I shared a panel with Joanna Penn, who's doing very well with self-pubbing her historical fiction, very professionally.

I came away pretty convinced that if you're trying to make an significant money - the kind you could reasonably hope for from a middling deal from a publisher - rather than doing it because you want readers - as far as I can tell you have to basically conceive of yourself not as a writer, but as a small business - just one that happens to sell something you write yourself.

I hope I'm representing what she talked about correctly:

As Terry says, you have to write a good book - and get it professionally edited. Hers have at least two goings-over by her editor, and even then she says that she probably isn't as meticulous word-by-word as those towards the more literary end of the process. She comes from an IT background but she still pays someone else to do the formatting.

You have to keep producing more product: she writes one a year, but knows it would work better if it were two, and says the most successful publish a novella in the spaces between to keep their name and books in front of people. (One of the interesting things about e-books is that people's sense of how substantial a book is or isn't, is much more fluid). Of course, two books a year has always been pretty common at the commercial end of the published writers too.

Some of the writers she mentioned use ghosts to keep up the production rate. It's the new books coming out that keep the old ones trundling along.

She gives away a lot of books for free, she monitors her sales daily, fine-tunes prices, does flash promotions on the blog or in social media.

She tries a new period or series - sees how it goes - will axe it if it doesn't work.

She produced paper versions of her first two titles, but now doesn't bother - it costs money and doesn't repay, at her end of the market. But she will keep that under review.

She works the social media hard - keeps conversations up with her readers, blogs every other day about a mixture of herself and her writing; for example, she was out early in the snow the weekend of the conference, taking pix for the blog...

It is, exactly, like running a small publishing business. It just happens that she also writes the books.

It sounds exhausting, Emma. But then some of that sounds like what lots of publishers are expecting from their writers nowadays.

I don't think my heart would be in having to promote, to that extent. I happy to be on FB, would get a blog perhaps, maybe Twitter, but i don't think i'd want to keep such a sharp eye on the business end of things.

However, that might be the way it's going for all of us.

I don't think my heart would be in having to promote, to that extent.

I do think that some people who embrace self-publishing on the grounds that they'd have to do much the same if they were conventionally published don't actually know just how much a conventional publisher does.

Even small independent presses have a marketing strategy if not much budget, a publicity machine of some sort, a presence in the industry including with the bookshops, e-commerce on their site, Twitter/FB etc. - and none of that costs you a penny in time or money. Yes, their authors need to do stuff too. But that's in collaboration: it's not you or nothing.

If you like, as an author published by a publisher, your business is being an author, and you make the best decisions you can (perhaps in conversation with your publisher and maybe your agent) about what's worth doing and what doesn't make sense, what is actively damaging to your writing self and what will nurture it ...

If you self-publish, you're being a publisher. It'll depend hugely on what you write and who you are, whether those two jobs are a good fit for each other or not.

Just wanted to add, because this thread is linked to from the Home Page, that this:

http://www.societyofauthors.org/sites/default/files/What%20sort%20of%20deal%20are%20you%20being%20offered%20.pdf

is the Society of Authors' quick information sheet about "What Sort of Deal Are You Being Offered".

and this:

http://www.societyofauthors.org/guides-and-articles

has all their guides and articles, including several on PoD and e-publishing, contracts, self-publishing and so on.

Well worth a look if you want to know what our professional body's experience of these issues are.

if you self-publish, you're being a publisher

Quite. As well as your own boss of course, and beneficiary of any monies made - but it's how those monies add up, in relation to the hours you've got to put in to generate sales, that would concern me.

Quite.

It's blindingly obvious really, but I think it's something that lots of people just don't engage with. Which is fine if you really do only want some copies to give friends. But I think most people know that you don't make a few pots of nice jam and then expect Sainsburys to stock it - but somehow they do when it's books.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/why-i-do-self-publish.html

Very good blog post, that might answer some of your questions, Petal. And maybe what any new self-publishing authors should note is that she paid for editing and copy-editing, despite being a previously published author.

Yes, very interesting post, Terry, thanks. As it demonstrates, now more than ever, the traditional route isn't a guarantee of success, either.

