Oh the final moments of editing are here, you feel the excitement and hope that you might have a successful and beloved book in the world. You polished and edited, edited, edited! Now you sit and stare at a finished book. You are in awe you did this all yourself. Now you have three choices waiting before you. Don’t publish and keep your prized work ? Or publish with the traditional method of finding an agent, facing the rejections and many critiques before getting a nibble of a contract? Or you go the indie way. Either way there is a lot of work beyond just getting your work published, but I will cover that in another blog post.
Traditional publishing can take months or even years to find an agent or the rare publisher who still accepts submissions with an agent. A lot of agents don’t even give feed back. You will receive endless rejection letters most likely before you hook an agent like hooking a fish. You are also under contract with a publisher and or agent. Many authors give up on querying for months and opt to just publish it themselves because with each rejection you keep being more discouraged. I’ve been here, and I turned the discouragement into determination to get my book out by self publishing. I am not discouraging you to not try to pursue the traditional, it you feel like that is a better path for you then good luck. You might land an agent the first one you query or it might be twenty down the road.
Indie publishing gives you more free reigns on your project. You control what goes on the cover, where it gets published, and controlling the destination of the book. It is more work, but you have the most control vs traditional. The down fall is if you don’t have artistic drawing talents or know your way around a photo editing program you will have to find a cover designer. If you don’t have someone who has a close eye for detail to edit you have to hire a editor. You are putting more money from your pocket into the project. In traditional publishing they handle what goes on the cover, they cover the editing of the book, you don’t have to fight with opening accounts at self publishing platforms like kindle. It just depends how involved you want to get with your project, how deep you want to dive in and control every aspect.
The final choice is yours, on what avenue you choose to pursue, or you can try both for a while like many authors do. They chase an agent for a few months and then shrug it off and publish on amazon or Barnes and noble. Publishing traditionally doesn’t guarantee a lot of sales and neither does a self publishing avenue. Popularity of a book relies on how much it gets marketed and publicized. Most publishers will market a book some, but unless you are well known author already they likely won’t invest a lot into your book to get it out there unless it is something really unique that they think could cause a stir in the literary world . They expect an author to hustle and drum up sales more than they do because it is the authors book. ‘
Well there is the general gist of traditional vs indie publishing, thank you for stopping by and take care.
- Sterling
Project : N.K. Sterling 