Why I Don’t Self-Publish My Stories
From science fiction author Jamie Todd Rubin:
Every now and then, when I write about the vast number of story rejections I’ve collected over the years, I get asked why I don’t self-publish some of the stories that I haven’t sold elsewhere. The short answer is that self-publishing is not for me. To be clear I am speaking only about me andmy goals as a writer. Different writers have different goals and different reasons for writing.
I grew up reading science fiction stories and I admired the writers who wrote them. I wanted to be just like them. Most of these writers didn’t self-publish. They went through a process of submission and rejection, until they ultimately started selling stories. Later some of them transitioned to novels. Each of them had to overcome some kind of editorial bar. While this editorial bar is an arbitrary judgement of quality, it nonetheless means something to me. I think of it like trying out for a baseball team. No one just starts in the majors. You play ball in Little League, and work your way up to the older leagues. Then there is junior varsity and varsity ball. Maybe college ball and if you are really talented and lucky, the pros. But who judges that talent? That bar that is set to get the pros is set high for a reason. This doesn’t mean you can’t settle into an adult softball league and have a blast. It also doesn’t mean that settling into such a league implies a lack of talent. It’s just a different path.
. . . .
Then, too, I might like a story I write. I might love it, but I am probably the worst judge of my own stories. Who might be qualified to tell me if the story is any good? It seems to me that a professional editor at one of the major magazines is just that person. They are extensively read within the genre. They know what sells and what does not. Sure, their opinions are their own, but it is the same yardstick that applied to my heroes, so why not to me as well?
Another point: I don’t want to spend my time deep in the mechanics of publishing. I want to spend my time writing more stories. Setting the outliers aside, my experience with self-publishing is that you spend at least as much time in post-production and marketing as you do writing the story. When I sell to a magazine, I don’t have to worry about any of that post-production. And the marketing is usually as simple as a blog post announcing I have a new story coming out.
Then, too, I make more money when I sell stories to a magazine than I do self-publishing. I did an experiment a few years back. The rights to my first published story had reverted to me, so I decided to make it available on Amazon as a self-published story for $0.99. When I sold the story to the magazine, I was paid $500 on acceptance–meaning I had the check in hand months before the story appeared in the magazine. In the two years or so since I “self-published” that story on Amazon, I haven’t made $5 from it. And yet the time it took me to format the document, get it online and monitor its sales far exceeded the $5 I’ve earned from it.
Link to the rest at Jamie Todd Rubin and thanks to LJ for the tip.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
I wonder if this writer would think differently if some of the writers he admires told him they would have self published if the option was available back then.
I’m not anti traditional publishing. I’d lime to publish with one some day, bht until the mess they are in cleans up and they start offering fair contracts and treating writers witb respect, its just not an attractive option. (To me)
“The rights to my first published story had reverted to me, so I decided to make it available on Amazon as a self-published story for $0.99… In the two years or so since I “self-published” that story on Amazon, I haven’t made $5 from it. And yet the time it took me to format the document, get it online and monitor its sales far exceeded the $5 I’ve earned from it.”
Publishing one story for $.99 and not making any money from it isn’t terribly surprising. Still, if what Rubin is doing works for him, that’s all that matters.
Yup. If you set yourself up to fail, you will almost certainly fail. Having just one short story on the market is setting yourself up to fail. It certainly isn’t a valid experiment for testing the value of self-publishing.
I made more than $5 off of my 99c short stories, but most of that was on Smashwords, which has a far better percentage on the little stuff. And I used more than one, which meant that if someone liked the Free one, they’d have a decent chance of going on and picking up another in the series. Or all half-dozen of them.
Yeah, his goals may indeed be different, and that’s fine. But he did set himself up to fail.
No real cover and not much of a book blurb probably hasn’t helped the sales. The link for the story on his sidebar doesn’t take you to a place to buy the story. I can see why it might not be selling if fans don’t know it’s for sale and has so little data for searches combined with the rest. All but the cover are easy fixes.
Yeah, it’s almost like there’s some kind of correlation between the amount of effort he’s putting into self-publishing and the results he’s getting from it. Hmm–I’ll have to ponder that one some more….
“To be clear I am speaking only about me andmy goals as a writer. Different writers have different goals and different reasons for writing.”
One goal might be to compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges. It would make for a much more constructive article.
Interestingly, an Amazon search shows that an author by that name has three self-published short stories up, in a period of over five years, all with ugly covers. The .99 story doesn’t even have a real cover, just the generic green and black.
