I decided to brave the London Book Fair for the first time this year.
The LBF isn’t really for authors, but they do have a special little corner for us where talks are given and, if you were quick off the mark when the tickets went on sale, where you can get a 10-minute agent one-to-one to pitch your work. I’ve decided to use the fair to make some informed decisions regarding whether I should keep pursuing the traditional publishing route or self publish, so today I devoted my day to finding out about self publishing and sourcing people to help me do that.
Self publishing feels like quite a daunting prospect, I don’t know why. It all seems like a lot of hard work. No, let’s put that another way: it is a lot of hard work. And investment – of time and money – the returns on which are very unclear. I’ve toyed with the idea for sometime now but I’ve been unconvinced I’ll be very successful for a myriad of reasons: I don’t understand the tech, I’m scared of doing it wrong, I worry about wasting a lot of money on stuff I don’t need, I don’t know how to market my book to make people buy it, I won’t have the security blanket of an agent/publisher to help me make decisions, I will be the one to make all the decisions and they might be bad ones because I don’t know what I’m doing … I could go on. Basically, there’s a lot I don’t know.
Then of course there’s my ego. ‘Getting published’ sends a very clear message to your friends, family, adoring fans, unknown critics, etc etc., that you have been approved and endorsed by at least one other person who isn’t your mum. Self publishing feels like you might have made it all up, that you are good at writing in any real way, like you paid your way into a world you don’t deserve to live in and it’s just going to be you and your mum buying 300 copies of a book for £2.27 plus postage and packing.
But today I listened to lots of people talking about the self-publishing experience and concluded that there are some very compelling reasons why I should get over myself and seriously think about doing it. In terms of control over your work and your career, it seems like self publishing beats trad hands down. You work at your own speed, have complete control of your end product (no editors changing your book title, ending, etc), retain the ability to flit between genres without upsetting a publisher who wants you to only write a certain kind of book, and stay directly in contact with your readers.
Of course, the little devil on my shoulder still says that self publishing means your book wasn’t ‘good enough’ to get picked up by an agent or publisher. And there is no doubt that for many people, the holy grail of getting one is the most important thing. But a number of authors who spoke today had deliberately chosen self publishing, even though they had been traditionally published before. Yes, there is a lack of reach, due to money and time and the ability to distribute across all the same channels as trad publishers enjoy. But something that really struck a chord for me was the entrepreneurial spirit of these authors: their joy in acquiring knowledge about the industry, the tech, the marketing and distribution; the buzz they clearly had, of being successful and respected, not only as authors but as business people too. It looked like a lot of fun.
The confidence in their product and the way they had got their stories out there was really interesting to observe. All of them had strengths and weaknesses; all of them identified their weaknesses, hired someone to do that bit of the process, and moved on. I thought about the crushing feeling of getting rejection after rejection, of the endless waiting to hear from an agent, of the vague notion that your book (as you wrote it) might never see the light of day. Your self confidence as a fledgling author is being permanently bashed up and it’s hard to stay positive when you’re staring into the abyss of having to do yet another submission to keep the dream alive. I’m finding it hard to be patient and stay positive through that. But then I thought about the motivation and satisfaction I get, from learning what good looks like. Of getting a job done well – and of having something to aim for – of having deadlines and being organised and in charge. I came to the conclusion that self publishing might just be a way to remove all the anxieties about being ‘good enough’ and just get on with achieving something.
One of the authors speaking made the point, that you will only ever be successful if you make your book indistinguishable from published authors of the same genre, which means you have to write a very good book. So either way, you have to write a very good book. How you get it out there and convince people to read it is purely down to luck, personal preference, or because your cousin’s husband works for a literary agent. So, lots to think about. Tomorrow I’m back to the LBF to pitch to an agent and consider the trad route. It will be interesting to compare how I’m feeling about things after that. If my ego is still speaking to me by then, of course.
Faye Brann 