Words for Writers

Welcome to another WORDS FOR WRITERS article! This time, your friendly neighbourhood hybrid author (that means I’ve both self-published and been traditionally published) is here to address some questions I’ve seen flying around social media lately.

There’s a lot of debate recently regarding which stream of publication is “best”, with folks debating between self-publishing their book independently or querying it to agents and presses for traditional publishing and the answer is: it depends on what you want out of publishing it.

But before we get into that, let’s briefly revisit what, exactly, both Indie and Trad Publishing actually do.

Trad:

• A publishing company turns your intellectual property (IP) and Manuscript into a product called a “book” (and sometimes also an “ebook” and “audiobook” simultaneously.) In return, they pay you Royalties.
  • They’re not buying it outright, they are leasing the use of it from you, and paying you for the privilege.
  • You retain copyright, unless you sign it over to the company (which I stridently advise you not to do.)
  • Unless the rights are locked down in your contract with your publisher, you have the right to ‘lease’ use of your IP to other companies creating different kinds of products, such as “screenplays”, “theatrical adaptations”, “podcasts” or “merchandise”. Depending on your contract, your original publisher might help you court these deals in return for a cut of the profits.
• The company pays all the out-of-pocket expenses to create the product, but in return, they keep the lion’s share of the profit from selling the product, and have complete creative control over how the product is designed and marketed.
  • That’s not to say that your opinions and thoughts won’t be asked, but you don’t have any veto power. That’s okay, though, because these are professionals who know both the business and their jobs better than most authors ever will. They’re good at their jobs.
• The publisher will take on some, but not all of the burden of marketing your book, and the attendant costs with their portion.
  • They’ll cover a lot of the pre-publication stuff (marketing to the industry) like doing all the work to pitch it to library associations, professional review outlets, large chain bookstores, high-end social media influencers, awards committees, organizing the sending of advanced review copies, setting up the book on Goodreads/Amazon, etc.
  • This means the post-publication stuff (marketing to readers) will be up to you. This is stuff like donating copies to your local library branch, appearing at local book markets and festivals, arranging your book launch party, designing and paying for any swag you might want to give away, etc.
• Your contract is ostensibly in perpetuity, or until one or both parties agree to invoke the sunset clause and part ways.
  • Reasons the publisher might sever your contract include but are not limited to:
    • Morality Clauses (you do something reprehensible that will damage the publisher’s reputation by association)
    • You or your agent are unreasonably difficult to work with (that’s not to say you should be a pushover, just don’t be an asshole)
    • The book didn’t sell as well as they hoped and they decide not to pursue Next Works or Sequels with you
  • Reasons you might sever your contract include but are not limited to:
    • Lack of payment (you’ve sold books but they aren’t paying you what you’re owed within the timeframe outlined in your contract)
    • Lack of sales (it’s been a certain number of months or years with no sales, as outlined in the contract, and you have the right to claw back the book.)
    • The editor or publishing house are unreasonably difficult to work with (it goes both ways)
  • The company will have Right of First Refusal on your next work(s).
    • This doesn’t necessarily have to be a sequel or prequel to what you just published with them. Sometimes it’s a completely different stand-alone book.
    • This is good! It means that your next book already has a home, so long as they want it. If you provide it to them for review, and they pass on it, then you (and your agent) are free to shop that book elsewhere.
    • This is also great if the first book you ‘sell’ isn’t the first book you wrote. You may have a whole backlist of projects that they can peruse and help you get up to snuff for publication.
    • However, if you had a bad experience with your publishing team, this means you may be stuck locked into a second book with them. (Don’t worry, if it was really horrendous, your agent will help you navigate or get out of it.)
  • You will be contractually obligated to provide them with any subsequent works created in the same IP that you may choose to write, and may be barred from taking them to another publisher.
    • You can’t publish Book #1 with one publisher, and then whisk it away from them and publish Book #2 elsewhere. Anything written in that world is automatically theirs, unless they pass on it.
  • You have the support of a professional editorial, marketing, and agenting team.

