Traditional Publishing vs. Independent Publishing vs. Let’s Be Both.
Are you a traditional author an independent author or are you both. Can we be both and stop with the “traditional authors are powerless and indie authors aren’t real author’s” rhetoric. I am both, I have published indie, I have not been traditionally published YET. I queried my book, My Only Sunshine to agents. It did not get a response, so I changed my query letter. It still got no response. Then I did a little more research.
They are taking certain genres but they are also looking for what will make them money. Trends that are hot right now, emerging trends. They are making educated guesses that what you’ve got will sell because that is how they get paid. I had a teacher once who used to like to say, “I enjoy having food with my dinner.” So if what you’ve got can’t sell right now then they are not going to ask for a sample of your manuscript. For query’s I used, www.querytracker.net. Remember just because it won’t sell now doesn’t mean it won’t sell eventually. You can shelve it and try again in a year if you see something similar that has sold. Unless your Steven King or Nora Roberts level then obviously anything you write will be sold because you are amazing.
OR
You can publish the book independently. Independently does not mean junk, it doesn’t mean untalented or unpublishable. It means, I don’t want my book to sit on the shelf for an undefined set of time possibly forever. So I’m going to put it out there and see if it sells. I have sold over 400 books to me that is incredible. To a publishing house, to one of the big five publishing houses, that is NOTHING. They haven’t even paid the postage they spent on publicizing my book with that. I know why my book got no response, it’s not because it wasn’t a good idea or because I’m not a good writer. It’s because the bad guy is a pedophile, a child gets raped and I’m an unknown author. That’s the trifecta of death for traditional publishing.
OR
So can we all just be authors, can we all support one another. Can we acknowledge that some types of books. Self help, inspirational, romance do wonderfully indie and others do better traditional. That sometimes you just need to put your work out there and know that you aren’t going to make a living off of your single book but once its out there when people ask you what you do you can say. I’m a writer, a published writer.
I hope I get to see people tomorrow night at the Gardner Museum. I think I’m going to plan a book launch party in Gardner if I can get some buy in for the second one. We’ll see. Here’s a quote from the second book, ready?
“Safety is an illusion, a construct built by man. Animals know, you are either the hunter or the prey.” (FREE Audible credit to the first person who guesses correctly who says it.)
