Writer Wednesday – Why I Chose Self-Publishing vs Traditional Publishing

Happy Writer Wednesday my friends. And if you didn’t already know, my THIRD book is officially out and ready to be read by all of you beautiful people. You can check it out here.

But other than saying how awesome my book is and why you should get it (CLICK HERE TO GET IT TODAY), I wanted to share with you all why I decided to go to the self-publishing route rather than the traditional publishing route.

Today, I wanted to share my insight on this.

This post includes affiliate links. You can see my disclosure page here. Thanks for your support!

What I am going to start with is the first reason why.

And it’s quite simple, I did not know enough about the traditional publishing world to get involved and immerse myself in that culture.

And it’s not to say that I may want to in the future. Because believe me, every YA author would love to be backed by Penguin Random House and get those sweet, sweet readers and their marketing team.

But to me, at this point in my life. The self-publishing route called out to me and it just felt right.

That is probably the first and most simple reason why I decided to become an indie author and go down the hole of self-publishing than the traditional route.

It’s not my only reason though.

My second reason behind all of this was time.

The very little info I had when it came to traditional publishing was that it was going to take time. Lots of time and patience.

And it’s not to say that self-publishing doesn’t have the equal amount of that, but with self-publishing, time was in my hands. Meaning I had the choice of when I wanted to publish. And at the time of my first book, I wanted to publish it almost immediately, and self-publishing will almost always let you do that.

I wanted time to be in my terms, and being an indie author I didn’t have anyone else besides myself to give deadlines and put things out. Which is both a good and bad thing.

Meaning while I didn’t have a boss looking over me to hit a deadline. I also didn’t have a boss looking over me to hit a deadline. I had to rely on being very self-disciplined to get my first, second, and third book out. Which in the end worked super well for me, but it may not work for others.

A third reason why I decided on the self-publishing route was money.

I started my book with zero dollars and google docs. I published my book at equally spending zero dollars, using Canva for my cover and Draft2Digital for all my conversions.

Self-publishing was the best option for someone as small as I am as an author with zero to little money to pour into my first few books.

Would I love to have spent money on an editor, book designer, and marketing team? Hell yes, I would have. Did I have the funds do such a thing? Not in the beginning.

And while going on a traditional route, you can possibly land in a position where you get paid upfront. Don’t get me wrong about that. If you’re a lucky one, you can start as a new author and go to the traditional publishing route with zero dollars and then land a hefty book deal.

Is it rare? I’d like to say yes.

But most of the time you’ll need a literary agent even before you can get your work sent out to a publisher. So there will be funds thrown around unless you find an agent willing to work pro-bono until you hit that jackpot book deal. But I also don’t know a lot about agents and publishers, so please prove me super wrong in the comments below.

But this brings me to my last reason of why I wanted to do self-publishing more than traditional publishing.

I wanted to have full control of my work and not have to share. At least for now.

You have to realize that once you go through a publishing company and have an agent, etc, there will be dues that need to be paid. Part of your book royalty will be going to your publisher, agent, editor, etc. And then you can end up with pennies.

As a self-publisher, you set your price and the royalty you get is all yours. So you can go banana nut wild on it.

I do use Draft2Digital though for some of my publishing needs so they get a very small percentage, but I still get at the very least 65% of my book amount.

And since I only do e-books, for the time being, it may seem like a few bucks is pennies as well. But after selling a few books a day those few bucks add up really quick in a month.

And to add to not getting your full royalty, you may not even have full control of your work. With self-publishing, you can write whatever, market it any way you want and basically, you can do whatever you want with your book. It’s under your full control and you can have whatever branded image you’d want it to have.

Overall, the biggest reason why I chose to self-publishing over traditional publishing is that I have control of what I’m putting out there in its entirety. I can write and publish as many books as I want, get my full payout, and keep the same process over and over again until the end of time.

Which has been great for me because I actually have a million story ideas in my head that deserve to be written. And by self-publishing, it gives me that full creative control I’ve always wanted.

Self-publishing also gave me ZERO excuses to stall on my dreams of being a published author. Because the only person that was in my way to get published was myself. As we always say and hear, you are your worst critic. And that definitely goes with writing a book. And I’d like to think I did a pretty darn good job of getting over that obstacle.

There we have it, the few reasons why I decided to go through the self-publishing route versus the traditional publishing route.

I want to eventually go more in-depth with the pros and cons of each one (and be less bias), but I’m going to do a lot more research on the traditional publishing side of it before I put that blog post up for a Writer Wednesday post.

For now, you got the great pros of why I decided on self-publishing.

Who knows it may change in the future, but for now this is what works for me and maybe it will work out for you too.

But until next Writer Wednesday, go enjoy my third book! Or my first and second book if you haven’t quite gotten to my third. (P.S. you don’t have to read my books in order if you don’t want to, they are full stories on their own.)

Thanks for reading and for all the support.

Happy Writing!

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XOXO

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