I Don’t Want Anybody Else, When I Think About You I Publish Myself: Methods of Madness in the Ebook Post-Apocalypse (Patreon)

Greetings, Mad Fictioneers! It’s autumn and that means I suddenly have nasty-ass heating oil bills and nothing is as attractive as staying in bed forever and everyone literally refuses to eat anything not pumpkin-spiced and also I fucked up my elbow on a truly Marvel-movie scale so I can barely function yaaaay! For those of you who haven’t followed my super graceful saga on Twitter: I was stepping over a baby gate, as you do, and started to trip, did some quick mental math concerning the baby child standing needfully right below me, and rather than crush him, I did a quick jump-tuck-roll Black Widow style combo only I am neither ScarJo nor her stuntwoman, also I am 40, also my job is definitionally sedentary so this kind of move is way outside my preferred subgenre and I slammed my entire bodyweight onto my left elbow and head against a hardwood floor LIKE A BOSS AM I RIGHT?

I AM WRONG. 

So it’s been a week, my left arm has been various types of unusable, from dead weight all the way to right now, where it is shakily trying to type and not very happy about it. It’s covered in bruises, and after an X-ray, my doctor suspects a piece of cartilage has either come loose or folded/bent and gotten ledge behind the joint, which is why I can’t extend my arm and am walking around like a cross-gender cast Richard III trying to do everything one-handed. IT’S BEEN GREAT.

But the baby is fine, so well done everyone involved: me, gate, child, embittered cartilage, unreasonably high health insurance deductible, and floor. Standing ovation all round.

This month, I asked what you guys wanted to hear me lay down TROOFS about and someone said self-publishing vs. traditional publishing and I figured he THAT’S never proven controversial online before so why not? I’ve published in basically every format you can manage from slapping some nonsense up on my website with a little cheeky HTML to serving full color tradpub New York Times bestselling realness, so I have a lot to say (WHEN DO I NOT HAVE A LOT TO SAY, SON) about all of it. 

I feel like I should warn you: if you are a self-publishing evangelist who wants to read a takedown of how evil New York publishing is and walk out of here with a mandate of heaven draped over your shoulders like Rocky’s sweat-towel, you’re straight up not gonna have a good time. Big shrug energy. 

First off, and I’ve said this quite a bit lately, starting out as a writer in 2019 is a different world than when I was starting out in 2004. It’s not a different universe, or even a different solar system, but it is a different planet. I remember so vividly when I was first going to conventions listening to people who had been at this game for decades talking about how to get published and going: what are you even talking about? Their experience had nothing to do with mine. The internet didn’t exist when they were baby authors. Midlist paperback science fiction was being sold in Safeway. It was like listening to people who grew up on the moon tell me how to walk. Yes, technically, walking was the same where they came from as where I did, but in practice, nothing that worked for them would work for me except, possibly, using my legs to do it. I think I’m not that far removed from the trenches these days, but like everything else I ever say here, I might be talking out of my moon-mouth, so feel free to tell me to go back to Safeway with my old-ass self.

ANYWAY.

Here’s the thing about traditional publishing. It’s hard. It’s hard to break in and it’s hard to get what you need from your editors and publicists and it’s hard to trust your whole future to a big corporation in which you are a very small cog and it’s hard to beat the signal-to-noise ratio and it’s hard to be on fleek with the zeitgeist and it’s hard to keep a career going once you’ve started and it’s hard to advocate for yourself or even know when you should advocate and when you should trust people who’ve been around a lot longer than you and it’s hard to be your own cheering section and it’s hard to live on advances and it’s hard to keep your name out there and it’s hard to compete with zillions of other books and it’s hard to meet deadlines and it’s hard to find your niche. It’s just hard.