However, he does have a technical background (web development) etc, plus a daughter to do cover art and... i think his post also demonstrates that to achieve anything with self-publishing, you really need several relevant skills. Or you need to put in the time (and money) to learn/acquire them.

I don't think there's any simple way to get your work and name out there nowadays, plus get reasonably paid for it.

We just have to keep chugging along whichever route we decide is best for us.

At least there are more options now.

I can't remember how, but someone was giving the example of two writers who self-pubbed at the same time, one did very little to advertise it, the other did exhaustive blog tours etc, and they both sold roughly the same amount of books.

'twas I, Petal. Not self-publishing, but being published by a small e-publisher. I couldn't be arsed to do anything at all but my friend not only went to town, she more or less went on a world tour... same number of sales. Not "roughly" the same - almost exactly the same. Both books were m/m gay romances - hers was erotic, mine was comedy.

Ah, thanks Catkin. Hmm, interesting. And kind of depressing! I mean, what other way is there, to try and boost sales - apart from writing a great book?!!

she more or less went on a world tour... same number of sales. Not "roughly" the same - almost exactly the same.

I mean, what other way is there, to try and boost sales

I suspect what happens - when it does work - is that the next thing the writer gets out there catches a few people's eye as being a familiar name, and does a little better, and so on... I know Joanna Penn says that it took several books before sales were both big enough and steady enough that she could give up the day job - till then she was doing it all in the evenings, like any other entrepreneur with a start-up company.

In other words, the debut effort, as it were, is rarely going to look as if it's paid off, and it hasn't if you compute the ratio of effort to sales within too-narrow parameters. As any real publisher will tell you, it's the new thing which keeps the old one selling.

Hence the serious self-publishers' emphasis on getting lots of things out there, fast and regularly, even if it is only novellas, or means buying in ghosts (and even if doing that doesn't make your creative self uncomfortable, outsourcing your writing is going to be more expensive than doing it in house).

She was talking about the still-powerful desire many writers have to get published, despite the increasingly lousy contracts offered by the traditional world. For example, some writers are actually signing contracts now that give away rights to anything they will ever write under any name.

I don't doubt your word, Terry, but that strikes me as desperate to the point of insanity. It would seem some writers need to strap on a pair.

Some of the writers she mentioned use ghosts to keep up the production rate. It's the new books coming out that keep the old ones trundling along.

But that's not the writer's writing! The sort of thing one might expect from Katie Price, not from 'proper' writers. Is the publishing industry really so insatiable - not to mention immoral - these days? Are some writers?

Is the publishing industry really so insatiable - not to mention immoral - these days?

The self-publishers I was talking about are deciding for themselves to use another writer to help them keep up the output of novels, in order to keep the business turning over. You could argue that it's only like James Dyson using designers other than himself to develop new machines for his company.

It's always been done - James Patterson only recently started putting "with John Doe" on the books where he's used a writer to flesh out the story-bones he's come up with, and David Baldacci also uses ghosts. It's not actually any different from things like the series for children "Lucy Whatever" who writes the Animal Ark series is written by loads of writers paying the bills so they can keep up their own work.

Having said that, when Naomi Campbell was up-front at the launch of her novel Swan, that she hadn't actually read it (let alone written it) a good deal of the trade was fairly horrified. I prefer Katie Price - she's a brand, and she produces books as part of that brand, just as footballers write memoirs - not very different from Man Utd or Rough Guides... Doesn't actually bother me, as long as it makes enough money for publishers to be able to afford me.

London Book Fair week is a good moment to remind ourselves that in industry terms, what we do is produce product. As someone said, authors should go to trade fairs the way that lambs should visit meat-packing factories.

Well, then, the truth of the publishing industry is pretty unpalatable. And it's conning the buying public. I can't imagine any writer of quality stooping to the level of pushing out 'product' with their name on it that they had no hand in producing. But then, no ghost writer would be up to the task, so it won't happen. Not so difficult to ape Patterson.

You could argue that it's only like James Dyson using designers other than himself to develop new machines for his company.

No, you couldn't.