Yes, anyone can upload anything to Amazon, and indeed anyone can even get anything printed.
But is either of these things the whole of publishing?!
People soon find out that it isn’t … when their book doesn’t sell, and they begin to think about why it isn’t selling.
Naturally, there is no guarantee that a book will sell even if it is published by a professional publisher. But if a book doesn’t sell in spite of having been professionally published, it certainly wouldn’t have sold if you had self-published it.
Why? Because when you self-publish, everything depends on your own self.
By contrast, when you publish with a publisher, you will of course put in your best efforts to sell your book exactly as if you had self-published it, but now you have the added benefit of a publisher’s entire system supporting your efforts, and indeed the further benefit of the publisher’s own efforts through its marketing, sales, and distribution systems.
And you must remember that marketing, sales, and distribution kick in only at the latter end of the publishing process.
Earlier than that, a publisher reads your manuscript and decides if he or she can add value to the manuscript, and wishes to invest the time, effort, and money necessary to promote your book.
Already, I hope you see two things at play which you miss when you self-publish.
The first is the publisher’s assessment – and you receive, implicitly (and if you are fortunate, explicitly), the value of feedback and expert opinion; to any intelligent and committed writer, feedback is a gift.
The second is the publisher’s investment of time, effort, and money.
That is one key reason why self-published books are rarely accepted for competitions and prizes. A publisher’s acceptance of a manuscript is a bit of a quality-filter and at least some guarantee of market-relevance.
Anyway, if a publisher accepts a manuscript, her/his next job is: proofing and editing your manuscript. Those are time-consuming and thankless tasks (and it is difficult to find good people who can help with those; further if you do find good people, those don’t come cheap!). Therefore, it isn’t surprising that so many publishers expect a rather polished offering from you, in which they are loth to have to do much proofing or editing. That disease especially afflicts larger publishing houses which are commercially driven. However, some larger publishers, and most smaller publishers still publish more for love than for money, and that is where you are much more likely to get detailed and extensive help with proofing and editing.
After proofing and editing, one comes to production. A well-written, well-proofed, and well-edited book can still be let down by poor production values and a less-than-effective cover. You can usually tell self-published books just by their covers because they look so formulaic. As a new publisher, I was totally unprepared for, and am indeed shocked, by how much time, energy, expertise and money goes just into the decision about cover design. And, so far as the bulk of a book is concerned, there are also questions such as whether it should be paperback or hardback, with or without flaps, the font in which a book should be printed, the font size, the book design as a whole, the weight and density of the paper, the materials for the cover and their thickness, the printing of the cover with all the details of colours and foiling… and there is the question of the words which go on the back cover, as well as on the jacket flaps – if the book is to have a jacket.
But we aren’t done yet! The key decisions facing anybody (including a self-publisher) are still ahead!:
- what price to charge for your book, and
- how many copies to print.
Even experienced publishers can price a book too high or too low. They can also print either too many copies or too few. If you print too many copies, you will sit on unsold stock; if you print too few, each copy will be more expensive to print than it needs to be. If the book is too expensive for the customer, no one will buy it; if a book is too cheap, you won’t make any money on it (or even lose money on every sale).
So now you have my “Publisher’s Value Chain” – the value added by a publisher at the various stages of the publishing process: assessing manuscripts, deciding which manuscripts to invest in, and being responsible for proofing, editing, design, production, distribution, and marketing.
If marketing is at the end of the chain, why did I start this blog with the issue of marketing? Because everything else that a publisher does is like preparing for a league match. And when everything is done, the league match is what matters. With publishing, the league match is marketing. However good the contents of the book, however thoroughly proofed, however creatively edited and beautifully produced, what matters finally is whether the book sells. And the entire challenge of marketing is that even the experts have only a glimmering of why one product sells while another product, equally good in every way, falls relatively unknown by the wayside. A publisher leans on her/ his own experience, as well as on the help of experienced and knowledgeable professionals in trying to make the best marketing decisions. Though the fact is that marketing isn’t the end of the chain. The very first question any publisher asks himself when looking at any manuscript is: can I market this? Who to? How best? All the other decisions regarding the book are an exploration and detailing of that initial decision. In accepting a book for publication, a publisher takes on a challenge: how can he or she successfully market that book?
Now we can summarise: the question posed for this piece is “In an age of self-Publishing, why do you need a publisher?”. The short answer is: of course you don’t need a publisher!
But should you self-publish?
Yes, you should definitely self-publish – If you are prepared to do all the jobs that a professional publisher does.