Should I Self-Publish? 10 Good Reasons to Take Control Yourself
Bella Rose Emmorey
book editor, rogue behaviorist, digital marketer, writer, brand builder, plant aunt, and cheese enthusiast.
$ $ The roaring debate of whether someone should self-publish their book or go the traditional route is dying down. As self-publishing continues to earn a respected reputation (because people have learned how to do it well), it’s no longer a decision of having a quality book.
It’s a decision of control, speed of publishing, goals, and royalties.
There are a few main options when it comes to publishing:
1. Self-publishing: You manage and fund all the steps to publish the book—you get all the royalties.
2. Traditional publishing: You query an agent, sell a book to a publishing house, and they manage the post-writing processes, taking the majority of sales.
3. Hybrid publishing: You hire someone to manage the steps of post-writing the book and publish through them as the publisher, and they usually take a percentage of sales.
Note: Hybrid publishing is changing over time, with many companies now offering post-writing services like cover design, formatting, and even uploading and publishing the book for you, but you still maintain all royalties.
The route you choose truly depends on your personal goals. Self-publishing isn’t for everyone. But if it is for you, you’ll probably know by the end of this list of ten reasons to self-publish.
1. Publish When You Want
It can take anywhere from a year to three to publish a novel traditionally. This doesn’t include the time it takes to land an agent (which requires querying and rejections). Going the self-publishing route means you get to publish literally whenever you want.
Do you want your launch date to be significant to the story? Do it!
Aiming to do a rapid-launch and publish all books in your trilogy a month apart (which helps sell fiction books on KU significantly)? You can!
Want to publish four books a year? It’s doable.
None of these options are available with traditional publishing.
2. Marketing Is Yours
Even with traditional publishing, the marketing is still up to the author in most cases. Now, if your book was in a bidding war and the publishing house spent six figures on it, they’ll obviously want to make their money back.
These are the books you see advertised extensively by publishing houses. It’s not the norm. Usually, it’s up to the author to market their own books—especially first-time authors.
And yes, this is a reason to choose self-publishing. Because if you’re the one putting in the work to grow your audience, push paperbacks, sell ebooks, and grow your email list, then you should get the bulk of the earnings!
It also means you get to decide how you market. Publishing houses can’t do certain marketing tactics that could perform well for your book. They don’t want to get themselves into any hot water with the press, so they won’t allow certain marketing tactics to take place.
This opens the door for you to decide how you want to market and to push the envelope. Try new things. Find something that pops off.
3. Higher Income Potential
Let’s get real about some numbers. If you learn to self-publish and market well, you can make a significant income by self-publishing.
Many aspiring authors who think traditional publishing is best for them are doing it based on that one first-time author whose novel got into a bidding war and they walked away with a $100,000+ advance. Then, that book was pushed hard by the publishing house and a ton of their marketing resources went into it.
But this wasn’t because that author's book was better than all other books (it was very average). It was because that publishing house spent so much on the advance and needed to make their investment back.
The average first-time author advance at a publishing house is between $5,000 and $10,000. And if your agent or contract sucks, you will have to pay back money unless your book sales reach the amount of your advance. Then you might make additional royalties (at a low rate).
A $7,000 advance with a book priced at $14, a printing cost of $4, and the author’s royalty of 10% means you have to sell 5,000 copies before you start making money past your advance.
With those same numbers self-publishing a book, and the author’s royalty of 60% on Amazon, you only have to sell 1,590 books to make $7,000. Which means if you do all the same marketing (because a publishing house won’t do too much marketing on behalf of debut authors with a minimal advance), if you sell 5,000 self-published books, you’ll make $22,000.
Now, these numbers are based on average $ paperback statistics$ , and do not include Kindle Unlimited (a fiction author’s dream), which is based on pages read and their $ KENP payment system$ .
And keep in mind that you do pay out of pocket for book production expenses when self-publishing, like the cover design, formatting, and professional editing.
But those expenses don’t have to be crazy, either. For example, $ NovelPad’s writing software$ allows you to easily export ebooks with only a few clicks, which saves on that expense.
4. Creative Control
You see this benefit everywhere, along with the horror stories of some third-party published authors who had to completely change their main character or plot in order to get the book published. That’s not the case with self-publishing. This way, you get to dictate how you $ write the ending$ , every character quirk and flaw, and especially the plot details.
While you should still go through the important steps like $ self-editing$ , beta reading, and $ professional editing to self-publish$ , you still have the final say on all of that feedback. Whereas with traditional publishing, your editor and the publisher may have non-negotiables for your novel.
If you keep up with your book genre’s trends, use an effective book cover, and go through the professional editing process, your book will be quality, and having the creative control here is a bonus.
Just remember that "creative control" doesn’t mean making your own covers if you suck at design and can barely operate Canva, much less Photoshop or InDesign.
5. Testing & Iterating
In the traditional world, a book series gets released one book at a time, usually spanning a year or two between books (or in the case of GRRM…forever). There is a typical schedule and process followed for most books, with very few exceptions.
But the habits of book-buyers, and even online algorithms, change. How can we test what’s working now instead of using the same methods that worked a decade or two ago? Trad publishers can't ride the wave of rapid changes in consumer behavior and algorithms.