Here’s the thing about self-publishing. It’s hard. It’s hard to get readers and it’s hard to hire your own editors and publicists and cover artists and it’s hard to be your own editor and publicist and cover artist and know you’re doing any of those roles right and it’s hard to trust your future to an absolutely massive corporation in which you are not even really a cog and it’s hard to beat the signal-to-noise ratio and it’s hard to be on fleek with the zeitgeist and it’s hard to keep a career going once you’ve started and it’s hard to advocate for yourself or even know when you should advocate and when you should listen to a million blogs telling you how to succeed in writing without really trying and it’s hard to be your own cheering section and it’s hard to live on Amazon Accounts Payable and it’s hard to keep your name out there and it’s hard to compete with zillions of other books and it’s hard to meet deadlines that only you set and it’s hard to find your niche. It’s just hard.

There just isn’t any easy way to do this. Self-publishing is not a cheat code. Traditional publishing isn’t a winning lottery ticket. What floats and what sinks is almost as inexplicable in one as the other, and indie publishing is almost riskier than both—more on that in a moment. There are advantages and disadvantages to any path you choose. The weird thing about the whole self/indie vs. trad debate that rages online all day every day if you find the right neighborhood of social media is that the risks and rewards are pretty much the same in both camps. They’re just wearing sunglasses and different hats. 

There is a reasonably high bar to entry in traditional publishing. That’s the biggest thing people see right off, and it causes a lot of resentment, because, let’s face it, we’re all geniuses with the greatest novel of all time sittin gon our hard drives if only someone would give us a chance, man. You have to get someone else to believe in your work enough to put money behind it. An agent, an editor, a company. This is an ego-shredding process for virtually all of us, and the idea of skipping it and going straight to the money and fans is obviously super appealing. 

But the fact is, at some point, to get any money and any fans, you will have to find someone else who believes in your work. That’s what readers are. Traditional publishing puts the filtering process at the beginning, self-publishing puts it at the end. But there is always a filtering process. 

What’s really fucking nice about traditional publishing is they give you an advance, they enforce (mostly) deadlines from the outside, they hire professional cover artists, editors, copyeditors, and publicists at no additional cost to you, and they put your books in stores and libraries all over the country/world. All you have to do is write the damn thing. In exchange for all of that, you get royalties that are quite a lot less than what any self-publishing platform offers, and that only when you’ve earned out your advance. You have less (but not zero) control over the final product, and you may very well fall through the attentional cracks of a large publishing house and your completely brilliant book might not get the support it needs to be a hit. The odds of that happening are really…pretty solid. I’m not being dishonest about New York publishing here. It’s run by people and people screw up and self-sabotage and bean-count and all the rest. Like any product, a lot of books should have been huge and weren’t because of internal office issues and a shit load of other things having nothing at all to do with literature.

And that’s the problem. It’s not just you. So much goes into any given book that something can always go wrong or right and you have very little control, ultimately, over which way that goes. 

In self-publishing, obviously, you control everything. The cover art, the editing, the copy editing, the publicity, all of it. You can’t fall through your own cracks. No one believes in your book as much as you do, so you can pour your soul into every aspect of it. And you get a lot more of the money per-unit-sold than any traditional house will ever offer you. No one will ever tell you to change a character to appeal to this or that market (though that doesn’t really happen as much as people think). No one will demand you cut all the poems your protagonist performs on the alarmingly frequent Neptunian open mic nights that really inform her character, man. It’s all you. 

And that’s the problem. It’s all you. You better hope your taste in covers is exquisite (spoilers: yikes. I don’t want to be a dick but there is something about a LOT of self-published authors that tends toward a certain lack of graphical skill and I don’t know why but it’s just the truth, you can spot themin the next county) and you have the money to hire someone to execute it (I swear to punch-drunk Odin you better be paying people, and not in exposure) . You better hope your eye for spelling and grammatical errors is impeccable (spoiler: it isn’t, you have read your book so many times you’ve grown blind to simple punctuation issues and if you’re serious about your career you’ll be hiring—with money—someone to copyedit for you). You better hope your sense of your own work is absolutely objective and top-notch because no one will be coming along to suggest Hamlet die in the fifth act instead of the third. (Spoiler: it really probably isn’t). Your ability to self-promote without annoying the shit out of everyone around you had better be at approximately Mad Men level. The product you put out is 100% dat you and you can’t blame any problems on anyone else.

