On Self-Publishing

For the uninitiated: there are two routes for publishing a book, known as “traditional publishing” and “self-publishing”. You can find a zillion pieces of info on the differences of these things, but I’ll give the short version.

Traditional publishing is when you send a snippet of your story (or get an agent to recommend your story) to a company that publishes and has a team to distribute (sell) them. If they like your story or see its potential, they will throw some resources at it—editing, cover art and design, and, if you’re lucky, some marketing for when the project gets released. The publisher pays you up front for the amount of money they believe they’ll make from selling the book, and you don’t receive royalties (a percentage of each sale) until they make that money back.

Self-publishing is when you do all that back-end work yourself—or pay someone for it. The editing, the cover art and design, and the marketing are all up to you. Then you sell the books, and you make all the profit. You have costs like printing, maybe advertising, paying your editors and cover artists, as well as—usually—paying Amazon or other platforms to host and sell your book. This is the most common method of “self-publishing”. Amazon will print and ship your book on-demand, and take 30% or so after printing cost. You just need a formatted manuscript, and a cover. Amazon can even help you with that.

That’s a simple overview. Check out this Kevin Kelley article for more.

I sent The Neighbors to publishing houses and agents, and none of them wanted to take on The Neighbors. This is super common, and did not deter me at all from the path. When I decided to dive into the self-publishing world, and actually started to build the book itself—not the story, but the physical book—a new world opened up. I realized I was selling a real piece of art. Not just the story, but a thing that sits on a shelf. It’s exciting. I realized, as a self-published author, I can do anything I want. I can create new versions, new covers, illustrations, short stories—anything I want! And I have control over my “market”. (Not like, the entire market, I mean it’s as if I have a small shop and I make everything that’s sold in that shop, and can sell whatever I make.)

That’s exciting! I’m so excited to improve my craft of making books, not just writing stories. I love writing stories, but through the process of building the Neighbors, I learned that a large portion of this is making the book itself, and having control over that is wonderful.

I will still send my stories out to publishers, because I can’t think of a reason not to, but I’m happy to have my own “bookstore” online where I can share what I’m creating.

Thanks again to Jacob Spivey who did the cover art AND design of The Neighbors. Brandon Sanderson said to have those be separate entities but I’m super happy with what we came up with and know we will only improve.  

So, for you, dear reader, who is hopefully a fan of The Neighbors, and is excited to have more to read, just know that this is only the beginning, only the first official iteration of more fun editions, many more stories, and more pieces of art to add to your collection.

Thank you!