Member-only story
Traditional or Self-Publishing: Which is Best for You?
All you need to know about the pros and cons of modern publishing
When I was a young buck with a typewriter, back when all this was fields and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, things were much simpler. You wrote a book, sent it to a publisher, they told you how horrible it was, and you repeated the process with the next publisher in The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook until somebody told you it wasn’t so horrible or you gave up. Good times.
Today, now that the fields have been replaced by Starbucks and the only roaming dinosaurs are old geezers like me, to get within ten-foot-pole range of a publisher, you need an agent . . . and good ones are scarcer than velociraptor eggs.
The publishing landscape has changed drastically, and not just because it’s covered in coffee houses. Self-publishing has been a thing for a long time, but in the last few years, it’s actually gained some crumbs of respectability. It’s no longer just the last refuge of the unpublishable. I’ve seen traditional and self-publishing from both sides of the desk, as writer and commissioning editor, so I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject. On many other subjects, yes, but on this one, not so much.
