Should You Self-Publish?

Originally Published April 5, 2022 on Medium.

Publishing can be an opaque and frustrating process, whether you’re looking to write a technical book, your memoirs, or a science-fiction novel. The publishers are large, gatekeeping entities who seem to hold all the power, and who make decisions for reasons that aren’t made public. You might have tried submitting to a publisher and gotten rejected, or maybe you don’t like what you’ve heard about working with publishers. Maybe you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person.

Self-publishing used to be a route for only the very determined or those who didn’t understand what goes into a publishing program. Now, like so many other activities, the Internet has made it much easier to do the work yourself. Services like Gumroad, Leanpub, and yes, Amazon, have made self-publishing realistic for the masses, for a price. But self-publishing hasn’t spelled doom for traditional publishers either.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked in traditional publishing for most of my career, and I’ve watched the evolution of self-publishing from a near-impossibility to something we take very seriously. Although I would choose the traditional publishing experience for myself, I’m pretty clear-eyed about what’s involved. The best choice for you comes down to your energy level, time, and the great common denominator: money.

It’s All About the Money

Let’s lay out the financials. As of 2022, specifically talking about technical publishers, the standard royalty rate is 10 percent at the most, dropping to 8 percent, and I’ve heard as low as 6 percent.

📚 Obligatory aside: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, which is sponsoring this piece, pays up to a 50 percent royalty, which is far above industry standards.

Ninety percent is a big chunk, no doubt about it. So the choice seems obvious: publish with a big name, and earn 10 percent of the profits, or by yourself, and earn 100 percent.

Except the equation isn’t that simple. What is that 90 percent actually going to? Yeah, executive salaries and rent on a shiny glass building somewhere — or more likely, a small bland building in an office park. But also the editorial, design, and layout services, the sales and marketing, and the warehousing and distribution system. Now the questions are more complicated: Do you really need all that? Or can you do it yourself? Let’s break it down.

Editorial

With the caveat that I’m a professional editor, if you think you don’t need an editor to write a book, you’re probably mistaken. The best writers in the world all have editors that they swear by and wouldn’t think of writing without one. So if this is your first time out, you definitely want an editor. If this isn’t your first time out, you probably already know that you want one editor, if not more. Types of editors you may want to employ include:

• Developmental editor. Also called a substantive editor, this person will consider the organization, clarity, pedagogy, and audience of your writing. This editor will help you polish your explanations and present the material in a way that’s optimized for reader understanding.
• Copyeditor. A copyeditor works on sentence-level correctness. This person helps you find missed words, contradictions, and logical errors at a finer scale than a development editor. A copyeditor also advises you on word choice, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Proofreader. Proofreading is usually the last step in the editing process. A proofreader checks for errors by approaching the manuscript as a reader would. This person finds typos, punctuation issues, and layout errors that would distract from your content. A proofreader will often compare the final version of the manuscript against prior versions to ensure all changes were made.
• Indexer. This function is separate from editing but often grouped under the same heading. Indexing is a highly specialized skill in publishing and requires an expert to do it right. I don’t recommend indexing yourself or relying on an automated indexing program.

You may be able to economize by combining steps: many copyeditors also offer proofreading services at a reduced price. Some developmental editors also offer copyediting, but usually in a separate pass, because the two tasks require a difference in focus. Because the developmental stage is the highest level and therefore most abstract — as well as the most expensive — some authors prefer to forego that stage, but I don’t recommend skipping it. Using all three stages will get you the most professional results.

Design

Knowing what you want to say is key, but how your work looks is also important. The design and layout professionals take your content from being a plain Word or Google doc to something that looks like a book. Something as basic as font choice can make the difference between text that reads smoothly and text that’s a struggle. Getting these steps right adds a professional feel to your book. You’ve probably seen ebooks that look just like a Google doc; these folks help you avoid that:

• Designer. This person works with you on the fundamental look and feel of the book, from font choice and size to spacing, headings, and other elements. There’s a world of difference between an academic tone with lots of reference and footnotes, and a more breezy how-to aimed at a casual reader. The designer helps you create that feel. If you’ve got sample code and you want it to be easily read, a designer helps there too.
• Layout tech. A layout tech implements the design. This person balances the pages so that they’re not too long or too short, ensures that figures and tables fit in the places you want them to, and adjusts the spacing so that your text is nicely justified without large running spaces or too many hyphenations.
• Illustrator. Your book may or may not have illustrations. Some of those illustrations might be screenshots, or they may be mostly drawings. If you have drawings, an illustrator will ensure that your drawing is clean, readable, and appropriately sized for the page.
• Cover designer. The cover is sometimes, although not always, treated as a separate function from interior design. A good cover needs to convey key information like title and author, but should also give an impression of the tone of the book. These days, a cover needs to do both at thumbnail size — not just at the full cover size.

Again, some of these services can be combined. Design and layout are the two tasks most commonly combined in this group. Many designers offer cover design services or will coordinate with specific cover designers. Some designers also employ illustrators or can recommend them. If you use all of these services, you should get a finished product that looks professional and conveys the right package for your product.

Marketing

Even if your content and layout are polished, if you just post your book on a website with an order form and don’t tell anybody about it, you won’t sell many copies. Many new authors find marketing distasteful and think that good content promotes itself. Word of mouth is a good marketing tool, but you can’t control or measure it, and it’s not always self-perpetuating. You’ll have to start somewhere, probably several somewheres, if you want to get any traction. Don’t think of marketing as hard selling or pushing your book on people. You created a resource because you thought it would be useful to people. How can your content be useful if readers don’t know it exists?

