If you're a writer, or a writer-illustrator like me, and you've never had any of your work published, then you may wonder which is better: traditional publishing, or self-publishing through Ebooks. Allow me to share my personal thoughts here.
There are advantages to both, and disadvantages. First, a simple, cruel truth. It's hard to get published through traditional publishing. By traditional, I mean submitting your manuscript to publishing houses and having a team of editors read your work, give it the stamp of approval, and send you a publishing contract. Your book would be in bookstores across the nation in about a year, maybe two. With traditional publishing, most companies would give you an advance against royalties. The advantages to traditional publishing is the up-front advance with the potential of royalties to come, and most publishing houses have the resources to promote your book and market it, print thousands of copies, and get your book in actual stores like Barnes and Noble, Wal-Mart and Target.
The downside to traditional publishing is: it's hard to accomplish. Editors are some of the most cantankerous people on the planet. Ever read through any of the Writer's Market Books? If you haven't, then you really should. Just read what editors have to say when it comes to submitting your work to them. From what I've read, editors seem like some of the grumpiest, hardest, unfriendliest, and rudest people in business today. In fact, you're lucky if you can even get one to read your query letter.
The bottom line: Finding an editor who is currently accepting query letters for the type of book you have written is hard. If any given editor accepts your query and agrees to read your manuscript, then chances are, she will reject said manuscript. If she doesn't reject it, and she passes it along to her team of editors to review, then chances are one of them will reject it. See? It's hard. Hard, but definitely doable. Writers get published all the time.
Another downside to traditional publishing is the long time it takes for your book to actually be released to stores. As I said before, from the time your book is published to the time it actually hits store shelves, two years could have passed. Really.
But what about the resources that these mega-publishing companies have? Just their power to promote your book alone, doesn't that make up for the difficulty it takes to publish through them? Maybe. But consider this: more and more these days, publishing companies are relying on YOU, the author, to promote your own book. In fact, as a condition of publishing your book, publishers want to know what you can realistically do to promote your own book.
Now, let's look at Ebook publishing. With the advent of Barnes and Noble's Nook, and the Amazon Kindle, MANY, MANY writers are turning to self-publishing ebooks. I'm one of them. Here are some advantages to self-publishing your Ebooks.
First, it's free. It costs nada to upload your book to the Kindle and Nook. Second, your book is ready for public viewing (and purchase) within hours of your uploading it. You don't have to wait up to two years. Thirdly, your book can be released simultaneously all over the world. My novel, for instance, is available in the US, Canada, UK, Italy, India, and other parts of Europe. In fact, a large chunk of my sales come from overseas!
Also, you set your own price for your books, and you get royalties on sales. Furthermore, you can easily track your sales, your earnings, and see how well your book is selling in different places.
And best of all, ANYONE can publish a book. You don't have to deal with those cantankerous editors. But that, my friends, is a double-edged sword, and it leads me to the disadvantages of Ebook publishing.
Like I said, anyone can publish an Ebook. And many, many people DO! And that's not always a good thing. As anyone who has ever purchased a book from Kindle or Nook can tell you, there are a LOT of bad books out there. Not everyone can write, but that doesn't stop untalented wanna-bes from unleashing their undeserving wares upon the unsuspecting public. Here's my prediction: Eventually, the Ebook market will become so inundated with awful, unreadable books, that sales for everyone will begin to suffer. Remember the Ebay craze? For a while in the mid-90s, people were getting extremely rich selling all kinds of stuff on Ebay. Several people became millionaires and then began publicizing their success stories for the world. It wasn't long before EVERYONE jumped on the bandwagon, wanting to get rich. As a result, today, there are millions and millions of items uploaded on Ebay every single day. Since the market is so saturated with products, supply far outweighs demand. As a result, sales for everyone suffer.
This is exactly what I believe will happen with the Ebook market. Eventually, there will be so many millions of crappy, bad-written books by amateurs out there, that sales will sharply decline. Ebook buyers will simply search out and buy Ebooks from their favorite established authors, and will ignore the Ebooks by novices.
So, what will happen then? Writers will give up the Ebook dream, and will once again return to seeking traditional publishing deals. That will be their only option if they want to get their books noticed. After all, their Ebooks will be like needles in a massive haystack amongst the other millions of Ebooks out there.
So my advice? Ride it out and see. You don't have much to lose, do you?
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Never be afraid to change a picture for the better, even if you've already put a lot of work into your picture. I once scrapped a children's book I had worked on for months, just because I thought the main character didn't resemble herself enough throughout the book. That was a painful decision, but one I don't regret. I knew I would never feel comfortable publishing work that I hadn't put my very best into.
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