Cons of Self Publishing
Maintaining Control over your Work
As much as I adore self publishing, there are definitely some cons involved with it. It’s good to go into any task with open eyes.
There’s no up front money. If you would love to go to Vegas to write a story about a big Vegas con game, you’ll have to fly yourself out there. Sure, you can try a crowdfunding effort, but it’ll be up to you to manage.
You can tax deduct all your author expenses, but that only works if you then make the income to offset those. So you want to make sure you do that in a way that balances out. Talk with a tax person to get some help for your area.
You’ll need to do a bit of research to find a cover designer, editor, and formatter that does the job you like. I like this part – I love looking around at Fiverr.com at all my options. But for some people this might be a huge chore. They might prefer to have someone else just take care of it for them even if it costs ten times as much. So I suppose part of this comes down to if you have lots of spare money lying around and don’t have a better use for it.
If you worked with a publishing house (big or small) they would edit your book to meet the market’s needs (or so they think). If you’re a brand new writer and have a lot of rough edges, you might really benefit from that sort of content changing. If that’s the case I suggest hiring, yourself, a content editor to give you that kind of feedback and assistance. That way you can make the changes on your own terms.
Definitely one big thing is that it’ll be harder to get into bookstores, libraries, and schools if you aren’t with one of the big publishers. So this is a situation that small publishers or vanity publishers really can’t help much with. If you’re doing illustrated children’s books and desperately want to get into every school library in the US, you’ll want to hammer away at a big publisher. That’ll be your only sure-fire option to achieve that result.
The same thing if you want to go on national TV more easily. The big traditional publishers have those contacts that the smaller publishers and vanity publishers just don’t have.
So realize there is a trade-off involved. You can still get on best sellers lists. You can still make a five-figure-a-month salary. But it will depend more on you and your writing.
Publisher Options - main page
Overview of Publishing Options
Traditional Publishers
... Pros of Traditional Publishers
... Cons of Traditional Publishers
Small Press Publishers
... Pros of Small Press Publishers
... Cons of Small Press Publishers
Vanity Press Publishers
... Pros of Vanity Press Publishers
... Cons of Vanity Press Publishers
Self Publishing
... Pros of Self Publishing
... Cons of Self Publishing
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