Since at least three different people sent me this link to a story on CNN’s page about self-publishing I thought it might be worthwhile to add some of my own thoughts to the discussion, as I’ve actually seen a number of nearly identical pieces over the last eight or nine years since print on demand publishing became widely available. The only difference here is that since this one appeared on CNN’s home page it seems to have attracted quite a bit of attention.

The CNN piece can be summed up this way: author has difficulty landing a publishing house for her book, self-publishes through iUniverse to make the book available via print on demand through Amazon, gets some glowing reviews, and then gets the book picked up by a major publisher. Then the piece goes on to talk about how cheaply and efficiently you can self-publish your book this way, and how more and more authors are turning to places like AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Lulu.com, etc., to get their books published. In this case the piece focuses on Lisa Genova, who had trouble getting a publisher to acquire her novel about a 50-year-old Harvard professor’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, decided to self-publish it through iUniverse, got some terrific reviews on Amazon & (more importantly) in the Boston Globe, and then got the book picked up by Simon & Schuster.

It’s a wonderful story and one that’s not unique to Genova. A quick search on PublishersMarketplace.com shows that over the last two years there were 29 deals reported where the book had been previously self-published. And in fact, two of those deals are for books that I represent: Small Dog, Big Life, by Dennis Fried, PhD (originally published as Memoirs of a Papillon and now coming out from Simon & Schuster in May), and The Baby Bond, by Linda F. Palmer (originally self-published as Baby Matters and now coming out from Sourcebooks, Inc. in the Fall). So it absolutely can and does happen. It’s also not a new phenomenon, as this same thing has been happening for decades. The difference now is that with the availability of print on demand and the ease of getting a book listed on Amazon it’s much cheaper and easier than it ever was in the past, and the number of self-published books has exploded in the last several years.

Of course, I can also understand the allure of a piece like this. Going through the process of finding an agent and securing a publisher can be both slow and frustrating, and rejection is a common part of the process. Most agents report that they pass on more than 95% of the queries they receive and that figure is about accurate for me, as well. As a result I run into authors all the time who end up feeling as though neither agents nor editors are giving their work the chance that it deserves, so the idea that one could simply skip all the gate keepers in traditional publishing and go directly to readers is certainly an exciting (and enticing) concept.

The difficulty I have with articles like the CNN piece is that they make the process of succeeding this way sound far easier than it actually is. Here’s a piece from the blog “How Publishing Really Works” that helps to round out the picture a bit more. In a nutshell, it shows that the average self-published book sells about 150 copies (that’s 150 total) and that about 40% of those sales are made directly back to the author. Here’s a short clip looking specifically at iUniverse, although the numbers look consistent across the range of pod publishers:

iUniverse’s most recent Facts and Figures sheet reports that the company published 22,265 titles through 2005, with sales of 3.7 million: an average of 166 sales per title. Obviously some titles can boast better sales (Amy Fisher’s If I Knew Then sold over 32,000 copies)–but not many. According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies.

Doing the match quickly, 83 out of 18,000 titles is less than ½ of 1% of iUniverse titles that have sold more than 500 copies. To put that into perspective, you’ll typically need to sell at least 3,000 copies before those sales will start to have an impact in convincing an editor at a major publisher (for instance, Memoirs of a Papillon sold more than 20,000 and Baby Matters sold more than 7,000) to pick up the book. Also, looking back at my PublishersMarketplace search, I noted that 29 deals were listed where the book had been previously self-published. That sounds like a decent number until you realize that more than 30,000 deals have been reported there over the last 2 years.

Does that mean I think you shouldn’t self-publish your book? Not necessarily. There are circumstances where self-publishing - especially when taking advantage of the speed and ease of print on demand - makes a great deal of sense (generally when speed to market is very important and where the author has a significant marketing platform to draw upon). And of course, there are truly some instances where traditional publishing overlooks a book that’s more than deserving of being published, just like Lisa Genova’s novel that featured prominently in the CNN piece. There are also some different self-publishing models, including skipping the printed book entirely and just selling a digital version of the book, that can be effective under the right circumstances. But I’ve already gone on long enough here. I’ll provide some more thoughts in a later blog post about what kinds of authors do well going the self-publishing route, and what kinds of models I’ve seen that seem to work well.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.