The Cons of Self-Publishing

We have seen how self-publishing can be effective for your career as an author, as it gives you complete authority over the book and allows more money into your bank account as well. But like other things in life, the act of self-publishing has its own set of disadvantages.

• You are your own master

Now since you have the made the choice of opting for self-publishing, you should prepare yourself to work on various tasks simultaniously. A standard publication house has people working on each aspect of the publication, simultaneously; be it designing, printing, editing or other. But since you are all on your own, you need to accomplish all this yourself. If you hire people to help you with each aspect, you would have to spend some money. Outsourcing will not solve your problem either. It will lower your costs - no doubt about that, but you would have to be careful and make sure that the work is being done to your standards.

Time is also not favoring you here. There are a lot of writers who make their living by working during the day and then taking care of the self-publishing task later. So much work every day takes a toll on your body, and quite your brain. Further, you are required to even take care of the marketing aspect of your book, once you have gone through the publishing procedure.

• High costs

If you get your book published in the traditional way, you can expect around 5-10% of the sales as your revenue. But with self-publishing, this can go as high as 50% of the sales. The only disadvantage here is that you need to work out everything in advance and take a gamble. You can try self-publishing your book and spend close to $ 5,000 for your book; but if it fails, you are left with nothing but sorrow and financial hardship.

You would also be required to get in touch with a distributor who can make your book reach the shelves of the bookstore as they will not ever buy books from self-publishing authors. So, adding the distributors share in the profit, you would be left with some per cent short of your expected profit of 50%. But still you are not secure. What happens when your book turns out to be an epic-fail? Usually, most of the bookstores would ask you to re-fund and remove your book from their stores. You can, however, enter into a contract with most bookstores, which would prevent the re-funding situation for a small cost.

The writing industry is highly competitive and you need to reach out to your targeted audience to make your book sales go high. So, you have to budget for marketing costs as well.

• Not high on reputation

Self-publishing writers are usually regarded as an ordinary or below-par writer whose work is not worth buying. Although this may be quite a bias attitude towards very talented authors, many people disregard their work as they question the credibility of the author's work.

• The author himself

An author worries his books just like his own child as so it becomes a very big obstacle for the author to criticizeize his own work. Since you are working as a self-publishing author, you need to carry out the job of an editor as well. It is not easy to change roles between an editor and an author. What you think of as an insignificant part of the book, an editor might consider an important one and so, editing the book can be quite troublesome for you. Unfortunately, when the book has not been effectively edited, it is bound to face failure.

Self-publishing is quite similar to a gamble one takes at a casino. You spend the money and can expect any of this: a failure, a success or maybe even a huge success for your book. But is not everything in life just a gamble? Go ahead and take the leap, because success is the product of risk-taking.

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Source by Carlos El Grande