Digital Self Publishing vs Epublishing

If there’s one thing you’ll almost never hear me do, it’s state that there is One True Way to do things in publishing.  If we put aside the no-brainers (most of which deal with a lack of professionalism or common sense) so many of the choices we make should really just depend on our priorities and our desired outcome.

I’ve dabbled a bit in self-publishing, and I’m dabbling more right now as we finish up our first Red story and start considering how we want to handle it.  People familiar with JA Konrath’s blog know that there is money to be had.  What makes me sad, though, are the people who seem to miss the most important thing he did in the years leading up to his phenomenal ebook success: work. Really. damn. hard.

My theory (and it is only a theory) is that the people who find the most success in self-publishing will be the ones who don’t have to do it. The ones who have options but chose to go the self-publishing route for their own reasons.  Self-publishing isn’t a band-aid that fixes a book no one wants to buy.  It’s a viable option for a business savvy author who has a strong product and wants the control to package and market it in ways regular publishers can’t or won’t.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that New York is struggling to catch up and adapt to the digital market.  Considering the chaos running rampant across digital retailers right now, that seems like a given. This post is not about the benefits and pitfalls of self-publishing vs New York print publishing, though.  This is about digital publishing, and whether you should do it yourself or team up with an epublisher, and I think the choice is a whole lot stickier when you take out the question of whether or not your publisher can effectively navigate the digital market. (Which presumably your epublisher can.  This goes back to research, though!)

Some Numbers

Epublishing is not all roses and rainbows.  There are good publishers and bad publishers, and even at the good ones you might sell a book that just doesn’t hit.  Or one that sells fast for a few months and then drops into obscurity for no reason you can tell.

A few days ago I posted this chart talking about how wildly our kindle sales had taken off.  As a reminder, these are month-by-month sales on one kindle title–I have quite a few other ones that showed the same Dec/Jan jump.

Of course, that’s the rainbows and roses chart.  To be fair, epublishing is not a sure thing.  Even someone who has pretty decent numbers on one book can have another book that looks more like this:

So what about self-publishing?  Well, we have 3 $.99 titles available at Amazon, and I made a graph showing just how well all three of them have done since the beginning.  (Also, an interesting side note: all of these stories are available for free in our website, but we’ve repackaged and bundled some of them for the kindle.)

(I have no idea why they’re converging on 200. Weird.)

Those certainly seem to be doing better than the worst of our epublished books, but not as well as the best.  Of course, these are also selling at a fraction of the price and, to be perfectly honest, since publishers get a better deal with Amazon than I do, I’m only making 5-10% more per sale on my self-published titles than I am on my epublished titles. It all comes down to a numbers game.

What numbers?  Well, I can tell you that every self-published book we’ve sold added together made us just a little more than we made on that one epublished title in January.  If you’re working with an epublisher who knows how to competitively price books, who knows how to attractively package them, and who has consumer trust (and this is a big one if you aren’t a name brand yourself) you’re probably going to end up ahead of the game getting a boost from a good epublisher.

How do you find a good epublisher?  First go read every word written here. Then follow all the links and read every word written there.  Don’t tell me it’s too many words, this is your career we’re talking about!

(I’m not kidding. Every. Word.  Research, y’all!  It is so important.  If you don’t know the difference between 3rd party and direct sales, or which pubs are known for which genres, you need to go find out!  I’ll wait here.)

Blah blah, so this is all rah rah epublishing yay?

No.  There may be times when self-publishing is the best option.  We’re doing it because we want to experiment with formats and giving them away for free, and most publishers aren’t 100% happy with you when you post your entire book online for free.  But the brutal truth is that unless you have a massive backlist and a lot of fans, chances are you won’t be paying the bills on self-publishing any time soon.

Which isn’t to say don’t do it.  And now we’ve circled back around to priorities.  Do what makes you happy, but know what you’re in for.  And with self-publishing, it’s a lot of work for maybe not a lot of reward.  But if it’s worth it to you?  That’s all that matters.

(As for us? We use the money we get from our kindle self-pubbed titles to pay for more contests. )