There’s no doubt, barring felicitous coincidence, that traditional publishing is hard—finding a reputable agent, checking out the legally-dense contract, trying to negotiate better terms, losing a substantial amount of creative control, dealing with the strong potential for your book’s short shelf-life…
David Gaughran, “…34-year old Irish writer, living in Sweden, who spends most of his time travelling the world, collecting stories, and writing about them,” recently wrote Publishing Is Easy.
Of course, he means Self-Publishing and I recommend his primer on the process—Basics.
The ease of self-publishing is counterbalanced by the difficulties of the writing process and the need to promote yourself as an author.
Sure, it takes a bit of exploration and self-instruction to accomplish self-publishing, so it may seem harder than writing.
And, the favorite lie of social media “experts” that book promotion is easy should be cast swiftly aside…
David, in that publishing is easy article, compares the difficulties of writing and promotion to the ease of getting your book out there.
Three snippets:
“Most people who think about writing a book never start one. Most people who start one never finish it. And most people who finish a book never polish it…”
“When you add together lack of experience or natural aptitude with mixed messages about what’s effective, you can see why many writers find the prospect of marketing daunting.”
And, the dangerous part:
“…when a newbie has been convinced that self-publishing is hard or expensive….they’ll take any kind of deal, or sign up with any fly-by-night outfit, or engage one of the vanity presses masquerading as a self-publishing company.”
As always, I urge you to take those two links to David’s articles and read them—unless you’re a successfully self-published writer; but, even if you are, you might still benefit from reading them :-)
And, if you want to read the 94 posts I’ve done about self-publishing, you’ll get an abundance of links to a wealth of information as well as discovering what I went through to find what I consider the “perfect” method to get a book published…
[btw, you’ll see this post if you take that last link since I’ve tagged it with “self-publishing” (just scroll a bit to find the others and take the little “older posts” link at the bottom of each page to find more… {plus, check out the Top Tags widget in the left side-bar for more topic collections}]
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