There’s Never Been a Better Time to Self-Publish

I remember a night early in my career in traditional publishing, circa probably 2005 or 2006, when I went to an event at a local bookstore. An author I’d worked with was going to be speaking on a panel with three other authors who’d also recently released new books.

I don’t even think there was any kind of theme uniting them. It was just “here’s some people who all have new work to promote.”

The author that I knew and two of the others had been traditionally published by trade houses, while the fourth author had self-published their book. I no longer recall what any of the books were about (other than the one that had been published by my company).

But I do still vividly remember my impression of the self-published author: “Wow, what a crackpot.”

Seriously! That was the vibe in the air about self-publishing just twenty years ago! 

It was pretty widely assumed that if you were self-publishing a book, you were way out on the fringes of sanity, your writing likely wouldn’t pass muster with any professional editor anywhere, and your subject matter was so obscure and deranged that no reputable company would ever take a chance on supporting you. Self-published authors were objects of pity, if not outright scorn and derision.

While now, y’know, Taylor Swift is basically a glorified self-publisher who was able to bypass a traditional publishing contract entirely and still get her book carried by Target.

A Paradigm Shift in Book Printing

Like most paradigm shifts, the changing perceptions of self-publishing happened slowly, bit by bit, until it felt like the rest of the shift was seismic and happened all at once.

In my perception, once the stigma began to shift around the kind of author who was self-publishing, there was the next level of snobbery around the quality of self-published books, particularly if they’d been digitally printed. 

While digital print-on-demand technology was becoming more prevalent and more widely available even through companies known for their offset printing, it was likewise still considered inferior. This was for a couple big reasons: There was a reduced variety of paper stocks that were available on digital printers, and there was a certain way that ink would sort of sit on top of the page with a slightly perceptible shimmer to it if a book had been digitally printed. 

Publishing industry people loved to point out that they could identify a digitally printed book at 40 paces, implying that, of course, only books printed on offset presses looked nice enough to be worthy of true consideration. (Not to mention worthy of its cover price, given that the ratio of print cost to cover price was usually a lot worse for digitally printed books anyway.)

But the quality of POD printing improved pretty rapidly, so soon there were fewer of those visual indications that any given copy of a book had been produced digitally. (Though, yes, if you ever see a barcode on the final blank page of a book right before the inside back cover, that remains a very obvious giveaway that a book was produced on a digital press.)

A Change in How Many Books Get Printed

This technological improvement happened to coincide with a trend in traditional trade publishing toward “just in time” fulfillment models. This meant that, rather than ordering a large quantity of stock from an offset printer that might slowly but steadily sell over the course of one or two years, publishers started ordering smaller quantities of books in order to completely sell through them within six months or less. 

The idea was for warehouses not to get stuck with excess copies of a book whenever sales started to slow down after a book’s initial publicity push. So in order to meet these very fast schedules and order “just enough” copies of any given book, suddenly trade publishing houses were turning to digital printing more and more often, particularly for books that were mainly just black and white text in standard paperback trim sizes like 5.5 x 8.5 or 6 x 9.

This was all happening around the same time that social media exploded with the rise of Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and eventually TikTok, when publishers began relying more and more on authors’ preexisting followers and fan bases. Rather than building an audience with or for an author, publishers started expecting authors to do more of their own marketing and publicity work than ever before. 

And if an author’s book suddenly went viral and demand spiked beyond what the publisher initially planned for, that meant that — you guessed it — digital printing often had to swoop in to save the day. This is because digital printers generally take much less time to produce physical copies, as compared to traditional offset presses that can sometimes need as much as four to six weeks just to print 1,000 or 2,000 copies of a paperback.

What Does a Trade Publisher Even Do Anymore?

So . . . if authors are suddenly required to do the lion’s share of their own marketing and publicity . . . and big offset printers are only printing enormous runs of books for big-name authors at the Big 5 publishing houses . . . suddenly it’s less and less clear what a trade publisher is even bringing to an author’s career anymore, other than a nice advance against royalties when the contract first gets signed. (And even those nice advances have started disappearing for everyone but celebrities.)

Coupled with the very visible success of self-published authors like Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James, writers began to realize that there was truly less and less reason to depend on the traditional publishing ecosystem to release their books.

For authors who didn’t want to jump through all the promotional hoops required by a big mainstream book launch, for authors who didn’t want to have to hire an agent and then wait two years for their book to be available to purchase, for authors who knew their market or demographic wasn’t typically well-served by trade publishing anyway, there was truly no reason for them not to self-publish.

The Self-Publisher’s Workload (and Price Tag)

Is self-publishing a lot of work? Well, yes! 

There are a lot of moving parts to juggle, and if it’s your first time trying your hand at releasing a book completely independently, there’s a whole host of steps in the process that you might not even know you don’t know until you run up against them. 

And the main elephant in the room is, of course, the expense of it all. You have to think about what it’s going to cost up front to hire a reputable editor, designer, and marketing professional, not to mention factoring in the fees that will get taken out of your earnings depending on the platform you choose to use for printing and distribution.

These are not inconsiderable factors to take into account!

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Self-Publish

But the fact remains that, even despite these challenges, there has never been a better time to self-publish your book.

The quality of the printing and the paper stocks is very high.

The turnaround time for printing digitally is mere days, not weeks like domestic offset printing or months for lavishly illustrated full-color books that are often printed in Asia and then shipped back to the United States for sale and distribution.

The accessibility is all but immediate. There are no gatekeepers insisting that you do things their way. You get to make the decisions about your book’s title, subtitle, and cover design, rather than needing to run them past a small army of ancillary team members at a trade publisher who may or may not like the color yellow for whatever random personal reason.

Plus, you get to keep all the money you make on your sales, without being paid a teeny-tiny royalty after you fully earn out whatever advance you were paid by a trade publisher. (Y’all, that’s an advance against royalties. It’s not just, like, free money from the publisher because they liked your book proposal. They’re expecting your book to sell enough copies to equal the cost of that upfront payment, and then some.)

Quite simply, I am fired up about the tremendous opportunities available to authors who are open to the idea of self-publishing. And I’d love to share my enthusiasm with you and show you why the self-publishing process would be appropriate for your book project.

Check out my self-publishing concierge program Screen to Shelf for more information about how I can help you get your manuscript into print.