The biggest problem with self-publishing though is marketing. Big publishers have thousands upon thousands of dollars to throw at marketing and deals with physical retailers. Publishing by yourself won't give you that option really.
The big publishers rarely spend anything on marketing for most authors.
The most likely scenario if you get a tradpub deal is a $5k advance, an editing pass, and a cover. Considering those would cost you $1-2k do to yourself, that's not nothing. But they still pretty much expect you to spend your own time and money marketing. The exceptions are the books they try to force into being popular which are usually DIE garbage.
The real problem is the Big 4 editors have become totally ideologically captured and completely lost touch with the market. They have no idea what sells anymore. The publishers just put out flop after flop and hope one of them somehow becomes a hit. That's why Barns and Noble stopped stocking debut hardcovers. None of the trash sells. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/wxl645/barnes_and_noble_makes_it_harder_for_debut/
On top of this is of course how almost every functional component of the industry is utterly compromised. Particularly reviewers, who at least in ages past occasionally got a few things right. But now it's purely ideological nepotism, along with corporate DEI investors and DEI funded consultant firms.
And all of this, combined with what was inevitably going eventually become an easily over-saturated global market, with an over abundance of "too much shit" shit for anyone to ever have the time to sift through. And then there's the mess that a lot of web-based content/publishing opportunities offer, which rarely yields profits or sales worth mentioning. It sucks especially if you just want your work to be appreciated, regardless of how little money it makes.
And even further on top of that is the ever decreasing interest in written literature, the advent of AI, etc.
Part of the problem is that there are just 4 big publishers. Consolidation down to the point where it’s possible for all of them to be reading from the same play book. If there were 1,000 publishers at least some of them would be on a different page
Being a writer, sadly, is a passion project. You've got to love what you do. Novelists that make money off of it to the point they do nothing but are rare.
As for physical copies, print-on-demand is a thing. It's the one thing Amazon does really, really well.
You can't really play their game, so you have to flip the table.
The biggest problem with self-publishing though is marketing. Big publishers have thousands upon thousands of dollars to throw at marketing and deals with physical retailers. Publishing by yourself won't give you that option really.
The big publishers rarely spend anything on marketing for most authors.
The most likely scenario if you get a tradpub deal is a $5k advance, an editing pass, and a cover. Considering those would cost you $1-2k do to yourself, that's not nothing. But they still pretty much expect you to spend your own time and money marketing. The exceptions are the books they try to force into being popular which are usually DIE garbage.
The real problem is the Big 4 editors have become totally ideologically captured and completely lost touch with the market. They have no idea what sells anymore. The publishers just put out flop after flop and hope one of them somehow becomes a hit. That's why Barns and Noble stopped stocking debut hardcovers. None of the trash sells. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/wxl645/barnes_and_noble_makes_it_harder_for_debut/
On top of this is of course how almost every functional component of the industry is utterly compromised. Particularly reviewers, who at least in ages past occasionally got a few things right. But now it's purely ideological nepotism, along with corporate DEI investors and DEI funded consultant firms.
And all of this, combined with what was inevitably going eventually become an easily over-saturated global market, with an over abundance of "too much shit" shit for anyone to ever have the time to sift through. And then there's the mess that a lot of web-based content/publishing opportunities offer, which rarely yields profits or sales worth mentioning. It sucks especially if you just want your work to be appreciated, regardless of how little money it makes.
And even further on top of that is the ever decreasing interest in written literature, the advent of AI, etc.
Part of the problem is that there are just 4 big publishers. Consolidation down to the point where it’s possible for all of them to be reading from the same play book. If there were 1,000 publishers at least some of them would be on a different page
I didn't say it was easy, mind.
Being a writer, sadly, is a passion project. You've got to love what you do. Novelists that make money off of it to the point they do nothing but are rare.
As for physical copies, print-on-demand is a thing. It's the one thing Amazon does really, really well.
You can't really play their game, so you have to flip the table.
Publishing yourself now is still better deal than publishing through the big guys ever has been, even 45 years ago.
This is one of those things that I simply can't generate any sympathy for.
The awards, NYT best seller, all that shit is vanity. Womp womp you're not getting felated by the establishment.
The "opression" is excluding you from a club that sucked to belong to anyway. It's like being bared from a HOA. Like thank you very much.
What physical retailers?