You’ve done it! You’ve slaved away at your computer for six months, a year, maybe more, and you just put the final period on the final sentence of the final chapter in your brand-spanking new book (or maybe you followed my advice from my last post and “blogged your book” to reach this point).
Whatever approach you took, congratulations! You’ve achieved something most people never do—you’ve written a book-length manuscript.
That’s the good news. But now you have some big decisions to make because you’re only part-way to the ultimate goal of publication. After all, if you don’t publish your book, it’s not really a book, is it? It’s just a manuscript.
At this point, you have some options, and I want to make sure that you make the best decision for your situation because there’s no one answer to the question of “What’s the best way to publish my book?” The best way for you won’t necessarily be the best for someone else.
There are a number of factors to consider when making this crucial choice. In this post, I’ll walk you through those factors—pro and con—for each publication option.
Ready? Alright, let’s go.
Option #1: Traditional Publisher/Physical Book
This is what most people still think of when you talk about a “published book”—a traditional, big name publisher, probably based in New York, who buys the rights to your book, prints it, markets it, and sells it for you.
Pros
- Immediate Authority. This publication option is the “Holy Grail” of publishing because people tend to put authors of traditionally published books on a pedestal. There’s no faster way to establish yourself as an acknowledged expert on a topic than to publish a book the “old-fashioned” way through a traditional publisher.
- Much of the Work is Done for You. When you sign a contract with a traditional publisher, they agree to do some amount of marketing for you. This usually means that they’ll put up a page for your book on their website, put a sales page about it in their physical catalogs, and maybe do a limited amount of print and/or e-mail marketing for the book.
Cons
- High Barrier to Entry. It’s very difficult to get a manuscript selected for publication with a traditional publisher. There are many hoops to jump through, from following strict guidelines for submitting a book proposal, to beating out all the competition for limited publication slots. And then, even if your proposal is selected, you usually have to work through multiple revisions and rigorous copyediting, work with graphic artists on a cover concept, etc. The whole process can be frustrating and exhausting.
- Short Window for Marketing Help. If you are one of the lucky few to have a book selected for publication by a traditional publisher, you could end up selling thousands of copies of your book—or almost none. And the first few months are critical in determining how much help the publisher will give you to market your book. If your book takes off quickly, they will push it hard for you because they’re getting a return on their investment. If it doesn’t, well, you’re probably going to end up having to do most or all of the marketing yourself because the publisher will cut their losses and turn to the next publishing project.
- Low Profits. When we think of publishing our books through a traditional publisher, we all dream of joining the lists of wildly successful authors—the J. K. Rowlings and James Pattersons of the world—and visions of millions of dollars flooding into our bank accounts run through our heads. But most people have no idea how rare those best-selling authors are. The truth is, the standard book contract pays the author 10% royalties on their book while the publisher keeps 90%. A good chunk of that is supposed to go toward marketing you book, but…well, see the bullet point above. So, with the average price of a professional education book being around $25, you’ll only make about $2.50 per sale.
Option #2: E-book on Amazon
Having your manuscript selected for publication out of the hundreds of manuscripts a traditional publisher sees every month is, statistically speaking, a long shot.
I’m not trying to bring you down or discourage you from taking that path; after all, as I laid out above, going for traditional publication definitely has a high “upside.” But if you want to take the “easy path” to publication, there are lower-barrier and lower-stress alternatives you might consider.
One of those “easy path” approaches is to publish your manuscript as an e-book on Amazon (or any of the other e-book publishers, but I’ll stick with Amazon here, as they’re the 800 lb. gorilla in the self-publishing room).
Let’s look at the pros and cons of publishing your manuscript as an e-book:
Pros
- No gatekeepers. You can publish your book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform in less than 48 hours.
- Lots of Eyeballs (Potentially). Amazon is HUGE. You have the chance to get your e-book in front of a massive audience if your title is catchy, your topic is trending, and you market it well.
- Get paid Easily. Once your e-book is up on Amazon, they take care of the e-commerce work for you. Sure, you’ll still need to market it to get people interested enough to take a look. But if they decide to buy, just a click or two and the purchase is completed with no further work on your part. And, Amazon also has a program called KDP Select that will help you market your book for a few days to get it in front of more people.
Cons
- Lots of Competition. Because it’s so quick and easy to publish your e-book on Amazon, lots of people are doing it, which means major competition for you unless your e-book is on a very long-tail topic. As a result, your e-book must have something unique to offer in comparison to other e-books on the same general subject or it’s going to be hard to get much traction.
- Low Profits. While you may sell many more e-books on Amazon than you would copies of a physical book, you’re probably not going to make much money following this path either unless you end up with that rare run-away bestseller. This is because e-books typically sell for $2.99 to $9.99 (with $4.99 being about the average)—and you’ll be losing at least 30% of that to Amazon as its commission for taking care of the listing and e-commerce aspects of the sale for you. You can offer your e-book for a higher price, but it you go over $9.99, Amazon will take 65% and leave you with only 35%–and you’ll probably sell far fewer copies if you go with a higher price. In the end, you make about the same amount of money (maybe a little more) per copy as compared to publishing with a traditional publisher.
