Self-Publishing?

[ewlyn.livejournal.com]

Greetings everyone!  With my first novel in it's final revision, I have been trying to decide what to do next with it.

I noticed that the upcoming May issue of Talking Writing is going to be about self-publishing.  Previous issues have had a lot of interesting essays written by various writers on whichever topic they are covering.  I'm hoping the May issue will have some insight into if self-publishing is the way to go or not.

Does anyone here have any experience with self-publishing or/vs getting published through a publisher which they would be willing to share with me?  Or are there previous posts here which someone can point me in the direction of?  I'm new and still exploring this community.

It would be much appreciated.

Comments

[svenjaliv.livejournal.com]

I have no firsthand experience; I'm to-be-published, in that I know my story's been accepted, but the process as such hasn't really started for me yet. As far as I know, though, self-publishing is easier in the sense that you can just DO it, without having to fight to be accepted by an agent or a publisher. Unfortunately, that makes it harder in a different way; self-published books tend to be fairly low-quality (not all, but many) since there's no acceptance progress, you can publish whatever you like. This also means that self-publishing has a bit of a bad reputation (much like fanfiction: much of it is bad, some of it is excellent, and some is in-between, but the amount of bad is greater than the amount of good, so the whole field tends to be tarred with the same negative brush). And most self-published books don't do well because they aren't promoted, distributed in bookshops, etc. If you go the traditional route, the publisher will take of all of that and they have the network, contacts, etc, which are necessary to do it.

So... I would try the traditional way first, if you can handle the idea of getting rejected many times before being accepted (if ever). If you want to self-publish, and do well with it, you'll have to do quite a lot of work promoting and selling the book. This is why I know it's not for me, personally: I'm a really bad salesperson and I can't advertise worth a damn. But that may well be different for you.

[kassidy62.livejournal.com]

I've gotten published at a small ebook company twice (extasybooks.com), and then self-published, starting at Amazon.

for the publication: I followed the submission guidelines religiously, which included subbing the first three chapters in a specified format. It was less than a month later when I heard back with a request for the full submission. I had to go through edits and then proof the galley. Once I was published with them, I was considered in-house and got a quicker response the next time I submitted. That story was also accepted. The artwork wasn't to my taste.

At Amazon, it was fun but a lot of work. After writing, I needed someone to read and offer any advice/corrections. Ideally you get an editor, of course. I had a friend who did the cover art, but we had to go shopping for royalty free images and go back and forth with it. I had to format the story properly and then convert it, which isn't a big deal - they make it pretty easy. The final output is a mobi format with DRM. I also subbed the story to smashwords which involves more formatting per their specs, more complicated than Amazon, but they distribute to Amazon as well if you'd rather go to one place and have smashwords take a cut. I then took it to another ebook distributor and formatted it for PDF, epub and mobi (I skipped the .lit format). It's all a learning process. After that, I had to do some promotion and get some places to review the story. I made more money initially with Amazon, but more work, but of course every person will have varying degrees of success.