There are many ways for us to get our books into the world, and they’re all valid. And they are pretty much determined by how much we have to back ourselves.
So, being published today breaks down into four categories. Traditional publishing — and I’ll call it trad publishing — we all know how it works. You have a company invest in you by giving you an advance, or just promising to publish your book with no cost to you. You gain that advantage by querying an editor directly at a small press, or impressing an agent with your query. And then when you impress the agent, then they get busy pitching you. There’s more time there, so that’s traditional. The advantages to doing it yourself in self-publishing, or doing it outside of traditional publishing, are not that much less. In fact, they’re greater in many ways.
Hybrid means that you hire a company, something like Atmosphere Press or She Writes Press. And for a fee of between $6,500 and $10,000, or more, they will take care of everything for you to get the book for sale online. They won’t guarantee that you’re going to be in a bookstore. But they are going to take care of the rest for you. You’ll have meetings along the way.
There’s something I call bespoke custom publishing, and that’s where you hire an individual to be a strategist, and that person hires other people, and you only get what you need, all the essentials. There’s a plan for promotion and getting your book discovered.
The problem with hybrid publishing is that you’re sold a package, and then usually what happens is you find that you need something like marketing or promotion. It’s not usually included in most hybrid packages. So bespoke is a way of taking an inventory of all you need, and then charging on an hourly basis for services. It turns out to be a lot less expensive than hybrid, and a lot more certain than being selected for traditional.
Finally, the fourth option is the one lots of people have done, and that’s self-publishing, where you do it all yourself. Perhaps you hire a copy editor, hopefully you hire a proofreader, but the rest of it falls on you. If you haven’t published before, now you’re learning. So, there’s a learning element to saving a lot of money by self-publishing. Cover design and interior work: how do you trust and vet those providers? What’s a fair price for good work?
