Hi

After reading some stories on here about agents, royalties and how little money you could expect to earn from book sales and the down turn in publishing companies I am wondering what would be the best method of selling my Book.

Do I pay for self publishing and marketing?
Or send my book to known publishers or agents?

What are the pros and Cons of either way of getting a book to market?

Kind Regards
Nicky

My advice is ONLY go the self-publishing route if you have a ready market for the book - and this usually means a niche market for a specialist non-fiction book, eg, a How-To book, a 'learned work', or something that appeals to a local society (eg, my aunt published a treatise on Oxford birds in association with her local ornithological group, and all the copies were snapped up by members of the society and various college libraries, even though they cost over £40 each).

If your book is a novel, then it is competing with tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - of novels already on the market and in libraries, charity shops and on the second-hand market. An individual cannot hope to compete in such a market. You would need to sell thousands, if not tens of thousands, of copies to be noticed by the publishing industry (and bearing in mind that most bookshops would only take one or two copies, assuming you could persuade them to take any), and after publishing (including editing) and marketing expenses you would be very lucky to break even, most probably you will make a loss, and, unless you've got a run-away best seller on yuor hands, don't even bother mentioning it in a covering letter for subsequent novels, as Agents don't think very highly of self-published works.
If you go that route, treat it as a hobby not a career.

But that's just my own, personal, opinion.


- NaomiM

My opinion's just the same as Naomi's: for niches of either subject or area (books about the local walks, for example, or breeding fancy budgies) where it's relatively straightforward to get the whole potential market to know about the book, it can work well, though you're still unlikely to make much money, and probably none if you cost your time spent producing and promoting it. For everything else, it's highly unlikely to work. And it also scuppers your chances of ever getting the book published commercially, since generally speaking they're only interested in brand new books. As Naomi suggests, IF you did manage to sell tens of thousands of copies off your own bat, it might be something to mention in trying to get your next book taken on by an agent or publisher, but otherwise I'm afraid that to the book trade it simply doesn't register. Worse, because they see so many appallingly written and produced books published by people who don't have the first idea of how to do it properly, perhaps unfairly, having self-published could even be a minus against your submission.

This is a good collection of blog posts by a former publisher's-editor turned writer:

http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/search/label/self-publishing

Emma

Self-publishing can be enormous fun if it's treated as a hobby or an extension of a hobby (eg, fly-fishing by J.R. Hartley).
However, if you go into it thinking it's the first step on the publishing ladder of a successful writing career you're liable to end up wanting to cut your own throat within a couple of years. - the writing game is hard enough as it is, without adding the prejudices of the industry to self-publication.


- NaomiM