The Savvy Self-Publisher: Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard

With changes in the publishing industry brought about by advances in technology, which have altered every aspect of the business, as well as new financial realities that have tested every link in the distribution chain between writer and reader, self-publishing has soared as a viable and, in many cases, preferable option for independent-minded authors.

Still, there’s a lot to sort out about this evolving topic of self-publishing. In order to put it into proper context, I recently arranged a conversation with three successful individuals with different yet interconnected perspectives. Jennifer Ciotta is the author of the novel I, Putin, which she self-published in 2012, as well as the No Bulls**t Guide to Self-Publishing. Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur—vice president of community and content for Small Demons, founder of Cursor, and publisher of Red Lemonade who, from 2001 to 2009, ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press. Kristin Nelson is the founder of Nelson Literary Agency in Denver, where she specializes in representing literary crossover novels, literary commercial novels, upmarket women’s fiction, romance, and all subgenres of young adult fiction. I invited them to discuss the creative opportunities, challenges, and rewards that self-publishing offers writers of all stripes and to give us a glimpse of what the future may hold.

Tell us a bit about your experience with self-publishing. Each of you brings such a unique perspective; each of you approaches the subject from a different direction.

Ciotta: In 2008 I was completing a master’s in creative writing and Russian studies at New York University. Though the academic and fiction-writing experience was fine, I felt I didn’t know the business of publishing a novel as well as I should. So I attended the New York Pitch Conference [part of the Algonkian Writers Conference] and pitched to editors and agents. I received manuscript requests from well-known editors, agents, and one film producer…but after studying the business for a couple of years, I decided self-publishing was the right choice for me. I self-published because I felt if I’m going to succeed or fail, I’m going to do it on my own. I wanted complete creative and business control. Also, after studying the industry, it was apparent that new authors who are traditionally published pay for and do their own marketing and publicity anyway. As for an agent, I felt and still feel that if the time comes to have one, I’ll need to have leverage to attract the right agent. I’m still working on building that leverage.

Nash: I suppose my relationship with self-publishing begins with taking over a company whose genesis was self-publishing. Soft Skull Press began in a Kinko’s in 1992 because Sander Hicks had written a novel in a New School creative writing class that had been rejected by everyone he sent it to. But Kinko’s had Power Macs with Aldus PageMaker and Apple LaserWriters, big Xerox machines, tape binding machines, and paper cutters, and he and his girlfriend worked the graveyard shift without a manager. Over [the course of] a month they laid out, printed, and bound four hundred copies and started selling them at gigs (Sander was a punk musician) and Lower East Side coffee shops on consignment. They liked the experience. Had friends who’d also written stuff. They published those. Then they made friends with better-known folks, like John S. Hall of King Missile and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Did their books. And so a self-publisher seamlessly became a publisher. Follow many publishers’ histories back far enough and you may very well find a self-publisher. In other words, these terms are not nearly as binary as we might think, and this complexity is also not of a recent vintage.

Nelson: As a literary agent based out of Denver, not necessarily the hub of publishing, I was looking for a competitive edge, so I started blogging in 2006 and only took queries and submissions electronically. My colleagues thought I was crazy, but I knew that my only chance to land good clients was to get there first. It worked. In 2007 I started reading a wildly entertaining fellow blogger who read and reviewed print-on-demand self-published titles. She would write reviews about the best ones because even then, good stuff was happening in this realm.

That’s when it began for me. I would read an interesting review that she’d post and then I would e-mail that author to see if I could read the novel. I even took on a few authors that way. Then, in early 2011, it was very apparent that a publishing shift was really about to unfold in terms of authors having direct access to distribution venues such as Barnesandnoble.com, Apple, and Amazon. We represent authors in romance, and the tectonic shift happened there first so it was easy to be at the forefront. I knew that as an agency we needed to evolve to stay relevant in these fast-changing times. Nelson Literary may be the first agency to hire a full-time software engineer as an employee; this happened back in May 2011. That summer we launched NLA Digital Liaison Platform to support self-publishing efforts of our current authors. When we launched, it was mainly for reverted backlist titles. Now it’s both backlist and frontlist titles. Just to be clear, though, we are not a publisher. Our authors maintain full control and [retain] all rights. For a commission, we are simply a liaison/facilitator providing a supportive environment and tech expertise for clients looking to self-publish.

