights are often a lump sum rather than royalties, but still...?)

> A typical royalty is 10% of the retail price.

For WHO? What publisher is offering 10%??

The best I've ever heard is a fraction of a cent per book, and you don't get a single cent until AFTER all the expenses have been earned back (advance, editing, promotion of the book, flying you all over the place, hotels, staff).

The standard rate from reputable publishers is 10 to 15%. It's what I've gotten from three different publishers (Hachette, No Starch, Packt). The rates for paperback, discounted books, ebooks, audio books, are all a bit different, but that's the ballpark. All these publishers also paid me advances. That’s an advance on royalties. You start getting paid more when your earned royalties exceed the advance. There is no deduction for any other expense whatsoever.

This thread is full of utter nonsense about the worlds of publishing and writing.

[Edit: minus the 15% for your agent, if you're represented by one. But as your agent also made sure you got a good contract, you probably come out ahead.]

OK I’ll bite. What is the utter nonsense in this thread?

Do you have any tips for self-publishing, or reliable resources that talk about it? Or do you manage PR, did you get access to any form of media coverage? I thought this was the main point of getting a publisher.