Indie:

• You yourself turn your intellectual property (IP) and Manuscript into a product called a “book” (and sometimes an “ebook” and “audiobook” simultaneously.)
• If you have the money and/or the connections for it, you can court and negotiate adaptation contracts yourself.
  • Hire an entertainment lawyer or agent to review any contract you negotiate yourself before signing! Always!
• You keep all of the profit from selling the product, and have complete creative control over how it is designed and marketed.
• That said, you are also responsible for all of the out-of-pocket costs—paying for editors, paying for typesetters or typesetting software, paying the cover designers and to buy the stock art and fonts licenses they many need, paying the file uploading fees, book printing costs, shipping costs, and marketing associated costs such as paying for stocking fees or table fees, etc.
  • Be honest and objective with yourself when it comes to your budget, and stick to it. Indie books very rarely earn back everything paid into making them at a high quality within the first year. This is an investment in yourself as a creator and small business owner, and it may take years (and several more books) to start properly earning profit.
• You retain full copyright, unless the company you print the books through someone manages to obtain it through their terms of service (in which case I advise you to walk away and not use their services).
  • This is great because it means if someone is interested in adapting the books, or reprinting them through tradpub channels, you are in complete control of everything already.
• You are under no obligation to print your follow up works through Indie channels, and can go the Trad route with your next book, so long as it’s a separate and distinct IP from anything else you’ve already Indie published (i.e. Stand Alone book in a new world, entirely unrelated to what you’ve already self pubbed)
• You have to do everything on your own. (Or you need to research and hire freelancers to do certain parts for you.)

Now that you understand the difference between Trad and Indie, let’s look at what might pull you in one direction or another.

Why do You Want to Publish?

Just Sharing For the Fun of it / Practice

I’d say dive right in, then! Who knows what will happen! You might get some great feedback, make some awesome friends, garner some great mutuals and build a wonderful and supportive community, and learn loads. If this is the case, though, I’d recommend trying out a serialization or social sharing site first, like Wattpad, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, or any of the other of the myriad of similar free apps. That way you’re not sinking money into something that you’re not ready to do professionally.

To Make Money

For some reason, the stereotype of the ultra-wealthy author is a favourite of Hollywood, and the public thinks that being a writer is the easiest and highest paying job anyone could ever have. The truth is, it’s a highly, highly competitive field, takes an immense amount of talent, practice, craft, determination and dedication, business connections and sheer dumb luck to become the next James Patterson or Casey McQuiston. Writing is hard. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of revisions, and ideas are cheap—it’s all in the execution, and that takes time and dedication to hone. Nothing about being a writer is easy. And even if you do finish your book and publish it (either indie or trad), it’s got to fight against a sea of other novels for attention.

Did you know that on average, about 3,000 titles are published on Amazon per day? And that an increasing number of them are AI Slop Vomit? That’s a lot of books for readers to wade through and choose from. And that each of those books will earn the author between $2-$10 dollars per purchase. That is… not a lot, when you start calculating how many units you have to move to live the luxury author lifestyle. You have to really stand out, and really market well, and really, really sell a lot of books to even begin to have it cover your bills. Writing and publishing a book is not a viable Get-Rich-Quick scheme. It is possible to make a living as a writer, don’t get me wrong, but it will likely take time and multiple titles to see steady enough income to quit your dayjob for.

To Get Traditionally Published

I love indie publishing. I love having all the control and making all the choices, and sharing my work that isn’t a good fit for mainstream markets with readers who love it for exactly how quirky and left-of-centre it can be, and I love having all the creative control.

But there is something wonderful about handing over a completed manuscript to a team of experienced and trained professionals, cashing my advance cheque, and going to have a nap while they handle everything from there. Trad publishing takes longer—years longer, sometimes—but for the chance to work with professionals who have connections that can offer me creative and emotional support, make my book better, help it hit bigger, and help me make more money than I might otherwise if I Self Pubbed? Yeah, it’s a fantastic exchange. There is still worth and value in the traditional system, and I enjoy it immensely.

To Backdoor my Indie Book into Trad Publishing

The path from Self-Published (or published on a serialization site) to Traditionally Published is a very thin, not particularly well-worn one. Besides the books specifically hand picked by the Wattpad Books and W by Wattpad publishing teams (usually through the Watty Awards), or their graphic novel/comic side Webtoon who publish the Webtoon Unscrolled books, or because the indie book was a screaming runaway success with an in-built audience like Fifty Shades of Grey or The Martian, I can think of vanishingly few novels that have been selfpubbed first and then picked up for traditional publication.