Now, once the book is written, whichever way you’ve published it, you have to face the main issue that stands between any book and success: the signal-to-noise ratio. It’s pretty fierce in print publishing but holy shit on Amazon it is unhinged. (And yes I’m going to mainly talk about Amazon because that’s where almost all self-published books end up these days. There’s other venues, but it’s easily the best deal for authors at the moment—which doesn’t actually make it a good deal.) You drop your book into a sea of noise, some of which is just truly terrible noise, and hope that it gains traction through your efforts and a couple of algorithms and maybe a promotional deal or two you’ve paid into, but by and large, the vast majority of self-published books receive no attention at all. Far less than even the least successful of traditionally published novels, all of which are available on Amazon right next to yours but with better covers and a minimum of push behind them. It’s fucking rough. There are exponentially as many books being uploaded to Amazon by their authors as being published by publishing houses. The chances of being discovered by readers are abyssmal. There’s a reason people can rattle off the self-published titles that became hits a moment’s notice: there’s just not that many of them.

But the chances of being a massive hit are always abyssmal. If you’re good enough, it may come out in the wash, given the difference in royalty rates. For most of us, it’s not a choice between respect and money, because there’s not that much respect to be had in New York and self-publishing is no guarantee of money. It’s a choice between what we can get and…what we can get. But if you’re good enough, you could probably find a way to get noticed regardless. Readers know that the quality of self-published books is dodgy at best. Everyone’s looking for that gem and sometimes they find it—but everyone in New York is also looking for that gem. There really aren’t that many astonishingly amazing iconoclastic novels that just couldn’t find a home. Not zero, but not many. Don’t be mad, but if your book couldn’t get even a small press interested, there’s probably a reason. Publishers are actively looking for quality. So are readers. It is what it is. For every The Martian, there are quite literally a million garbage nothing throwaway titles.

I will say the exception to this is romance. Romance outsells every other genre in America and print publishers are notorious for paying their authors very little per book, but expecting a shit ton of titles from them constantly. If you’re writing romance, the audience on Amazon is so huge and so not particularly discriminating that I think self-publishing is actually a fairly smart way to go.

The other exception can be if you’re already a well-known name. Getting your back catalogue out there can be a brutal process if you’re relying on publishers to print books other publishers already sucked most of the money out of. Many of us are doing this these days, or putting out new work this way when how fast the money is is more important than how much it is. It can be a good deal. It also requires you to be an entire publishing house unto yourself, and few enough of us know how to do that as well as we know how to write. When I was starting out I knew jackshit about anything and probably would have picked a shitty title font, too. The catch 22 is that when you know enough about publishing to do it all yourself and do it well, you probably have already made it in publishing to some extent.

But guys. Look. It’s Amazon. Amazon is Amazon’s friend. The biggest trick they ever pulled was convincing authors that they’re the little guy on their side. If you don’t like the idea of trusting your work to a big New York corporation I have no idea why you’d feel awesome about signing it over to Amazon—who won’t give you that big fat royalty rate unless you offer your book on their service exlcusively. Amazon is a bigger corporation than any of the big five publishers. It’s not even close. And they can delist you or change your cover price or bundle your book with others or do, really, anything they want to your title without your permission. 

