7/28/2023 0 Comments Better than masterwriter 2015In truth, unless you already have a built-in audience from your blog, your traditionally published work, your Youtube channel, or your Instagram account, you probably aren’t even going to make back what you spent to make your cover art for that self-published collection. The odds are stacked against you either way. I get that it’s easier to put something online and pray that the money rolls in than it is to slog through the underbelly of publishing slush piles for decades.īut here’s your spoiler for the year: the money probably isn’t going to roll in, no matter how you publish. Many are like me at 18 or 19, people with a few years of writing stories under their belts, who are really frustrated that no one will buy their work, or who simply don’t have the time or inclination to figure out where to start with getting published at smaller and then bigger houses, or who feel publishing is just one vast conspiracy where people only publish writers they know (it does make it easier). Most of those who choose self-publishing right out of the gate don’t have hundreds of rejection slips in a folder somewhere. Yet the vast majority of folks self-publishing today aren’t professional authors with quality work to sell, and they aren’t misunderstood geniuses. Is your new experimental book not finding a home after that bestselling fantasy series finished its run with numbers that were sort of ‘‘meh’’? Self-publish it! Do you have short story collections with award-winning stuff that no one will buy because ‘‘there’s no money in short fiction’’? Now you have options. Did your publisher not pick up the third book in your trilogy? Self-publish it. It’s fabulous that authors have so many options now. The ease with which one can publish freely online today is both a blessing and a curse. Like many writers who came up in the business before self-publishing was virtually free, I’m relieved I didn’t have access to modern-day self-publishing tools. The old-fashioned grind where you continually level up your skills as a writer and bust through the pearly gates after decades of hard work? Yes, that works too. It helps if you know people in publishing if you want to get published, yes. Good books get rejected all the time, yes. That trifecta of ignorance led me to invest in a lot of publishing conspiracy theories, so it amuses me these days to see so many new writers engaged in the same conversations about publishing cabals. But I also knew very little about writing, or publishing, or how to tell a good story. I suppose you could chalk a lot of this up to being young. Like a lot of new writers, I got through years and years of rejection slips by believing I was simply misunderstood.
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