Self-publishing has those freedoms. You can alter your cover and see which gets more conversions on the page. You can change and edit the description to find which format sells more. You even have the opportunity to run your own ads to figure out which visuals appeal most to your genre’s audience.
All of this information informs how you can proceed toward selling more books and making a full-time income from them (if that’s your goal!).
6. Book Pricing & Promotions
Sometimes, running a $0.99 promotion can land your book extreme ratings on Amazon, pushing it to be seen and bought by more people than if you would have kept it the same price at that moment.
This is also true for submitting to book promotion websites, where you can apply to be featured and included in their lists by reducing your book’s list price for the duration of the promotion.
For the author in this image, you can clearly see how well it worked in the moment, but also afterward as her books kept selling after the price change and promotion.
Note: This author also updated book covers and descriptions in an effort to make sure this promotion went as far as it could—another perk of self-publishing.
7. Write-To-Market Potential
Publishing a Christmas book in your genre around the holidays.
Launching a Valentine’s Day novella as an epilogue to your well-read series.
Using a current event to spin up a topical book to publish while the media is still hot.
These are all possibilities when you self-publish. In the traditional publishing world, these types of books would have to be planned two years in advance. How can you write a post-pandemic apocalyptic society and launch it a few months after a worldwide pandemic hits, capitalizing on the media attention to this very idea, if you have to plan it two years prior?
You can’t.
But there are many self-published authors who use these exact tactics to publish topical, trending, well-timed books—and make money.
This is called writing to market.
Writing to market is altering the books and stories you write to fit what’s trending and popular with the increased likelihood they’ll sell.
At the height of Harry Potter, books that took place in magic school settings sold above many other genres.
When Twilight became a worldwide sensation, vampire romance novels ran rampant (I myself read at least 8 book series about vampires in that timeframe…eeesh).
When Netflix dropped a Bridgerton adaptation of the widely successful book series, readers wanted more of that unique subgenre. During that time (December 2020), Google searches for "books like Bridgerton" grew significantly, and then they did again in March of 2022 when the second season came out.
As a self-published author, you can both predict and plan for these trends, but also respond to what’s popular by writing to that market, increasing the chances of breaking through and selling more books.
8. Reader magnets
Have you ever seen a traditionally published book link to a lead magnet to help the author grow their email list? It may be happening more currently, but self-published authors have been doing it for years and are reaping the rewards.
A reader magnet is a term used by the author community for lead magnet, which is a freebie in exchange for someone’s name and email address.
Many authors will create quizzes, recipes, or even exclusive short stories and novellas only accessible to those who sign up for it. You can place these at both the beginning and end of your book so readers have something free to consume from you.
A reader can even see these offers before they buy the book, landing them on your email list even if they don’t buy…yet.
These emails can be piped into your email service provider where you can then email those people to leave reviews that’ll increase your book’s visibility online, offer updates, and even sell the next books in your series. This is super accessible and can be updated any time by you, as the self-published author with 100% creative and process control. :)
9. Innovation & Inclusion In Literature
This may be late on this list, but it’s truly one of the best parts about self-publishing. Agents and traditional publishing houses are incentivized to publish books that work. This is always based on past successes. There are very few instances of a publishing house taking a chance on an "out there" story, angle, or structure.
Because there isn’t a certainty it will make money.
And since these publishing houses are first and foremost businesses, they have to protect their bottom dollar. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovative literature, and unfortunately, inclusion.
We see the latter aspect changing more and more as the leaders of publishing houses pull their heads out of the deep, dark caverns of their own privilege and recognize that there are all types of people who read. Types of people who want to see themselves represented in literature.
But because, for some ridiculous reason, writing books about people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, or even just a main character who isn’t stick-thin, was taboo for so long, publishing houses decided those won’t sell.
They do though, and they will continue to. This doesn’t make landing an agent and selling your lesbian monster erotica easy. In fact, no matter how well written they are, many publishing houses still won’t touch it.
You know who will touch it (amongst other things <_<)? Readers who are into that.
The point is, we can’t innovate in literature if publishing houses refuse to step off the over-trodden paths. If your work is unique, different, or even inclusive, publishing traditionally will not be easy.
Those doors are now wide open for all self-publishers.
10. The NYT Bestseller list is mostly a sham, anyway
It’s nearly impossible to become a NYT bestseller by self-publishing. That’s not a bad thing. The NYT list has $ varying criteria$ for how to get on it, none of which are dictated by the book’s actual quality. It’s more of a list about who has the best marketing tactics and connections to large media.
We mention this because when asked why people prefer trying to go with traditional publishing, their answers primarily land on the opportunity to be featured on this list.
It’s not a bad goal, based on what we’ve learned. This list means: notoriety, quality books, historical sales. But the truth is that this list has very different criteria. A book doesn’t have to be quality to sell (which is evidenced by the NYT bestsellers I’ve read that sucked).
What is most important to you? To sell enough books to make a living doing what you love with total control, or to have your name on a list in which you don’t even know the criteria involved to be on the list, just so you can say you’ve been on it? If you're a nepo baby, the answer is clear. For the rest of us...? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Traditional publishing isn’t all bad, by any means. It’s just not accessible to the average person and is behind the times. If you’ve been debating which option to go with, these are all the reasons self-publishing may fit your needs best.
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