Marketing is also one of the fuzzier functions to define or assign a specific value because some of it is indirect. If your book carries a known publisher’s logo and is listed in their catalog, the marketing message says, “this book is similar in content and quality to our other books,” which, hopefully, readers trust. Having your book on the publisher’s website makes it easier for readers to find. Established publishers have relationships and agreements with a variety of sales channels (including Amazon) that self-publishers don’t have, and can get preferential placement for your book or inclusion in publisher-wide marketing events.

You may have heard that publishers don’t promote books the way they used to, or they only promote the top of their lists and that they require the author to do the rest of the marketing. To a certain extent, that’s true. But a publisher doesn’t sign a book if they don’t expect it to sell, so they’re always interested in promoting books, even if that takes the form of supporting the author’s promotional efforts. Ultimately, the author is the best tool for promoting a book, because who knows the content better? You identified the need, you crafted the solution. In short, you’re the expert. The publisher provides marketing knowledge and experience. Even if you’re doing the actual work yourself, a publisher’s marketing team can recommend communities to join, conferences to speak at, and how to get the word out on social media. Having a starting point and a map is always better than being lost in the woods.

On Professionalism

I’ve mentioned “professionalism” several times, and you may wonder why I’m making such a big deal about it. Isn’t the content more important than the presentation? Surely readers can forgive a stray typo or a boring font choice if they’re getting the information they want.

Readers often do forgive the occasional error, but their tolerance is in proportion to the value of the information they’re gaining and the format in which they access it. If you’re writing a blog post, a tutorial on your personal site, or even a series of tweets, readers are much more likely to overlook errors that don’t affect the content. But we’re talking about self-publishing here, which means you’re expecting readers to pay for a physical book or an ebook, and payment raises their expectations. The idea of a book has been around for hundreds of years, and so readers have certain expectations of what a book entails. If they’re paying money, expectations include quality in language and design.

If readers keep having to self-correct for typos or are struggling because the font is difficult to read or the images are unclear, that’s more cognitive load on their part, which makes learning harder. In short, readers are less likely to have the experience you want them to. While readers may specifically notice grammar or punctuation errors, issues like organization and design are usually invisible. Readers don’t specifically know what’s wrong but get a general impression of a lack of professionalism. If readers believe that you’re unprofessional in your language and layout, they’ll question the value of the information you’re conveying and may not trust you to be accurate.

It’s possible to convey that your content is both accurate and high-quality, even without a polished presentation with the right marketing. But if you’re self-publishing, you already have a considerable marketing task ahead of you, and there’s no point in adding another marketing challenge on top of that.

What Publishing Really Costs

All of the functions I’ve listed so far are things that the publisher can provide for you, and that’s without getting into printing, warehousing, and distribution since ebooks make those processes optional. You can also hire outside experts to do these jobs for you or to help you do them. Of course, hiring professionals costs money. Costs vary by location, but the Editorial Freelancer Association has a list of rates that are a good place to start. If you’re writing a technical book, look at the rates for STEM content in that table.

Because a lot of these services, especially editing, are done by self-employed freelancers, you can get a lower rate from someone who’s just starting out or looking to build their reputation in a new field, but hiring inexperienced freelancers also carries certain risks. How to find a trustworthy freelancer is a topic for another article, of which there are many.

Here’s where the math comes in: make a list of the services you’ll need, research the rates, and calculate how much production of your book will cost. Now compare that to how many copies you think you can realistically sell. This isn’t the time to be hopeful or optimistic; however many books you think you’ll sell, the reality is probably fewer than that. Now compare your calculated expenses to that projection.

❓ Did self-publishing expenses come out to 90 percent or more of book sales?

That’s why publishers exist. I haven’t even factored in the amount of time you’d spend researching, coordinating, and keeping track of all those freelancers. If you do it yourself, the project management is on you, so if your copyeditor has a family medical emergency, your designer blows a deadline, or the indexer goes out of business without warning, that’s your problem. With a publisher, all project management is taken care of for you.

What Are Publishing Services Worth to You?

It looks like I painted a grim picture of the actual costs of publishing a book. My goal is to make the hidden costs less hidden, so you can see that the equation isn’t just 10 percent versus 100 percent. The real question in saving money with self-publishing is whether you can do some of those tasks yourself or if you’re interested in learning to do them.

I don’t mean “do them well enough to get by, probably.” I mean “do them at a professional level,” because your competition is traditional publishers, and they’re professionals. Spell-check is not a substitute for a copyeditor. Layout templates in Word are not a substitute for a designer. All of these things still require human discernment and experience.

If you’ve already got professional-grade design skills, illustration skills, or marketing skills, you can take some of these tasks on yourself. (Even if you’re a professional editor, I still recommend getting another set of eyes. It’s notoriously difficult to edit your own writing.) Maybe you’re fascinated by the publishing process in general, and learning how to do some of those tasks seems appealing to you.

If that’s true, fantastic! I love the idea of more people with professional-level publishing skills. You’re the people self-publishing was invented for, and you should embrace it. But while you’re learning, you may want to reduce your sales expectations for that first “learning curve” book. Like most things, the more you practice, the easier it gets, and after a few books, some of these processes won’t seem like a big deal.

On the other hand, if the thought of doing your own editing, design, and marketing fills you with dread and fear, you can get someone else to do all that for you, for a price. It’s up to you to decide if a price of 90 percent is worth it.