Plot Your Writing Career: Traditional versus Self-Publishing

A writer who is "sick of agents" and wants to take back control over her own life considers going the self-publishing route. Following is my "take" on the subject.

Writing a book is vastly different than publishing a book. Of the strengths and skills that make for a terrific writer zero prove much help when it comes to self-publishing. Yes, both writing and self-publishing involve hard work. But, writing is creative, artistic, and demands solitude. Publishing is numbers, business, and demands interaction.

Score 1 for Traditional Publishing

To make the leap from writer to self-publisher, what once is your "baby", the project you spend more time with than your own family, what you dream about day and night becomes a "product" for the marketplace. 

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Want to learn the publishing business from the ground up? Then, yes, give self-publishing a whirl. But, get ready to learn everything you can about publicity, distribution, marketing, promoting, oh, yes, and since you are only as good as your last book, make sure you schedule time to write your next book, too.

Score 1 for Self-Publishing

Just because you write a memoir, novel, screenplay, short story, non-fiction book does not mean that anyone will FIND your work. 

Nielsen Books reports that sales in the UK were up 4.4% with 120,000 books published in 2008 over 2007. Bowker reports that book sales in US were down 3.2% with 275,000 books released in 2008 over 2007, but that print on demand and short-run books were up 132% of 123,000 titles produced. 

My point? How is your book going to stand out from all those 500,000 books, more or less, that will come out the same year yours does?

Whether you self-publish or are published by a big New York house, you have to help the book grow "legs", find a readership. Yes, some authors are so big that they do not have to worry about such matters, but they are the exception. Yes, you, too, may be the exception, but self-publishing teaches you about sales. After all, whether self-published or traditional, you only get paid on the # of books sold.

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On a personal note:

Five years ago, too impatient to go the traditional route of New York, I formed Illusion Press, and published Blockbuster Plots Pure & Simple. Illusion Press seemed an appropriate name for the unreal quality of the entire process from inspiration to publication. Five months and the book was in my hands.

What started as a short print-run for my students morphed into BBP. Today, I continue to invite writers to experience the freedom of structure. For most writers, the most difficult part of the writing process is the inability to see the forest for the trees. Blockbuster Plots for Writers dedicates itself to the structure of plot and has helped thousands of novelists, memoirists, and creative non-fiction writers master this elusive craft.

Miracles happen.

Score 1 for Self-Publishing

The real difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing?

Traditional publishers pays you $$ up front. 

Self-publishing, you put the $$ up yourself.

Plot, Platform, Publicity

In a recent issue of The Bookwoman, the official publication of Women's National Book Association, Fern Reiss gives hints on how to publicize your novel. One of her methods is to put a nonfiction hook in your novel. Hooks provide a potential platform as well as leverage for publicity. Riess' words shot through me. Of course! Brilliant!

I often guide writers through the pitfalls of creating the Middle of your story in two ways. The use of antagonists is one. The other is to create an unusual world. When the protagonist leaves the old world, they enter the story world. Not only does this technique support your writing, as Reiss points out, creating such a hook leads to so much more.

Write what you know. Create the story world around your passion -- that which you know and love.

Or write about that which you do not know, but fascinates you enough to immerse yourself in until you become an expert.

Readers and audiences love to learn or experience something new and exotic. Provide that in the world you create in the Middle.

Take raising a wild coyote (the core of a new memoir coming out 12/2 by Simon and Schuster -- The Daily Coyote) or learning about life as a queen (as in CW Gortner's new historical novel by Ballantine Books: The Last Queen). Not only do the exotic worlds of contemporary Wyoming and 1492 Spain provide excitement and plot twists, they also provide a potential platform from which to publicize your work.

For instance, Barnes & Noble writes of Daily Coyote: "This full-color illustrated book will change your view of an entire species." This is big, news worthy, and holds importance beyond the book itself, beyond Shreve herself. News outlets -- T.V. and radio, newspapers and magazines are more likely to do a story on Shreve and her book based on that one statement than simply doing an interview about the book itself. Therefore, the unusual world she elaborates on -- raising a wild coyote -- becomes her platform which an entire publicity campaign centers around.

What unusual world does the story world in the Middle of your story involve???