I’ve just finished an absolutely dire self-published sci-fi novel. I wish that author had Rubin’s attitude, as that would have given me back several hours of my life. And now I have to write a review of it.
I don’t have anything against self-publishing or self-published authors (one of the top books I read this year was self-published). Just ones that publish before they’ve learnt to write, revise and edit.
Well, the danger of opening the floodgates is you get a whole lot of water, and all that water looks the same when it’s crashing down on your head. And sometimes the water you get is the water the fish peed in.
Oh no! Poor you.
Why didn’t you just stop when the novel got boring? Was the author standing there with a gun, threatening to kill your children if you didn’t finish the book? I have read many dreadful books, but I never wasted hours on them. Usually, the 1st 2-3 chapters are enough.
Your website shows you are an editor. If so, were you dissing your clients? I hope not, as that would be very unprofessional. You do realise these people paid you money? If you want to become self employed, you don’t choose your clients, and you certainly don’t diss them.
Iola said “had to write a review,” not “had to edit.” From that I assume the author was not a client.
That’s why I covered both bases.
If she was reading for pleasure, why didn’t she just throw the book away?
If she was reading professionally, she shouldn’t be complaining.
The only joy left, when reading absolutely dire things, is complaining. Either that, or MSTing them for others. *has had child hooting and chortling incessantly over a MSTing of some appalling HP badfic*
I predict that it won’t be long before this attitude just won’t be viable anymore. If you want to be an author, you’re going to have to be willing to act as a publisher as well.
So traditional publishing is something you have to try, try, try at, but self-pub is measured by one (or three) $0.99 short stories with bad covers?
Those $5 are $5 more than you get paid for rejected stories, right? And honestly, making that much without good production quality is amazing.
Everyone can choose the route they want. That’s fine. It’s getting to where the only full-time non-blockbuster writers are self-pub, though.
Well, till it hits the Minimum Amount that will get it transferred to your account, that $5 isn’t more than one is paid for a rejected story…
But make that $10 (for EFT), and then it’s a different story…
I definitely don’t think there’s One True Way to publish. Different authors have different needs and goals, which is why I’m glad that there are so many different options for publishing.
However, I think it’s interesting that so many forget that publishing–no matter how you do it–requires patience and persistence. That presentation matters. And that, in general, you’re not going to make much at first, especially if you only have one or two shorts or novels up.
I actually spent more time that was essentially wasted pursuing trade publishing than I have self-publishing. (Trolling agent blogs, trying to craft the perfect query letter for each individual agent, etc.)
I just feel sorry for this guy.
Editors aren’t the recruiters for the major leagues anymore, nor were they ever very good at it to begin with. Recent history of previously rejected indies on the NYT Bestseller list have borne this out, as does the fact that they have way more losers than winners in their dugouts even with all their expertise and marketing muscle.
The only people fit to judge a story’s worth are readers, and if an author doesn’t publish the story one way or another, it won’t get read.
If you can’t get your trad pub deal or you don’t want to, just self-pub. There’s no stigma there anymore. It’s gone! And newsflash, it’s even gone for the Big 6. Guess who they’re recruiting now? Yeah … folks in the slush pile at Amazon called the bestseller lists (chock full of indies, don’t you know).
And to complain he doesn’t want to bother putting a decent cover on his book (purchasable for $20 in ten minutes from any number of pre-fab sites) to help it sell? Too much work? Geez. I’ll bet he wouldn’t go out to a bar to pick up chicks and wear his pajamas and not shower or brush his teeth. He’ll probably invest countless hours in queries and re-writes and gosh knows what else, but he won’t upload a pre-fab cover and type in a book description? Pa-lease.
Maybe he has real talent – and that would be a real shame that fear of being self-published would keep him from bringing joy to readers and to himself when they told him how great his work is.
If I were going to publish a cheapie story, and use a cover, I’d grab my phone and take a picture, then load it into an art program. Oh, wait, I already did that for my freebie PhanFic!
It ain’t great, but it looks decent at low resolutions, nails the genre down with a hammer, and even the worst reviews (“too short”) haven’t said word one about the cover being bad.
If I can get enough short stories together for an anthology, I’m probably going to take my own pics for that, too.
What’s really sad is if he is writing for magazines and anthologies in many cases rights revert back fairly quickly (compared to novels). So if he republished what has already had “stamp of approval” and put a little time & money into the basics he’d probably make more money.
“I sell to a magazine, I don’t have to worry about any of that post-production. And the marketing is usually as simple as a blog post announcing I have a new story coming out.”
