Choosing A Publisher

Self-Publishers

Often, there is a very bad connotation connected with “self-publishing” or “vanity publishing”. This is not always unfounded. Let’s Look at their Pros and Cons:

Pros

• This is usually the cheapest way to get a book published.
• They may give you a free ISBN, but that ISBN is always going to be tied to a “self-publishing” company.
• It is very easy to simply upload your files and voila! You’ve got yourself a book!
• If your book has good content, is well-edited and professionally designed, a Traditional Publishing Company could eventually come across your book and offer you a contract. (Although sadly, there are some non-legitimate companies that prey on self-published authors promising a contract but offering to publish one book for a huge amount of money.)
• You may get a fairly nice royalty per book, but this only really adds up if many people know to buy your book.

Cons

• Self-publishing companies may or may not have quality control, and are certainly not known for discretion as to what they print. This helps give “self-publishing” a bad reputation. Books may be badly formatted (if formatted at all), shoddily manufactured, poorly written, or be among the “genre” of books that consist of get-rich-quick schemes advertising for one to purchase more books to achieve the goal.
• If you are unfamiliar with the printing business and the specifications needed to have high-quality, print-ready files up to the book industry’s specifications, your book can turn out to look like it was published by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. The pictures and cover may be fuzzy, the text may not be aligned properly, the formatting could be all wrong. There are a dozen reasons why there are professional publishing companies and it shows.
• There may be little or no quality control or no editing and proofreading involved, which is what gives “self-publishing” a bad name.
• Usually self-publishing companies that offer packages have a limit to the number of picture insertions allowed in a book.
• Most self-publishing companies force you to order a certain number of books, and have a minimum or maximum number per order.
• You may be forced into an exclusive one-year contract that cannot be broken if you do not like their results.
• The sad fact is that when one “self-publishes”, they are often taking the quick and cheap way out, ultimately selling themselves short. Any loony off the street can create a book with who-knows-what kind of content and it will be “published” by these companies.
• You may own the rights to your work, but the self-publishing company and its affiliates are able to control how they can use it. This can be extremely problematic if you ever come out with a newer edition of your book. They can even keep your new version from being seen in sale listings, in favor of promoting their own company’s older version. You will likely get the runaround when trying to prevent this from happening. They may claim “they can’t remove the old title” because there are sellers with used copies, or they still have some of the book in stock. This can ultimately force you to buy your own book at the retail price just in order to have the old version removed!
• You may not get the respect you deserve by self-publishing, no matter how good you are. You simply may not be taken seriously as an author.
• You may or may not get very wide distribution.
• It is entirely up to you to market your book. You may actually get a listing on one or two book websites, but there might not be any real potential for getting your book into an actual “brick and mortar” bookstore.