You’re a self-published author, right? And you’re starting to feel depressed about it. Perhaps you’re on your fourth or fifth or twentieth self-published book and every time you still send the manuscript off to agents and publishers and you get the same rejections back. You probably don’t even hear from half of them. I certainly don’t.
We all know the benefits of traditional publishing: you’re likely to sell more (although that’s not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination), you don’t have to bother talking to cover designers and marketing people, and generally a lot of stuff is organised for you. Also you suddenly walk straighter and get to stand near your books in branches of Waterstones with a smug grin on your face, and your farts don’t smell any more. We all fantasize that it will be the solution to all our woes, even if that is never, ever the case. But let’s talk about the benefits of self-publishing, since that’s what we’re doing.
You get to write exactly the book you want.
No one is going to tell you what to write, or what the market supposedly wants or doesn’t want. So make sure you do write exactly the book you want. Don’t chase the market, it never works and leads to unhappiness and dissatisfaction with your work. There’s nothing worse than not selling the book you didn’t want to write in the first place.
You can make it as long or short as you want.
Like short books? (like me) Then write a short book. Make it 50,000 words, or even 40,000. Lean, propulsive, grabs you by the throat, or just beautifully sleight. No wasted words, no wasted chapters. Something the mainstream publishing industry has forgotten, or ignored. Or… make it an epic. If you want to go into long detail about a new culture you’ve created, do it! No random suit is going to tell you what your readers want from you.
You get control over the cover.
No bland silhouette of a person in a dark street for you. Make it unique, make it exciting, make it yours. (I recommend working with a designer, though). It’s the first page of your book, it’s the thing everyone sees first, so use it as another outlet for your creative expression. Make it a creative exercise, not a marketing exercise. And you can continue this spirit in the typesetting too.
So much of traditional publishing is about compromise, but we don’t have to suffer any of that. We are free. We can produce a book that is a perfect representation of what we want the reader to hold, to read, to experience. So embrace it, embrace the freedom, stop trying to make your book look like something Random House has produced, stop pumping it with filler or cutting chapters to the bone, stop looking at the New York Times bestseller list and trying to work out if you could write a psychological thriller with the world Girl in the title. Stop being ashamed of self-publishing, own it, be a book artist, and make something only you could make!
An earlier version of this article appeared on Turn the Page
