What's better: convincing a publisher to issue your book, or going your own way?

I just exchanged messages with copywriter-turned-novelist friend-of-longstanding Kim about getting her novel published.  Her manuscript is 190,000 words long – mercifully shorter than War And Peace’s 587,000 words, but daunting nonetheless – making it problematic to find a commercial publisher willing to assume the expense of issuing her book, along with the attendant risk.

Kim knows just how difficult this will be, as do I, recently confirmed by Louis Menand in his New Yorker story “Remainders,” where he writes about just how challenging it is for publishers to offer books people actually want to buy, pointing out,

“two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand.”

A couple of years back I wrote that The Art of Client Service passed the 20,000 copies-sold sales mark.  As of last month, make that 24,000-plus copies and counting, putting me in elite company, better than the 96% of authors, most of whom are nowhere close to achieving that number. 

How many published books are there?  Menand actually supplies the number:

“Today, something like three million books are published every year, including self-published e-books that are available only on digital platforms.”

Among this veritable publishing tsunami, Amazon serves as the dominant player, constituting, “more than half of all book purchases in the United States and offering, “something like thirty million different print titles.”

What this tells us is the vast majority of books are perishable; they have a sales-blip moment and then all but disappear.  In comparison, even after eight-plus years, Art endures and copies still sell; why is that?

Menand has a theory:  “Most books are used, not read.” 

That might be it.  With its short, fast-reading chapters and “How To” guidance, The Art of Client Service is designed to be a reference resource, something to turn to when advice on crafting a proposal, presentation, or Creative Brief is needed.   

In working first with Dearborn Press, then Kaplan, and now John Wiley & Sons, I’ve learned what is the hard truth about commercial publishers:  unless your name is Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, or Jennifer Egan, your publisher, no matter how committed to your book, will perform more like printers and distributors than publishers, expecting you, as author, to shoulder the heavy load of promoting and selling what you’ve written. 

Fiction is but a fraction of the total books published in the U.S. – estimates range from just 30% to 40% – making Kim’s mission to find an agent then a publisher rife with potential failure.   Would it make sense, then, to simply self-publish, sidestepping the disappointment of one-too-many a rejection letter?

When Roberta and I self-published Brain Surgery for Suits almost 25 years ago, the task was complicated.  Find a book designer.  Find a printer.  Find a book distributor.  Register an ISBN number with the Library of Congress.  The list of tasks seemingly is endless.

These days, self-publishing is vastly easier, with several companies offering to do much of the work for you, Amazon, Xlibris, and iUniverse among dozens of other worthy candidates.  If the cost of printing is a barrier, then do an e-book and avoid that expense.

I’ve written a couple of times before about the challenge facing writers striving to find their way into print – first here, then here – so I am a realist when it comes to what Kim and other writers confront.  This perhaps explains why so many people say they, “ want to write and publish a book,” when so few actually do.

Kim did an extraordinary job, just finishing what is a mammoth undertaking, but in truth – assuming it finds its way onto print as a self-published effort or with a commercial publisher – an even bigger challenge awaits:  promoting it.

We’ll save that discussion for a later day.

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