A highly regarded agent recently remarked that the odds are stacked heavily against self-published authors—that only three or four titles really “make a splash” each year. What’s your response to this? Tell me about managing expectations in an industry that still measures success in terms of profit-and-loss margins.

Nelson: In 2007 I would have agreed. However, if this comment was made within the last two years, then I fear this agent may have his head buried in the sand. I represent Hugh Howey and Jasinda Wilder—and just recently I signed three-million-copies-plus-seller Barbara Freethy. Hugh and Jasinda are both authors who had not been previously traditionally published. They rose to fame solely through their digital self-publishing efforts during the past two years, and both have sold over a million e-books.

I also have several authors who started out in the traditional-publishing realm, Jana DeLeon and Courtney Milan. Last year, Jana was doing so well digitally publishing her backlist as well as her new frontlist titles that she was able to quit her day job for the first time in a decade of writing. She even hit the USA Today best-seller list on her own—something her previous publisher could never do for her. Courtney is having good success as well. She makes four times what she made with her traditional publisher and she even hit the New York Times best-seller list on her own. I’d say these gals are “making a splash” even if they aren’t household names. Even today, I could probably rattle off the names of fifteen self-published writers who are making it big this year. It’s becoming quite common, actually. Most of it is happening in the genre of romance, but Hugh and other rising stars are not writing in that arena and [are] finding success.

For an agent, the tough part is determining how a traditional publisher and a self-published author can work together. Some of these independent authors are making so much money on their own, traditional publishers literally can’t offer enough money to make it tempting to partner. If a self-published author is making a hundred fifty thousand dollars a month, it’s hard to seriously consider a traditional offer for, say, half a million dollars for two books—for all rights, including digital. Is having the print component or bookstore distribution worth it? Probably not. However, many independent authors would seriously consider it in exchange for something more reasonable, such as a finite term of license or a truly reasonable sales threshold…. Independent authors don’t want to give up all rights with no hope of getting their work back at some point if a publisher loses interest. It would then be lost income for them.

Now self-published authors have made the leap to traditional publishing and love it. But many are regretting it. These days, part of my job is to make sure that I routinely have conversations with publishers, and to keep the door open to any possibilities that make sense as my independent clients become even more successful.

Nash: I think it is important to look at this in the larger context. Given the dramatic increase in the total amount of content available, and the velocity at which it travels, we’re seeing a shift from a world of a few handfuls of million-copy sellers and tens of thousands that sell four figures in units, to one where there is one series every two years that will sell ten million–plus, and millions that sell hundreds, or tens, or ones.

In other words, the distribution of success has become even more skewed. This also means that publishers have to focus on “tentpole properties,” a term they stole from the film business. Now, self-publishing is actually a pretty good purveyor of tentpoles because [tentpoles are created] by consumer response. They’re memes. Gangnam Style. Although we see that for those numbers to be maxed out, you want the infrastructure of a media company. Is that necessarily a publisher? Not purely, no; it could be a movie studio. What exactly happens there is less about abstracting the attributes of publishing or self-publishing and favoring one over the other, and more a function of the specific personality of the writer and the specific cultural and economic context of the books.

In terms of the ones selling a degree or two below—say, steadily in the range of fifty thousand to five hundred thousand books—that is largely the province of institutional publishing. That’s not a stable place for a solo enterprise because velocity is critical: Sales at that stage happen because of consumer buzz, people want to eat in the Chinese restaurant that everyone else is eating in. Self-published authors either zoom through that fifty thousand to five hundred thousand unit number, or they don’t even come close to it.

