Why Self-Publishing Is Awesome!

‘I’ve read ninety blog posts on whether I should self-publish or not!’  I hear you cry. OK, I hear you. There are a million blogs that basically conclude with the same thing - that it depends on what your publishing goals are and what kind of thing you’re writing as to whether you should choose traditional publishing or self-publishing. Ah! But I’m not going to tell you that because I think self-publishing is awesome and traditional publishing can get in the bin!

I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post that as a trans woman, I’m used to gatekeeping, i.e. every time I go to see a healthcare professional about trans-related healthcare, I have to prove to them that I’m ‘really trans’ as if, you know, I can’t be trusted to decide who I am without an old-white-cis-man holding my hand as I do it.

But when I started writing, I still effectively subjected myself to the same process by sending stories off to magazines who would then reject them.

What I wanted from these magazines was for them to tell me that I was ‘a writer’. But I write all the time. You’re reading my writing right now! I’ve got a book available to buy online! (Talking to Lobsters - available here: Buy from Amazon). So why did I need the approval of others to help me feel more like I was an actual bona fide writer?

Well, some of this comes from capitalism; as a society, we tend not to value something unless you can earn money from it. But why is that? So many talented people in other areas of crafts and the arts are valued for work which doesn’t make any money. If someone you know makes really pretty jewellery, but they go to work in a coffee shop to earn their income, their jewellery is still pretty, and people will still wear it.

Music is quite similar; amateur music is the backbone of a wide variety of genres, and people happily go to see amateur bands play at venues all the time.

When you consider the world of books, however, it’s only very recently that books written by amateurs and indie authors have started to gain a bit more credibility. This is a shame because indie/amateur books have got so much to offer! 

That niche idea that a publisher told you would never sell? The great news is that there will be someone out there who LOVES that idea and loves your work as a result! You might not make a billion pounds out of your book, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be incredibly fulfilling to the people who do read it.

Mainstream traditional publishers have to be able to sell large volumes of books to justify all the promotional, design, and staffing costs associated with a large business. This doesn’t make them bad, per se, but it does mean that they’re quite limited in the types of work that they can support. The rest of us, meanwhile; we can be the ones putting out indie books containing all the great ideas that they would never see potential in, and one in a million of those ideas will go on to become the next worldwide trend that publishers wish they’d spotted.

I think there’s also an argument about skills which is quite important when thinking about self-publishing. Writing a book requires quite a few skills; you’ve got to have a great imagination, you’ve got to be good at communicating your ideas on the page, you’ve got to be good at structuring a piece of work, you’ve got to be empathetic to imagine how characters might behave in certain situations… the list goes on. 

But in a self-published work, the writer might only be good at a few of these things. For example, I don’t think I’m the best wordsmith ever; I just think my writing gets in the way of what I want to say sometimes rather than flowing effortlessly off the page. I do, however, have a pretty good imagination which comes up with all sorts of weird and wonderful things that other writers wouldn’t be able to. It’s getting these ideas out into the world that drives me to write, not whether my prose flows elegantly or not. I think that even though I might not excel at ALL the skills associated with writing, my work still deserves a place out there even if it’s not going to make me rich. There are definitely people out there who have enjoyed my book, too, even though traditional publishers weren’t that impressed by it.

Your work deserves a place out there too! And there is definitely an audience for your work, even if it’s just a small one! So why wait until a severely limited publishing house that is only able to print forty slightly different versions of the same young adult novel each year gives you permission to be a writer? You ARE a writer, so get your work out there!