At first blush, he appears to believe that if you traditionally publish, you don’t have to market to sell. From all the author’s I’ve read about who are traditionally published, they market just about as hard as self-pub authors do.
And I’m sure if he’s sold a short story to a magazine then he wouldn’t need to market. He’s already earned all the money he’s going to get since most articles/short stories are a flat fee (that I’ve noticed in my limited research). Magazine shorts and novels seem different to me, but perhaps not…
The first thought in my head was “Why should I care what you do with your books?”
Then I read the article.
….and I still dont.
I will however classify this man as a ninny.
Randall, I was just going to say the same thing. Every time I see a title like this, I think, who cares?
I don’t think I have a self-published short story that I haven’t made $5 on now. I would certainly prefer to have sold them to magazines for a few hundred bucks up front, but most of them were never going to sell to any magazine worth selling them to.
He actually had me until he talked about his experiences with self-publishing. I mean, “I don’t wanna, I like this, that’s too hard” are all valid reasons.
But even assuming that he is right about traditional publishing paying more… with short fiction, YOU CAN DO BOTH. And doing both makes you more money. You don’t compare them, you add them together.
All of those people he admired so much knew this. Even before self-publishing became an option, you don’t sell exclusive rights to short fiction. You sell it to a prime magazine, and then you resell the rights to reprint markets and anthology markets and in a collection and to re-reprint markets.
That’s how traditional writers always made a living.
Self-publishing, when the reprint market is played out, has actually always been one of the options. That is, in the old days, once you built a career and people knew your body of work, you might very well put out special limited editions in paper — collectables — of your work which has already been published everywhere else.
Now, with ebooks, self-publishing is just one more stop on the road to solvency.
This. ^_^
I’ve toyed with single short stories and collections, with not-so-good covers and with bought ones. I’m admittedly still early in building my career, but so far, the main factor I’ve found that influences sales is having related stories in a series—namely, multiple stories with a single narrator.
And from sales numbers and patterns, I can see X bought story 1, Y bought story 2, and Z bought side story A. But any one of those doesn’t sell as many copies if 1, 2, and A aren’t all out together.
The author seems to be doing well enough. He seems happy and that is important. As a reader, I might like to point out to the author that I am THRILLED by the tsunami of self-published books & shorts stories available. I follow the leads of other readers with similar tastes and I am rarely disappointed. Since samples are FREE I can figure out in just a few pages if it’s worth my time to read any farther and it doesn’t cost me a thing. And the writer’s royalties are not getting dinged when the stores return the ripped-off covers of unsold books to the publisher for a refund.
Of course, I’m not an editor at a fancy magazine or publishing house. Just a reader, you know, the END USER who actually pays for the book, who takes the book home, who gets to read what the editors at the fancy magazines and publishing houses tell me is good enough to read. Books like “Gorilla Beach” and “A Shore Thing” published by Simon&Schuster and written by someone named Snooki.
Oh, and I just bought the Kindle edition of his short story “When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer”. There are two other books of his available & self-published. The cover of the short story is not appealing but I overlooked that very important detail to make a point. A point like ‘posting a blog about your story might be a way to get the word out.’ Maybe. If you don’t mind all the hard work. Now he’s made six bucks… minus Amazon’s cut. Then I’ll write a review.
If he’s good, I would like more of his thoroughly vetted short stories available. If he got the rights back already.
Sems sad to me, he’s missing out on so much.
Putting aside the horrible contracts and the degrading way they treat authors, being dependent on someone else to give your work a stamp of approval and the “go-ahead” to publish is giving your power away.
Imho there is so much time wasted trying to pursue the traditional route. This author talks about wanting to write rather than promote, well, I would ask him how much time he spent drafting a query, researching agents, etc., etc., etc. All time that could have been spent writing.
What makes this even more of a time waste is the dismal data about being able to break in to Trad. Pub. It’s still a “who-you-know” game. Only 1 in 7,000 queries get accepted, the rest all have an “in” because they know someone. Pursuing something with those odds, putting your work on the line with those odds, is so unfair to yourself as a writer. The idea that you can’t publish if you don’t somehow hit that 7,000 in 1 chance, it’s just sad.
And, again, that’s not even getting into the fact that once you are selected, you’ll be signing a contract that will totally screw you over.
Fortunately, I think this guy’s perspective is going to become less mainstream. I suspect in a few years, the idea that writers “need” a stamp of approval from Trad. Publishing will have faded away.
I hope so.
“[B]eing dependent on someone else to give your work a stamp of approval and the “go-ahead” to publish is giving your power away.”
