Self Publishing is catching on like the H1N1 virus, anyone can get it. I got into self publishing because everyone hated my book. Ok not really. problem was my book mentiones the 7th Day Adventist religion and certainly since most christian book publishers are not SDA's they rejected me, they wont accept books outside of their beliefs. Funny, they'll allow sex and vampires but not other religions. So I went to the very few SDA publishers that existed and they too rejected me because "its now what we're looking for." Christian romance is becoming very popular these days and yet my book is not what their looking for? Weird.
So what are my reasons? Simple..
Paid by Commission.
Ever wonder if you'd make it as a salesman? I didn't. I'm too lazy to sell things people don't want. I had a job interview a few months back at Blockbuster and the lady asked me to sell her a bottle of water. She wanted to see if I could convince her to buy the bottled water. Why someone would go to Blockbuster to buy water is beyond me, but that was the point she was getting at, to sell products people didn't want. I failed miserably. I was about to grab the stapler and threaten to staple her nose shut if she didn't buy the darn water!
That's what you will do if you self publish. Try to sell a book to people that probably don't want it. While many people are buying NY Times best seller books and the Twilight books, you must convince them to buy yours. That's a tough task. But if you succeed the commission is well worth it. If you do the math correctly and sell correctly you can make maybe up to a few hundred dollars a day (at most) It's really tough however and you need to break out your best professional pitch sales and tell your friends to stop passing your book around town.
No Pressure
With some publishing companies, they give you a time frame to finish your book. I can't do that, aside from being lazy I get too tired to even look at a book let alone write one. I went days, weeks, even months without even thinking about "The Faithless Christiantic" But that's the good thing, you can take your time with it. You don't HAVE to write. We're pressured in school. That's why I failed so much at those pop quizzes, we had 20 minutes to answer 4,000 questions. We are pressured at work, we're pressured by our annoying girlfriend that demands everything right away. I don't want to be pressured into my writing. Creativity flows out better and faster when you aren't trying to reach a deadline.
More Satisfaction
Self publishing is the only time where you do everything yourself, write, cover, edit. There's no "I" in team, but there's a "me" in team (well there's an M and an E) You can find people to do it or do it yourself. I prefer doing it myself. Nothing like spending 8 hour a day editing than receiving the proof copy then noticing a lot of punctuation and spelling mistakes that I missed the first hundred times I reviewed it on computer. Does that make me mad? No, because I did it myself. I write the book, made the cover, added the numbers and left the spelling mistakes, yet I'm proud, why? because I did it myself. I accomplished something that most people need an entire football sized team to do. I published my own book.
Cheaper
Through my self publisher the minimum I spend is $10. Some contract companies charge you up to $500 to publish through them. If I had $500 I wouldn't even bother writing a book, do you know how many copies I'd have to sell to get that money back? 50 if thy cost $10 and if you are a nobody like me, 50 is hard to reach. Heck 20 is hard to reach. So I'd have to be nutso or rich to spend $500 on publishing a book I can't sell.
Why do I self publish? When you're lazy and broke, it's the only option!
