| DIY publishing through Amazon is dead easy. Source: I once packed up my blog into a Word doc and had it published on Amazon in a couple of hours one night. Naturally, I did it to win a bet. But the bet was designed to teach a friend of mine a lesson, that he was using the unknown difficulty of self-publishing as an excuse to not work on his book. He finally stopped procrastinating and finished his manuscript within a few months. The hard part of selling books is the selling part. I similarly goaded my own wife into writing a series of sci-fi novels and we (pre-pandemic) had been going to book fairs to sell them. We maybe did two a year, mostly just for fun. We usually sell enough to cover our expenses (printing fees, booth fees, gas to travel, food while we're out). But along the way, she's earned a handful of loyal readers. We've never put a lot of effort into it, but she sells a few hundred copies a year of her three books. It's not bad, especially for a vanity project. There is a clear line pointing from "effort in selling" to "books sold". Most publishers these days won't even look at you unless you already have an active readership. We've met a lot of other authors at the book fairs, seeing the same people every year. The ones who have publishing deals are having to do all their own selling, just like us, but didn't get to choose their own cover and are giving up a huge chunk of cash to the publisher. For what? So they can say they're "published"? Meh. I've seen a lot of people approach their projects as, "If you build it, they will come". I'm sorry, but that's just not a thing. The movie from which that quote comes from (Field of Dreams) is about a literal miracle. You have to sell the book. You have to get out and beat pavement, whether you get a publishing deal or not. So if you have to do the work, you might as well keep the money. |