Now, all the forgoing has to do with sales. There are authors publishing for reasons other than sales, so the question becomes what type of splash, what impact do they want to have on the world. And there you face a very fundamental fact that, all other things being equal, it is typically easier for a team to make a splash than a person. So whether your self-publishing goal is to raise visibility for yourself as a nutritionist or as a 
human-resources consultant or as a poet, having a team of experienced people supporting you makes it easier. At that point, then, you’re starting to make a series of judgments—appraising your own skills, ascertaining skills to which you have ready access via love or money, determining your precise goals, deciding how you want to monetize (i.e., it need not be through selling books), and so forth. These things simply aren’t binary, even though the media, and some tweets and some panel discussions, can make them seem that way.

Ciotta: I agree with Kristin and Richard. Coming from a self-published author’s point of view, there’s the terrifying BookScan that traditionally published authors must contend with. To be blunt, if you’re not selling the way a publishing house wants you to, you’re out. Even great writers are under the gun. It’s all about profit-and-loss margins.

As I discuss in my self-publishing guide, if you want to be a successful self-published or traditionally published author in today’s market, your mind-set should be: “It’s all about the money, honey.” You have to be the businessperson and the author. Your job is to write a great book and sell it. And if you’re a self-published author, it’s heightened big-time.

Since independent authors are becoming so business savvy—and, as Kristin noted, many are making much more money using print-on-demand services, other print services, and being digitally published than being traditionally published—self-
publishing is only going to keep flourishing. Are more than three to four self-published books making a splash in a year? Absolutely!

If, as Richard says, it’s easier for a team to make a splash than a person—and Jennifer, you discuss in your e-book the various people and services you employed during the publishing of I, Putin—then what would you say to a writer who is starting out, alone, on the path to self-publishing a book?

Ciotta: Always start with this in mind: Write a good book. Make sure the book is professionally edited, preferably by an editor who has knowledge of The Chicago Manual of Style. With regard to the technical side of self-publishing, if you can do it yourself and do it well then go for it. For example, I’m a book-manuscript editor by day, thus I edited my own books. However, I’m not a book-cover designer at all, nor am I a formatter. So I paid for professionals to do these tasks for me.

An independent author must understand that [a] book must be professional. It must read and look professional. Think of how many books are on Amazon. Now imagine your book has a run-of-the-mill cover design. That book is pretty much dead in the water. You must go above and beyond to ensure that your book is not only high quality, but that it will stand out among all the self-published as well as traditionally published books. In other words, make the best first impression you can.

Nash: Entirely agreed. When I get questions by writers starting out, I don’t really have answers; I have only more questions. What do you want to get out of it? What do you love doing? Can your friends help? And so forth.

I’m actually going to niggle a little at a comment you made earlier, Jennifer: “It’s all about the money, honey.” Now, to the extent that means you’re in charge of everything, that you’re the boss, I agree completely. But the brute reality is that this is a ludicrous way to make money. No creative endeavor—acting, rock star, dancer, etcetera—is a plausible way to make money. Sure, many who do it dream of fame and riches, and a microscopic percentage get [that], and a slightly bigger but nevertheless microscopic percentage get a little of it, but people like to dream, even as they’re doing it, because they love being in the game. Just like teenagers playing basketball, or football, or baseball dream of the professional leagues, regardless of the percentages, which are equally terrible. So if you’re doing it for the money, you’re on a pathway to bitterness. Do it because you love it, you love the process, you love the engagement, you love getting better at what you do. Now, of course, if you do get lucky, don’t be dumb about money, and at this point all the admonitions Kristin and Jennifer can give should take precedence. “It’s all about the money, honey.” But really it’s about love, and so when I first meet a writer asking the sorts of questions we’re discussing here, I want to find out more about that love and how the processes—not just the outcomes, but the processes—for getting your book out there in the world can support you in that love and passion.