This, I believe, is the crux of so much of the emotional craziness that happens to writers. It’s so important to be confident in your work, but confidence sounds like bragging, and new writers are taught from the beginning that they are the least qualified to know if their work is any good.
There is a danger to being over confident, but there’s an equal danger to not having enough confidence in yourself and your own work. That lack of confidence and the constant need for outside validation, along with limited distribution, is why I think so many authors have put up with the dismal conditions in the publishing industry.
Hopefully, this is changing.
Danyelle – I hope so too!
Excellent instructive reading, especially when it comes from end readers and lots of food for thought for the new “Self-publisher” I am… you’ll find me in Amazon under NJ Richards.
Now if I said reading this was a humbling experience it would have meant I was on the high road to begin with, not so, because, although I thought I knew something about writing and DTP, I know I’ve made almost all the errors “Newbies” make: Default covers, grammar, styling, pricing, marketing, expecting to upgrade my car from sales etc but hey, thats why I’m here!
Personally I self-published my books for several reasons, i) I knew nothing about author publishing and it was a good way to start, ii) I could make all the above errors (and more) and merrily fall on my face and get over it, iii) I could learn and edit and re-edit to my heart’s content and not have to scrap, iv)…
Conclusion. There’s no need for a trad pub vs.self-pub debate, there’s just a need to discuss how best to bring good quality reading material to the bookshelf!
I took a look at the other 2 items and from the description both are short stories and 2.99 short stories at that with some good reviews. I didn’t read all the reviews but they didn’t seem gushy and some pointed out things that didn’t grab them along with what did. But as many of you pointed out I think he’d be better served by having more up, putting out a collection, and much better covers.
So now I know why he doesn’t self-publish. I had been a bit concerned. But I feel more comfortable now. Thanks for sharing.
At some point, the ‘self-publishing’ arena will have to go a few steps further. There is a horrendous glut of garbage out there (yes, GARBAGE) that isn’t just poorly written, but poorly typed, unedited and unreadable. Finding the good stuff among so much is like digging for a diamond in a sea of glass.
This supposedly democratic process also puts down what this author rightly points out: there must be a bar to determine what is good and what isn’t. It doesn’t exist in self-publishing at the moment. Other than reviews that may or may not be sock puppets or written by your mother, there is little for potential readers to determine if they’re wasting their time or not. Social media can help carry the message, but people who buy books are used to a certain level of professionalism – everything from the quality of the binding (if a printed book), to the artwork to editing. Serious readers want an experience, to fall into the work and be altered by it. My own experience reading many self-published works is that the writers really didn’t understand that there is a certain commitment you have to give to the reader, beyond the story. You are connecting with others, communicating with them, affecting their perceptions with your ideas. So much time is spent trying to ‘sell’ wherever you can, or just ‘getting it done’ and uploaded to Amazon or wherever, that this important point is left behind. Just as I’m sure some ‘traditional’ authors might prefer the better ‘deal’ of self-publishing, I’m sure plenty of self-published authors would prefer to benefit from the professionalism of a proper editor and marketing team – leaving the author free to be an author, to connect and not feel burdened with being a salesperson as well. While both are about creating confidence, one is an art, the other is just business.
Would love to see people from the world of ‘traditional publishing’ reject what their world has become and join ‘collectives’ that unite non-contracted authors and add that professional touch that raises the bar and builds the experience into one that lasts, is not merely ‘disposable.’ A collective that truly benefits the authors with respect as the creative force and the readers who deserve better.
there must be a bar to determine what is good and what isn’t. It doesn’t exist in self-publishing at the moment.
Sure there is. It’s called “sample pages.” Or “Look Inside.” No reviews you trust? Look at the “review” of the work itself. If it doesn’t grab you in the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence… Ta-da! You know it’s not for you. (And if it’s titled “The Eye of Argon,” you know it’s not for anyone who isn’t drunk, sleep-deprived, or both…)
It’s the same bar that we have, browsing in a store, except with even more raw honesty: if the book description is clearly ungrammatical and ill-spelled to boot, we can pass it by. A book in the store will always be packaged prettily, even if it turns out to be drek by the ghost-writer of the Flavor of the Month, or simply something Not To One’s Taste.
I’ve been doing that for years. Look at book, flip it over to read the back, open the front cover to see if there’s an excerpt… Curse the publishers who fill the back cover and the inside pages with “reviews” about how uberwondersplendiferous the book is, without any mention of what it’s about. Put those books back. Pick up another book with an intriguing title and/or cover. Lather, rinse, repeat.