Option #3: Publish on Your Own Website
A third option, if you have your own consulting website, is to take control of the entire process and publish your e-book through a product page and shopping cart on your own site. Not many consultants go this route because it does take a little (OK, a lot) more work. But if you’re up for the challenge, there are some major advantages to going this route.
Pros
- Greater Credibility and Raving Fans (aka Willing Buyers). Having a professional-looking website is one step you can take to establish yourself as an authority in your field. But a fairly high percentage of your competitors also have websites. If you write and publish your own e-book(s) on your website, though, you definitely raise your status above the crowd. Plus, if you already have a mailing list that you’re communicating with regularly, anytime you publish a new book, you have an audience of people who already like your work just waiting to buy. All you have to do is send out an e-mail and say, “Look at this new thing I have for you” and you can generate instant sales.
- Higher Profits. When you publish your own book(s) via your own website, you don’t have the marketing reach of the traditional publishers or Amazon. But if you can generate even a fraction of the sales as you could through one of those other avenues, you stand to make a good deal more money. That’s because, when you publish and sell your own books through your own website, you can charge whatever you want, and when you make a sale, you make not 10% (as with a traditional publisher), not 35% or 70% (as with Amazon), but 100% of the purchase price!
Cons
- More Work to Market Your Book. You’re on your own to get the word out about your new book via e-mail marketing, pay per click advertising, social media, etc. As noted above, traditional publishers will only do the minimum marketing for you unless your book takes off quickly after publication, and Amazon will give you minimum marketing help if you utilize their KDP Select program, but even then, you have to work to drive traffic to the promotion. But at least you get some help from your publisher with these approaches. Not when you do it on your own. When it comes right down to it, though, no one wants your book to succeed like you do, so you’re ultimately the one most responsible for its success or failure. So yes, expect that you’ll have to bust your butt to make this work.
- Slower Results. I mentioned above in the first “pro” bullet that, if you have a large e-mail list and loyal following, you can launch your book, send out an e-mail, and make almost instant sales when you publish on your own website. But if you don’t have a list or your list is small, it’s going to take some time to build that up. On the positive side, your book isn’t going to go “out of print” as long as you have it up on your website and you’re the one fulfilling the orders. If it takes you a year or two following the launch of your book to build up your list, the book will still be sitting there, waiting to sell, when you finally get your list up to critical mass.
Recommendations: What’s Best for You?
Now that we’ve looked at the three major options and their pros and cons, where does that leave us? What’s the best path for you to take?
Well, it depends. Here are my recommendations:
- If authority-building is your main focus, put your effort into trying to get your book published with a traditional publisher. No, you probably won’t make a lot of money, but the boost in credibility traditional publication will give you will lead to money in other ways, especially speaking gigs. And if you shop your book around to multiple traditional publishers and can’t find a taker, you can always change your approach and go with one of the other options discussed here.
- If getting your book published and out there on the market as quickly and easily as possible sounds good to you, go with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and publish it as an e-book.
- If building a “tribe” of like-minded followers and becoming a guru in your field is your primary focus and making more money per sale is also important to you, self-publishing your book and marketing it on your own website is the way to go.
One More Recommendation
If you don’t mind a little extra work, I have one more recommendation for you: publish your book in both paper and electronic versions.
Why? Well, I’ll explain by using my own household as an example. I love physical books. I collect them. I have multiple shelves full of books all over the house, not to mention boxes of them in the basement that can’t fit on the shelves. Some I’ve read once. Some I’ve read several, or even many, times. Some I’ve had for years and still haven’t gotten around to reading (but I’m sure I will someday). I like the feel of a book in my hands as I read it. I like the tactile sensation of turning the pages. Heck, I even like the smell of a book (you other bibliophiles know what I mean)!
My wife, on the other hand, does most of her reading nowadays on her iPad. She’s an avid reader, too (she might even read more than me), but when e-books came out, she was perfectly happy to switch over to the electronic format.
The point is, there are readers who prefer physical books and there are readers who prefer e-books, and most people favor one or the other heavily. Which means that there are two completely different audiences for your book, and if you only sell to one of them, you’re missing out on half of your potential audience.
So, what can you do about this situation? Well, if you’re lucky enough to get your book published through a traditional publisher, you’re all set, as they will almost always publish an electronic version of your book in addition to your physical book.
If you’re self-publishing, though, you can still serve both audiences.
If you publish your e-book through Kindle Direct Publishing, you can also set your book up for print on demand and offer it as a paperback. KDP does the printing for you when a copy is ordered and subtracts the printing costs from your royalties. You don’t have to keep a stack of books in your basement and mail them out to people when they buy.
And if you choose to sell your book on your own website, it’s also easy. Just produce a nicely designed PDF version of your book and deliver it for downloading when someone orders. Those who prefer to read on a screen can read it as soon as they open it. And those who prefer to have a paper copy to flip through can print it out and read it that way.
As you can see, there are a lot of options for publishing your book. I hope this walk-through of the pros and cons of each has helped you decide on your best approach. Good luck, and please leave a question of comment below if you’d like to talk about it.