If the point of being published is to be Trad Published, definitely query agents and small publishers first before Indie Publishing. That said, having a project on a site like Wattpad will give you a lot of experience and metrics that you can brag about if you elect to query around a second or different project. I cite my serialization site readership numbers in my tradpub marketing documents all the time. Just because you chose to Indie pub one book means you’re locked into Indie for the rest of your career; you can always query the next book you write to agents and publishers that allow for direct submission.

To Share my Story with the World

Amazing! It takes a lot of hard work to write a novel, and I applaud you for finishing it! If you want to share the book with people, and help the best readers find and love it, but don’t necessarily care for the trappings and timelines of Trad Publishing, then Indie Publishing will probably be ideal for you! Especially since you can print as many or as few books as you like, and completely control how and where they’re distributed and sold. There’s lots of ways to make that happen, if you’re not necessarily prepared to learn new software and pick up graphic design skills—you can hire professionals to do all of that on your behalf, either a la carte via friend recommendation or via freelancing sites like Fiverr, or a vanity publishing team, who will handle everything for a lump fee. If you do choose to use a vanity press, double check Writer Beware before you hire one. Some can be scammy.

This is especially great for folks who aren’t looking to get into writing and publishing full time. My Uncle, who just turned 101 this past month, wrote up his memoires a few years ago. He just wanted to print enough copies to give one to friends and family members. I encouraged him to print a few extras and donate them to the local libraries, history archives, and museums, and I’m glad I did because they were very grateful to have them. He did it all through a vanity press, and we were both satisfied by the work they did.

And while it will definitely require extra work and diligence on your part, you can get self-published indie books into bookstores, festivals, book markets, awards, and press. It is entirely possible to have a flourishing full-time writing career as an Indie Published author; I know several who earn more than enough as an Indie author for it to be their full-time job, and to live in financial comfort. They get to write what they want, how they want, and publish it on their own timeline with complete creative control, and their readership is engaged and willing to spend money on what they produce.

(A caution here: I have also known Indie writers who have gone bankrupt or reverse mortgaged their homes throwing everything they have at a book or series that just isn’t hitting with readers. If something just isn’t grabbing readers, you have to let it go and move on to something new. The nice thing with Trad Pub is that your agent and editors will be there to chivvy you onto the next work. The danger of Indie is that it can be hard to let go when you’ve poured everything into it, and harder still to know when it’s the right time to do so. Cultivate a group of writing friends to check in with you, and stick to a realistic budget.)

Have a Movie Made

Take a screenwriting class instead. If the ultimate goal is to get a movie made of your story, why not just write it as a movie in the first place? It is a lot rarer than it seems from the outside for a novel to be adapted, and if that’s the only reason you’re doing it, consider that maybe you’re writing for the wrong medium. For more info on that, read my article about How Books Become Movies.

Become Internet Famous

You do you, I guess. I have no idea how it would work, and no advice for that because I am definitely not Internet (In)Famous, and have no desire to be. Looks exhausting. But don’t let me stop you! You can do this either through Indie or Trad pub, if you work hard. Just… be famous for something good, okay? Don’t attack your fellow authors. We’re colleagues, not competition.

Already Published

No matter what method of Indie Publishing you choose, be aware that this means the manuscript will forevermore be what is considered “Already Published” by the whole Traditional Publishing business machine.

Publishers create products to sell. If someone (you) has already created that product and made it available for purchase, it means that it’s not new or exclusive for the publishing company. And so very much of traditional publishing relies on New and Exclusive. For all that they deal in stories and sell beautiful pieces of writer’s souls and imagination, never forget that tradpub is An Industry ™, and many, many of the decisions are made because Capitalism™.

There are very, very few agents and publishers willing to look at Already Available projects, and generally only those with massive pre-existing readerships and fanbases. There are now also imprints of larger presses whose employees are scouting and scooping Indie books for republication with Trad support and distribution, which is a great foot in the door to Trad, but you also have to ask yourself why they’re doing so.

Yes, to find great work and share it with the wider world, but also take long hard look at the contracts they offer, and decide if the terms are acceptable to you—they’re without a doubt going to be more restrictive and come with less compensation than if you went the full Trad route with an agent to advocate for you. Just read the contracts carefully.

Reasons to Trad Pub

Usually because…

… you don’t want to run a whole business.