They can also, for a fee, pump your book up in some low-traffic sub-category so you can claim the bestseller title. There are a lot of scams these days and Amazon profits from most of them. The thing no one seems to want to call out (because we all need Amazon to live now) is this is the exact same fucking thing predatory self-publishing schemes have been pulling since they were invented! Preying on writers’ dreams, promising they can make books sell if you sign up for this exclusive package for just a little more money, but of course they only offer this package to their most valued customers authors, it’s a sure thing, baby, you’re a star. There is no fee to upload a book, which separates them from the old methods, but they’ll get their dime regardless. If the service is free, my loves, you are the product. It’s not less true because your dream is pure and good. Read Foucault’s Pendulum—or just the section where the editors are discussing how the self-publishing arm of their house works, and you’ll find the tactics and methods were precisely the same in 1988 as they are now. The only difference is the ultimate delivery method. And when you buy those packages, even if it does move a few copies…you’ll know why. Even if no one else does. It doesn’t feel that great. They own you and they don’t really care any more about your heartbreaking work of staggering genius than they do about bulk bags of cat food or baby wipes. It all ships from the same warehouse, hunty. 

Just be careful, is all I’m saying. Know what you’re signing. RTMC—Read the Fucking Contract. And know that, unlike traditional publishing, that contract is non-negotiable. You take it or you leave it. And maybe you’re the next big thing and it’ll all work like it did for 50 Shades. But listen, and this is a very important point:

Your debut novel only comes out once. Your advance, should you get one, is likely to be vastly higher for your first book than your follow-up in today’s market. The excitement around a new writer only happens once. Everyone is after debuts. So you owe it to yourself to try to find someone who will give you that money and excitement up front before you go the other route, where all the outgoing money will be yours and the excitement may drown under the 5000 other titles coming out on Amazon Unlimited that month. I genuinely do wish my first book had been The Orphan’s Tales. I didn’t know any of this then. 

Self-publishing isn’t necessarily a last resort. But don’t be fooled into thinking your chances are better there. It’s always hard.

But! I hear you saying. Cat! Wasn’t your bestselling book originally self-published? Isn’t what you’re saying proven wrong by your own history? Aren’t you literally the case that proves self-publishing is awesome and there are books out there that could only exist without a traditional publisher controlling their content?

Yes, it was. Fairyland is what it is because of its original identity as “crap I slapped up on my website because I couldn’t make rent.” And I do think I got away with things (polyamorous witch/werewolves what) that I wouldn’t have if it had gone through a traditional publishing process. But you’ll notice that I wrote it in 2009, when Kindle was only just getting started and Kickstarter was like a minute old. I kept all the money from my donation button because I never put it up on Kindle, and if I had, there’s a very real possibility it wouldn’t have been picked up by Feiwel, who turned it into a bestseller. Because back then, that didn’t happen much. My editor got a lot of phone calls telling her she was an idiot for buying it. And you’ll notice, when that big house came knocking, I didn’t say no. Only a fool would. We all need to eat. Eating is awesome. And like a start up hoping to be bought out by a big company, almost zero self-publishing evangelists would turn down a fat contract if they were offered it, no matter how invested in the self-publishing convention circuit (which is heartbreakingly always far more about selling books than reading and loving books) they may be. 

But all that being said, I also didn’t start out with a big house. My first book with a big fancy New York book daddy was my fourth novel. I started out with a small press called Prime Books and weird books with no advances because I was dumb and didn’t listen to people who said you should probably get something up front. Four books before I got an agent and an advance.

Now, were those books successful? Sort of. The Labyrinth was a minor splash. The others a little less. I’m not even mad about that. They were all weird books, Bront. But they did well for a small press mostly because I was already active online on Livejournal and other communities and I had a built-in audience who would buy it, not because an indie press in 2004 was just omg so amazing at publicity. And The Orphan’s Tales got sent to Bantam Spectra because my indie editor knew a woman there and sent it to her, even though in almost every other way he treated me abominably.

Indie presses are the other side of all this. And they can be great. More personal attention, passionate editors, less titles for the house to focus on. It will always be less money, but that can be okay. You have to make that determination for yourself. I still publish with Subterranean and a couple of other indie presses. But. And there is always a but.

