Is it Better to Self-Publish or Publish Traditionally?

When you write a book, most people think immediately of publishing traditionally. But online, there is little information for authors looking for this.

Comparing this to the wealth of information on self-publishing… well, it isn’t really even a comparison.

So which is actually better, self-publishing or traditional publishing? Here’s the quick answer:

Self-publishing gives authors much higher profit per sale, but generally receives less sales. If you are good at marketing, choose self-publishing. If not, it all depends on how much effort you are willing to put in.

Essentially, if you’re willing to put in enough effort into marketing your book, you should choose self-publishing. If you just want to do the writing and nothing else, you should go for traditional publishing – but you need to make sure everything’s perfect.

But it isn’t quite that simple, so read on!

For royalties, self-publishing takes the cake. And it isn’t even close!

For traditional publishing, authors can expect an upfront lump sum and royalties thereon. To get the royalties, though, you must sell a certain amount of books.

So either way, whether you sell nothing or millions of copies, you at least get something. But you make more money if you do the latter.

The lump sum depends a lot on the book, but it usually ends up in the thousands for a good book.

Royalties typically only get up to about 18% at the high end. A low royalty can be just 10%.

But some of this money also ends up going to your agent, the person who convinces publishers to take your book on – usually amounting to about 10% of your money.

Self-published authors don’t get a lump sum – so you can easily spend a lot of time for literally nothing. But the reason why self-publishing wins is the royalties.

Self-publishing usually gets you at least 65% profits, sometimes all the way up to 90-100% with the right platform.

So if you sell a million copies through self-publishing instead of traditional publishing, you’ll usually make at least double or triple by doing it solo.

This is where traditional publishing wins. Traditionally published authors typically sell about 3,000 copies of their book. Though, interestingly, they sell less than 500 copies in the first year.

Self-published authors do a fair bit worse than thid, with only an average of 250 copies sold. But many books don’t sell at all, and some sell tens or hundreds of thousands.

For me, I sold about 3,000-4,000 copies per book – but most of them for free (during a promotion period). So I only ended up making about £25 from each one so far.

There are three main things to change for self-publishing, but only one thing you should get to work on for traditional publishing.

For self publishing, you should try to:

1. Market your book. Marketing is the most important thing to get to success with a book. Luckily for you, I made a guide to marketing books and ebooks.
2. Make an actually good book. It’s insane how many people overestimate the quality of their book. This definitely included me at the start. But, just for you, here’s a guide to making your book better.
3. Make a good “listing” for Amazon (or wherever you’re self-publishing). That essentially just includes your cover, first chapter, title and description, plus your price.

And for traditional publishing:

1. Make your book as good as it can be. You need it to be perfect. If it isn’t absolutely perfect, it probably won’t even get to an agent – let alone published. Pore over every sentence (well, maybe not that far – but you get the idea) so that it’s amazing.
2. That’s it. With traditional publishing, the rest is done for you.

Hopefully this has helped you decide which one you’re going to pursue, but keep in mind how much quicker self-publishing is – it’s usually the decising factor. Good luck!