I don’t know about you, but I became a writer to write. Not to also become a webmaster, a project coordinator, an editor, a fulfillment officer, a graphic designer, a marketing genius, a savvy distributor and bookseller, a typesetter who knows all the rules and conventions of the practice, and whatever else I might need to learn how to do in order to publish a professional book independently. I can do it, I’ve taught myself to do all those things, but I don’t like doing them. And they cut into my writing time.

I want to tell stories, not sell them.

And I certainly would prefer to not have to pay out of pocket for everything as well. I’m already living on limited income—going into debt to publish a book that may or may not earn back enough to pay it off is not at all attractive to me.

Publishing Trad means everything after the manuscript is revised and locked is someone else’s problem, and I love that for me.

… you want to work with trained professionals and a support network.

Your publisher will come equipped with:

• an Acquiring/Substantive Editor (who helps you revise the story as a whole to make it the best it can be, and helps you write the best version of the Marketing copy the other teams will use, like the synopsis and back cover pitch paragraphs)
• a Line Editor (who reviews the story with a fine-toothed comb to ensure all the details match up and every word means what you think it means)
• a Proofreader (who finds and eradicates typos and grammatical errors)
• a Typesetter (who lays out the manuscript in book-shape)
• a Designer (who will design the look of both the cover and the interiors of the book)
• a Cover Artists (who creates the cover illustration based on the Designer’s brief)
• a Publicist (whose job it is to get the word out about the book)
• … and a whole bunch of other people whose jobs it is to manage printing and distribution of the book to bookstores and libraries, court audiobook/television/film adaptations, create and sell merch for the book, etc.

Not to mention your agent, who will:

• Submit your books around to publishing houses for consideration.
• Negotiate a bomb-ass contract on your behalf.
• Will court audiobook/television/film adaptations on your behalf.
• Will review royalty statements and keep on top of companies to ensure you’re paid fairly and on time.
• Will act as chief hand-holder, brainstormer, and springboard for your next works.
• Will protect you and help you access legal representation if you need it.
• Be the bad guy on your behalf.

… your book is both accessible and mainstream.

Publishing is a Business. While sometimes something unique and niche pops off, the bread-and-butter of the industry is the comfort-food predictability of the exact kind of stories readers expect when they choose your book. The Romance book will end with a Happily Ever After, the Sci Fi Book will give the reader insight into the human condition and explore the consequences of technology, Fantasy will provide an escapist world to get lost in, spies will catch the bad guys, and above all, the story will be well-told, and satisfying, no matter the genre.

I’m not saying your book has to be boring or trite. I’m saying that it meets (within a certain margin of flexibility), the genre and age market expectations for word length, tone, tropes, character arcs, and plot. That makes it very easy to package and sell, and therefore very appealing to agents and publishers.

We all love good comfort food, don’t we?

… you are looking for a more reliable and predicable paycheque.

As I said above, it is possible to make writing your fulltime career, but it often requires the publication of multiple titles, and a decade or so of steady publishing and building your readership. This is for both Trad and Indie Publishing. There are one-off genuine overnight success stories, but you can’t count on your manuscript being one of them.

While you make less money per book in Trad Publishing (see my article How Do Writers Get Paid for a thorough breakdown of how money ends up in an author’s pocket), the truth is if you do manage to publish traditionally, then you’re likely to sell more books overall than in Indie. I’ve seen statistics floating around that most Indie books sell fewer than 500 copies over their lifetime (though that doesn’t count the per-page-reads of places like Kobo Plus and KDP). And in Trad, you are often given an Advance on Royalties, before the book is even published.

Having said that, getting your book picked up by a traditional publishing house is significantly more difficult than self-publishing a book, just in terms of patience and luck.

Agents receive hundreds of queries from authorly hopefuls a week, but sign only a handful every year; agents then submit books to dozens of editors, but can’t guarantee sales. Every agented author has had at least one manuscript wither on submission, to be put away in a drawer and either never see the light of day again, or to wait to be revised in the future so your agent can try again when the tastes of the market have shifted.

… you want to leverage a publishing house’s greater reach and market penetration.

The truth of the matter is, unless one has incredible personal connections, even the most dedicated and industrious indie publisher cannot match the breadth and depth of market reach that an established, major global publishing house brings to the table.