Ciotta: Richard, I couldn’t agree more. I meant, “It’s all about the money, honey” in a different context. That’s what the industry is driven by: money. Traditional publishing houses and agencies want sales, sales, and more sales. As for the self-publishing mind-set, I mean that you need to have business savvy nowadays. From the get-go, the self-published author must think about the business side. No, I didn’t mean it’s a good way to make money! That’s a ludicrous idea. To self-publish the right way, you’ll put tons of money into it. You won’t see a return on your investment for quite a while!

Nelson: As an agent, I’ve been incredibly blessed over the years with the success of my authors. For almost all of them, it’s actually been a very plausible way to make money. Most of my clients write full time and don’t have to supplement with a day job. But I also understand that this is not the norm; still, it does put me in the mind-set of writing as a valuable source of income. Even more so now, with my self-published authors’ ability to produce and distribute their work directly through the distribution channels and to keep a bigger percentage of the royalties, thus making the possibility greater of actually earning a living through writing.

But in the end, no writer begins this journey with the sole intent to make money. It begins with a story and the passion to share it. And what I’m discovering is that writers, even those who are self-publishing, have a very specific preference to not tackle this journey alone. Hence, the importance of a team.

Authors need beta readers they trust or a developmental editor to tell them what sucks in a manuscript and what doesn’t. I don’t know a single writer who can create perfect art in the first draft. Wouldn’t that be a gift? Then of course there is everything Jennifer has already mentioned—the copyeditor, the proofer, the professional cover designer, an excellent tech person to convert e-files. Every writer will eventually need a team or won’t have any time to write!

So I would tell a writer who is starting out to start forming that team early. In the beginning, it might be as simple as making connections to other self-published writers. Later it might be as complicated as having an agent, a dedicated contact at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble, and yes, even a traditional publisher. Be prepared for trial and error and for the possibility that not every connection will be worth keeping. And then be ready for that team to expand when needed.

Let’s talk about gatekeepers, which is really sort of an ugly term. I think what’s exciting about self-publishing for a lot of people is that it does away with this idea that only certain lucky writers get anointed by the seemingly self-elected purveyors of literary taste who are deciding first what gets published and then what gets promoted at the bookstore. With self-publishing, anyone with some money, know-how, and fire in the heart can produce a book and get it in front of people’s eyes. But how is the self-published author supposed to compete for the attention of readers if most of those readers are unconsciously relying on a whole line of people—agents, editors, booksellers—to narrow down the choices, albeit based on a subjective standard of quality, for them?

Nash: Well, look, we all have filters in our day-to-day lives: human filters, automatic filters, filters on our laptops, filters at the playground (“avoid eye contact with that parent,” your friend tells you). We all need filters. The exact sequence of filters represented by the funnel that is the book-supply infrastructure, though? Not really. That was never a system designed to help consumers anyway—it was a system based on the dictates of manufacturing and distributing widgets. It’s standard Industrial Revolution stuff, initially vertically integrated, shifting to a more outsourced mode in the late twentieth century. Parallel to that, in the newspaper and magazine business, there was culture and entertainment writing of various levels of seriousness that have been grafted onto a platform paid for largely by classifieds and department-store and car-dealership advertising. The bookish side of it had a culturally and socially (though not economically) symbiotic relationship. And everybody treated that as the cultural establishment, because why not? It was what was there. But it wasn’t remotely purpose-built to be a system for adjudicating culture. It just became that because it’s all we had.

Now we’re building new filters. New retail aggregators like Amazon. New media and communications systems like BuzzFeed, Gawker, HuffPo, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. And, as usual, of course, they’re not being built for books. Just like they weren’t built for books in the nineteenth and twentieth century, either. We’re just going to need to figure out how to use the tools capitalism inadvertently provides us for our own purposes. A key way in which that will happen is that we have the human talent from the previous system, slowly adjusting to the new tools.

An important thing to remember, though, is that the old system wasn’t built to filter for consumers. It was built to sell books. We didn’t do a very good job filtering to consumers. Why else did Whitman self-publish? Why did Melville almost vanish? Why did Paula Fox disappear and reappear? Why did we publish Jewel’s poetry? Serial liars and plagiarists? And so forth. Why, if we looked at the National Book Award finalists for the 1950s and 1960s, do we recognize so few names? It’s not, by the way, that publishers suck. It’s that we’re all just human. We can’t pick winners, never could. We just get lucky and try to justify it after the fact.

