Self-publishers versus book reviewers - FIGHT!

[JenJen]

Hi JenJen. Having tried the self-publishing route I would very seriously say that you should exhaust all options with traditional publishers before going this way.

When I self-published my novel (about the time I started this thread) I had the idea in my head that I could do everytihng a publishing house could do. To begin with things were going well, I managed to get some interest in my book and created a dedicated, if small, following. The problem is that the initial energy that I spent on promoting the book soon died off. Copies of my book sat in my cupboard and I wasn't doing the legwork. I went to work fulltime and my spare time was filled with family and other stuff. Now that I don't have the time or motivation to continue to promote my book everything has come to a virtual standstill.

The other problem with self-publsihing is that I never felt like I had truly completed the act of writing a novel. Yes I had written the piece and proofed it until my eyes were ready to fall out, but at the end of the day I still feel like I cheated at the last leg of a cross country race.

I would not go down the self-publishing road again.

The one positive point I did get from it was that it allowed people to read my book and gave me confidence that people were enjoying my writing. Occasionally I get random emails from complete strangers asking me when the next book is coming out. That's a good feeling but it only serves to remind me that I should have been more persistent when it came to approaching agents.

I've been a bit reluctant to post in this thread as the title makes me cringe everytime I read it. I'm not sure why I chose that heading but it sounds very arrogant (I think I was trying to be funny at the time but it's lame).

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, and sorry it didn't seem to work out :/
I don't really think there is much difference between the regular book self-publishing route and the graphic novel one. If anything, self-publishing a graphic novel could be harder because of the very limited audience.

So yes, I've pretty much made up my mind on this.

 

[Jennifer Kirk]

Is self-publishing necessarily bad? I wouldn't say so, but what magazines and newspapers seem to think when it comes to reviewing is another matter. Even smaller publishers get a hard time getting reviewers to review. I guess it comes from the fact that it takes time to actually read and review a book, and so reviewers are going to prioritise what they receive, and any publishers or self-publishers they haven't heard of will inevitably slip down the queue (and maybe fall off the bottom).

Yes there are a lot of small presses around. Are they really much different from a well written, edited and presented self-published book? Maybe the only difference in some cases is really just who put the money up to pay for it (was it the author, or some chap called Gerald who runs a small press out of his garage?). A reviewer doesn't want to spend their time reading a book to find it's somethinhg that isn't good enough to bother reviewing, so human nature is to play it safe and start of with the big names first. Reviews of big names are also what a lot of people want to read, so they have to think of their audiance too.

An ISBN gets you listed pretty much anywhere that sells books. The key thing is turning that into sales. Just because Amazon, Waterstones or WH Smiths has a book listed on their database, does not mean that it is carried in stock. When my book was published I found out that there was a huge behind the scenes process that happens top ensure that a book is more than just listed, but actually physically present in Amazon's warehouse or the shelves of Waterstones.

I had the experience of having the first print copy of a book done by the publisher I am with. Maybe that's akin to self-publishing in some reviewers' eyes because there is no previous book track record for the publisher (they normally stick with webcomics). Consequently out of maybe twenty review copies that went out, we got three actual reviews. I'm told that that's pretty good all things considered. It also helped that I pulled favours that I wasn't really entitled to pull and sweet-talked two people including a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and a prominent journalist for Sky and the BBC. Sometimes there is a big element of not what you know, but who you know so getting all the help you can beg, coerce or just plain con can be helpful.

I suppose it gets easier once you have a track record. At least a bigger publisher comes with a track-record that you can ride the shirt-tails of.