While even trad pubbed authors need to do some marketing on their own (mostly the reader-facing efforts, like making bookmarks, holding give-aways, and arranging autograph appearances), they have the direction and support of professionals with educations, experience, and connections that far outpace the writer’s own. They can get your books into stores, major review outlets like the New York Times, arranged for preferred placement at major chain book stores (on tables and endcaps), and considered for prestigious awards. All of which is very difficult to do on your own, unless you spend megabucks.

Reasons to Indie Pub

Usually because your book is…

…niche work.

The book or story produced is either hard to sell to mainstream publishers, or they’ve rejected it. In this case, I mean when the agent/publishers think the book is “too” something. “Too poetic.” “Too weird.” “Too queer.” “Too diverse.”

Just make sure that you’re not mistaking a book being “too” something for feedback that indicates that your manuscript requires more work. “Too raw” may actually mean “requires some serious editing.” Be honest with yourself and the level of your craft.

…shorter or longer than books traditionally are.

Trad Pub houses sometimes have a pretty firm set of guidelines for how long they want a book to be, because of the cost of manufacturing that book, and because of the market research stating how long a book ought to be in order to be appealing for the target demographic. But sometimes a story ends up being outside those guidelines, and that margin is just too large to make printing such a book viable.

For example, skinny novellas with only 20-40 pages are often too small to produce and make a profit–it would cost as much to produce it as one could sell it for, making it a project not worth taking on for a publisher (whose goal, of course, is to keep the business afloat while publishing great books).

Alternately, a huge book’s price needs to be jacked up to account for the large amounts of ink, paper, and special binding to keep something that large from falling apart. While readers are willing to spend $40 for a paperback copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest, they will be significantly less likely to do so for an unknown or debut author.

Publishers prefer books in that sweet spot where they’re making good profit, but purchasers aren’t feeling like they’re being ripped off.

… weirdly formatted.

This is anything that would make the book more expensive for the publisher to create, would require that they hire an extra interior graphic designer, or might be confusing to a reader used to just straight-up prose. For example, if part of the story is told in pictures, or in verse, or a book that requires extra special formatting allowances, such as a good deal of illustrations or footnotes, or a book that ties in with and is dependent media available elsewhere – like a webcomic or a video hosted on your site.

I’m not saying that Trad Pub publishers aren’t interested in taking risks, but they are calculated risks and that have been costed-out carefully, and usually are executed only when the author involved is a big enough name that the bizarreness of the project won’t put off the hardcore readership of the author, and there are at least a small pool of guaranteed sales to rely on.

…backlisted and/or out of print.

One of my novels, TRIPTYCH was originally published with a Trad Pub small press out of Canada. When my contract with them was up, I clawed back the rights because I was unhappy with their marketing efforts on the book, which had resulted in a long enough stretch of time with no sales to allow me to invoke the sunset clause in our contract. A second publisher took the ebook rights for the book, but was uninterested in also publishing the hardcopy version, so I took myself off to IngramSpark, and along with the help of a hired interior designer and a cover artist, produced a paperback and hardcover to fill the gap myself.

…a collection.

Over a decade or so of being a professional writer, most authors end up with a hodgepodge of short stories, poems, and articles that they’ve written for anthologies and other publications. Usually you get the rights back on these kinds of short pieces a year or two after they were originally published. And then they’re just sitting there on your hard drive, collecting digital dust.

This is a good opportunity to collect them all together, put them in some sort of order, and publish them as a single volume. Unless you’re a big name, most agents and Trad Publishers aren’t interested in publishing this for you, as there’s little guarantee of a return on investment—but who cares! You’ve already written the stories, you might as well share them! And these are great volumes to have for your readership, especially for the completionists and hardcore fans you may cultivate.

… to complete a series.

Sometimes, and it happens to us all, a publisher doesn’t end up publishing a whole series. Firstly, publishers don’t always sign the rights for a whole trilogy or series at once. Usually it’s in one or two-book deals. If book #1 does well, the publisher may then contract for books #2 and #3. Or just book #2.

And if any one of those books flop (whether it’s the publisher’s fault for marketing it poorly, or it just doesn’t do well), then the publisher will either decline to sign the rest of the series or cancel the contract. After all, why should they publish a proven money-waster?

