To Go the Self-Publishing Route or Not?

With more authors treading down the self publishing path, this author wonders if he would self-publish…

A few weeks back, Dave Birch asked me if I’d publish my next book myself. I don’t think I would.

So why am I happy with them, and what can you learn from that?

However well an author may understand their audience, there are trends in publishing, and understanding those trends is far easier for a publisher who has people monitoring their sales and those of competitors.

So we got effective market advice from our publisher.

The next thing authors get is financial support, either in the obvious form of an advance, or in that the publisher pays for printing, binding, warehousing and distribution in advance.

The final thing you get from a major publisher is channels, both domestic and international.
As an aside, in “Why There’s no Tip Jar” Charlie Stross writes, “If I put a Paypal tipjar on this blog, to take conscience money from folks who’ve downloaded a (cough) unauthorized ebook or two, the money would come to me, not to the publisher. And without the publisher those books wouldn’t exist: wouldn’t have been commissioned, wouldn’t have been edited, wouldn’t have been corrected and marketed and sold in whatever form filtered onto the unauthorized ebook market.”