Small presses are almost always run by one or two people who started the company, so the company is shaped by their personalities. Can be great. Can be terrible. If that one guy decides he doesn’t like you personally—or likes you a little too much—you can be as sunk as you’d be anywhere else. Except there’s no HR or agent to go to bat for you. 

And the sad fact of it is, small presses can go under very easily. Probably the biggest indie publishing success story has to be The Windup Girl, a book that sold so many copies it put Night Shade Books out of business (among many other reasons having to do with the personalities of the two guys who started the company) and fully wrecked the careers of a lot of other writers who relied on them. It was almost me, too. I got out a month before it all went tits akimbo, and I am still having trouble with the company that bought them out. And this seems to happen with a prestige indie press every 10-15 years or so. Ask the old timers, they’ll tell you about the ones before Night Shade. 

But, like any publishing method, when it’s good, it’s good. There really are a lot of gems at this level that were too risky or weird or whathaveyou for prime time. You have to sell far fewer copies to be considered a star at an indie press than you do with Random House. You can build a career on it—I did. Awards are far less hostile to indie presses than sheer self-publishing, and I say that as the first and so far only person to win a Nebula for a self-published novel. It can be a great bridge between the two approaches. And I want to say well, you still have to be your own publicity machine and that sucks but frankly, traditional publishing kind of expects you to do that yourself these days, too, so fuck us all for a bag of retweets.

So here’s the thing: no matter what, you have to swim in a big, gross sea full of trash sharks. If you are good enough and savvy enough to fight them off and make a splash with one method, you can probably do it with any of them. Maybe your odds are slightly odder with Amazon these days because the sea is just so big and full and the trash sharks are just so numerous now, but usually, usually, talent will out.

What I want you to take from all of this is that no matter what, you have to look out for yourself. I’ve been saying it since like 2007, but the best approach to the Choose Your Own Adventure of publishing in the post ebook age is a hybrid one. Try to get an agent who can help you navigate it all. Try to find that valhalla of a fat publishing deal. If you can’t, or if, like me, you’re super self-aware and know your book is funky af, try indie houses. Try getting short fiction published in zines that pay you and have big audiences first. If that doesn’t work, put it the hell up on Amazon and hold your head high. Do what’s best for you, after you’ve read all the fine print and done all the homework. Sometimes, even for a popular writer, that will be self-publishing. But popular writers have the privilege of a ready-made audience, and that’s a huge advantage. I’ll be doing the third Prester John novel that way, because god help anyone trying to find a print publisher to put out the third book in a series that was a cult semi-hit at best and whose original publishers went out like a wet narwhal exploding. Novellas and other unusual lengths can also do well. They can do very poorly, too. You can’t know. And if someone offers you an amount of money up front that makes you happy, think about taking it. Because money later isn’t a sure thing, and increasingly, people are far happier to pay $8 for fancy coffee than $3 (or any dollars) for art. 

Look out for your book, your story, your work. Try to remove your ego from it and just get it the best deal. The playing field is pretty equally bonkers, brutal, and full of landmines these days. We are long past the wild west of ebook self publishing. It’s a mature market, which means it’s no shortcut. Pay artists and professionals if you have to pay anyone, don’t pay seminars or snake oil salesmen or anything that feels more like self-help than literature. Get outside eyes on your stuff one way or another. None of us are objective judges. Keep your options open, so if and when a publisher, major (Anyone know what Bantam Spectra is up to these days NO YOU DON’T BECAUSE THEY ARE AN EX PARROT) or minor goes belly up, or Amazon janks you for whatever reason, you don’t die where you stand. Diversify. Hybridize. Stay nimble. 

And most of all, most of all, darlings, care more about what’s in your book than how it’s published. Make it good, make it wonderful, dream out loud, make the quality of your work your top priority. Don’t get so wrapped up in this debate over the capitalist virtue-signalling of how a book gets sold that you forget the point is to write something that touches people, on some level, ever, and that’s why we all wanted to be writers in the first place. To tell a story, and know someone heard it.

The rest is trash sharks.