What does that mean for the individual author? Yes, it is relatively harder to get attention. But don’t complain—before now you’d never have had the opportunity to be seeking the attention.

Ciotta: The answer is, don’t compete with the traditionally published authors. As a self-published author in today’s industry, you can’t get reviews from certain major newspapers or magazines, you can’t get your book in many bookstores, and a lot of media outlets won’t put you on their TV or radio shows. That’s just a fact right now, though I have a feeling it will be changing.

That’s why it’s crucial to have a well-written, professional book and to be savvy about marketing and publicity. You will learn what doesn’t work for you in the first year. I had another self-published author say to me, “You won’t know how to sell your book in the first year.” She was absolutely right…with regard to fiction (nonfiction is always easier). If you don’t have a clear, defined target audience, it can be tough. So then who are your gatekeepers? With I, Putin, I was sure my target audience was men, forty and over, who have an interest in politics. Wrong!

Yes, I do get a few readers like this…but I’m learning in the year and a half my novel’s been out, soccer moms in the Midwest to hipsters in the city to young people in Egypt and the Philippines are reading it. How do I know? They write me and rate and review it on Goodreads. These are the new gatekeepers, who have all the power. In other words, readers, by word of mouth, are the people you want to embrace you and your book.

Nelson: In the publishing lexicon, especially for frustrated writers, “literary agent” might as well be synonymous with “gatekeeper,” and both are dirty words. But I didn’t become a literary agent to be a gatekeeper. I became one because I loved books. And I foolishly thought that if I liked a story, other people might too. I’ve never once taken on a client because I thought the manuscript, once published, would become a best-seller. Not once. I’m surprised every time the magic lightning strikes and a novel I represent becomes a best-seller.

This is perhaps not the best way to sell myself as an agent, but when I’m speaking at conferences, I always highlight the list of novels I passed on that went on to great success because I want it to be clear that I’m not the sole barometer of what readers will anoint as good or worthy of best-seller-dom. Besides, not every book in the library speaks to me, and most certainly not every novel that’s currently sitting on a best-seller list is one that I would pick up and read. There are definitely titles on the list that I’m astonished to see.

And it’s easy to get tunnel vision. As an agent, I see this all the time when a submission goes to editorial board—where acquisition happens by committee and folks want what’s hot or trending rather than what will be hot in the future—and the work gets shot down.

And that’s where the new filters come in. There is now a chance for readers themselves to be purveyors of literary taste and to influence what is popular. This is how the “genre” of New Adult came to be. I put “genre” in quotations because, honestly, New Adult is just Chick Lit from a decade ago but in new clothing, which encapsulates slightly younger protagonists and now has emphasis on a relationship being an important definition of self, as opposed to girlfriends and career.

Publishing has a tendency to ride a trend like Seabiscuit into the ground before declaring it dead and not touching it for years. That’s exactly what happened to Chick Lit. But those readers didn’t disappear. They just got tired of the formula stories that were being fed to them and stopped buying. Publishers in turn stopped pubbing them. Then those readers couldn’t find any stories because writers couldn’t sell those stories, even if they had an original twist.

Self-publishing and direct distribution gave those displaced and ignored writers an opportunity to sell a story they actually wanted to read but couldn’t find being published. It empowered readers to cast their own vote, via their spending dollars, about what they wanted to read. And now we are seeing an interesting reversal, where publishers are looking for writers to prove themselves via a self-publishing-sales track record first, after which a publisher might sign them.

Now to perambulate back to the original question: How is the self-published author supposed to compete for the attention of readers if most of those readers are relying on the old publishing model to filter the content? The same way it has always worked: word of mouth. Readers telling other readers what they loved and why.

That, and only that, is how best-sellers happen, whether they are self-published or traditionally published. How we wish we could bottle that for every title.