It’s harsh, but it’s one of the realities of the biz. In this case, your readership is left with an incomplete series, and you might have a book or two that you’ve written already, or a story you want to finish, and now can’t.

In this case, it’s usually possible to negotiate with the publishing house to bypass the Right of First Refusal clause, and claw back the ability to publish the rest of the books in the series on your own.

…been rejected by agent / publisher.

Nearly a decade ago, my first agent read the original version of TIME AND TIDE (then called “First Impressions”) and said that he didn’t know how to sell this “weird Victorian romance crap.” Putting aside the fact that the manuscript is neither Victorian nor crap, I did a revision on it and then put it away. When I pitched it to my second agent, she also said that she wasn’t interested in trying to shop around something that another agent had already rejected, and that she wasn’t sure what to do with a queer time-travel love story either. With no support for the book at all, I decided to revise it again, changed the title to “A Woman of the Sea”, and thought I’d give Wattpad a proper go.

The book did quite well there. It’s not a flip-off to either of my literary agents that it has, though, because what works on Wattpad and what works at a Trad Publisher and in bookshops are often very different things.

However, in this case, I have a segment of my readership that isn’t on Wattpad and doesn’t care to engage with the app/website, and who prefer hardcopy books. I had free rights over all the licences and ownership because my agent doesn’t want to rep it and Wattpad doesn’t want to monetize it, so I decided might as well make money on it myself. I used the same team that helped design and do the covers for TRIPTYCH, and self-published “A Woman of the Sea” via IngramSpark.

From there, W by Wattpad Books noticed how well it was doing on the Wattpad App, and offered a collaboration to give the book a proper edit and redesign. I pulled down “A Woman of the Sea” from IngramSpark, and it was republished and distributed via Penguin Random House as TIME AND TIDE in fall of 2024.

… to kickstart a Trad Pub career.

Self-Publishing is also a great way to kickstart a Trad Pub career, too, if that’s something that appeals to you. It shows an agent that you can complete a project, and produce a professional-grade manuscript, and it also demonstrates that you understand how to market a book as well.

This also provides the opportunity for you to build up an audience that can migrate with you to Trad Pub; publishers and marketing departments sure do love lots of wonderful high stats and numbers in terms of audience engagement and readership.

Of course, as I’ve said in earlier, agents generally can’t sell manuscripts that already exist in book-form, so if you’re going to Indie Pub a book, make sure it’s not one that you’d rather see Trad Pubbed. It is very very very rare for a Trad Pub house to pick up a book that has already been selfpubbed for large distribution. Trad Pub publishers will only republish a book that already exists if they know the numbers are going to be through the roof.

Agents and Publishers are in the business of turning manuscripts into products called a books. If your manuscript is already a book with a cover and an ISBN, then there’s nothing for them to create and sell. You’ve done it already.

So if you intend to Indie Pub a book, gain a readership that way, and then pitch the exact same project again to an agent or publisher, I urge you to give it a real think-over. There’s no harm in pitching the manuscript around to Agents and Small Presses first, and then Indie Pubbing if the book isn’t picked up. But it rarely works the other way around.

By the same token, there’s also no harm in Self Pubbing a book first, using that to build audience and loyalty, and then leveraging those numbers while pitching a second, different book to agents and publishers in the Trad Pub sphere. (So long as this second book has nothing to do with the first – don’t pitch the second book in a series that you’ve already begun to publish.)

A Word on Trad Pub

This article has breezed over one of the most difficult and daunting part of Traditional Publishing, and that is actually getting an agent and/or smaller press that allows you to submit directly to actually pick you up for representation and publication. Trad Pub requires diligence, determination, and a willingness to rework and revise your work a lot before you even get to the part where you have an editorial and design team to help you make it the best it can be.

If you have decided to pursue traditional publishing with your manuscript, here are some more articles to help you on your way:

• The Publishing Flowchart – What Happens in What Order
• What Do I Do Now That My Novel Is Written?
• Finalizing Your Novel for Query
• How to Write a Book Pitch / Back Cover Copy
• How to Write a Novel Synopsis
• How to Create a Pitch Package
• How to Write a Query Letter
• How to Get a Literary Agent

 

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I hope this article was helpful. You can find more of my WORDS FOR WRITERS series of advice blog posts on the craft and business of being a writer right here.