Guest Post - Lindsay Buroker : Self-Publishing

3 Reasons Many Authors Are Self-Publishing These Days

Just a few years ago, self-publishing was considered a last resort by many. It was something you only turned to after every publisher and agent had rejected you. With the advent of e-publishing, and the growing popularity of ebook readers, things have changed.

While many authors are still following the tradition route, lots of others are skipping the “gatekeepers” and self-publishing their work to the online Kindle, iPad, and Nook stores. I’m one of those authors.

I never bothered querying agents and, a few months after I released my first ebook, I’m making a respectable part time income from my work. I can even see the potential for that to grow into a full-time income in the not-so-distant future. But I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

For the writers (and curious readers) out there, I’ve put together a list of…

3 Reasons Many Authors Are Self-Publishing These Days

1. You can get your work to market very quickly.

If you choose the traditional route to publishing a novel, it’s not a speedy process. You’ll likely spend months querying agents and then, if you’re lucky enough to get picked up at all, you’ll wait more months while your agent queries publishing houses. Then, if you’re lucky enough to find a buyer, you’ll wait more months (likely closer to a year) before folks can find your story on a bookshelf.

From the time I first decided to try e-publishing back in November, it was about six weeks to getting my first ebook into the stores. That’s how long it took me to stumble my first-timer way through finding an editor and someone to do cover art. Now that I’ve found an artist and editor,  the time from complete manuscript to published ebook is even shorter.

Why does this matter, you ask? Well, aside from the fact that I’m impatient and would suffer terribly if I had to wait a year and a half for my book to come out, a story can’t start earning the author any money until it’s available to purchase. A year in limbo is a year wasted. Which takes me into my next point…

Click here to read the other 2 reasons

2. You have the potential to make more money as an independent author.

I’m certainly not “just in this for the money” (I wouldn’t have chosen fantasy as my genre of choice if I was!), but many novelists dream of the day when they can quit their day jobs and write full time. To earn a living from making up stories…. What could be better?

Being an indie ebook author isn’t an easy path to riches (you have to learn a lot about online marketing!), but, book for book, you can make more money than if you go through an agent and a publishing house (both of whom take a cut of your earnings). Some “midlist” indie authors who got into e-publishing early (you know…way back in 2009 or early 2010) and have multiple ebooks out are earning full-time incomes now (some of them are earning very nice full-time incomes!).

This is possible because of the high royalties one earns with independent ebooks. If you sell your novel for $2.99 to $9.99 in the Amazon Kindle Store, you’ll earn 70% of each sale. Compare this to the 25% (or less) a traditionally published author makes. Too, you can afford to underprice the publishing houses (they have a lot of middlemen to pay, so it’s not feasible for them to sell ebooks at $2.99 or $0.99), something that was never possible with paper books (and one of the things that made self-publishing so undesirable…. you just couldn’t compete on price).

3. With ebooks, you aren’t limited to publishing novels.

This is one of my favorite aspects of e-publishing. The economics of putting together paper-based books means stories need to fall within a range of X to X number of words. My most recent release, Flash Gold (a steampunk story set in the Yukon during the gold-rush era) is a short novella, which comes in at 18,000 words. Since it’s much shorter than my 100,000-word novels, I sell it for $0.99.

As you’d expect, a novella takes a lot less time to write and edit than a novel. Some people are even turning short stories (4,000-8,000 words) into $0.99 ebooks. That doesn’t seem like enough meat for the money to me, but I do have a couple of short story collections that I’ve turned into ebooks.

All this means that you can publish more work more often and keep your name fresh in readers’ minds. And you can get paid for those shorter stories that you usually wouldn’t be able to sell to a publisher. Not a bad deal!

As you can see, there are lots of good reasons many authors are turning to self-publishing, specifically e-publishing. While it may not be the road for everyone, it’s nice to know there are alternative roads to success these days.

If you liked this article, please stop by my e-publishing blog or check out my fantasy ebooks on Amazon or your favorite online bookstore. You can also read the first part of Flash Gold for free on my site.

Thanks for reading!  

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Thank you SO much Lindsay for this post. I found it very interesting and can also see it will be very useful for many people.