Should You Self-Publish Your Book?
Should you self-publish your book?
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| Add the variables |
Now, before you either say a yea or a nay I’ll add a few variables to this question:
1) Your book is a memoir of your life, and you really did have an interesting life, but you are not, what some might say, as interesting as the next person. The memoir will be written by you but you will have an editor who is willing to rip its guts out to make it better.
Should this be something you can work with in a larger market or not? Would it earn you enough income?
2) Your book is about a community historical experience. You know that it will sell well in this community, but you will need to work on its marketing to give it all the potential it has. The sales will be reasonable, but it is a small community.
Do you know the market well enough? Can you network your heart out?
3) You are writing a fiction book. It will have decent sales as long as you have it edited a number of times. You’ve had a few readers go through it and you are getting a number of decent suggestions. The market is there, and you are somewhat known in cyberspace.
Should you self-publish this book?
The point here is that there are so many variables with the choices you make, and while you could potentially self-publish all of these books, the question still is should you self-publish them?
It is sort of like writing a blog, you might not want to self-publish, but you also know that by trying for many years to get a traditional publisher to say yes is not the best option for you whatever the reason. Be prepared to have “days” with publishing your book.
2 Comments
Leah Griffith
I am currently wrestling with this very question. I have a wonderful novel which has already been edited, has wonderful cover art, is already formatted for Kindle, plus it won a literary award. My editor wants me to hold off on self-publishing because she feels the novel has some good potential. I’ve been querying agents and have thus far received about eighty rejections.
The economy is in the toilet. I’m annoyed with the selectivity of today’s agents which leaves very little room for unknown authors. So…I’m writing another book and I’m continuing to query on my first novel. I just might decide to self-publish, but right now I feel too conflicted to make a final decision. I never thought that writing the book would turn out to be the easy part;)
honkeie2
I found this blog just by hitting the 'next blog' button and found myself reading and rereading this post. I love to write, I am not any good at it but I like to do it. I have started and stopped soo many writting projects I probably could fill a book with them all. But I will probably never do that, just the idea of someone reading something I wrote gives me the fear of the 'red pen' all over again.
I will continue to write for the 'therapy' of it, not with the pipe dream notion of ever being published 🙂