3 Ways to Publish a Book: Traditional vs Self vs Hybrid
Hello again, creatives!
Today, I’m breaking down the details of how to get published via the three general paths: traditional, self, and hybrid publishing.
All-in-all, it is a 5 step process, which doesn’t sound so bad, but publishing a book is time consuming and definitely not for the faint of heart.
Update December 2020: I have a Youtube channel where I break this down as well. So if you would like to check that out, you can.
Let’s start with the basics. What does a writer do when they have finished a book?
Step 1: Choose Your Path
There are three general paths that a writer can choose when publishing a book.
Traditional: Go through a literary agency to hopefully land a deal with a bigger publishing agency who will handle contracts with distributors, wholesalers & retailers
Self: pay to publish through online platforms that offer editing services and an avenue for distribution channels
Hybrid: Represent yourself, or find an agent, before finding a publishing house where they also offer distribution and marketing services
Step 2: The Pitch
2a: Pitching a literary agency
A literary agency is a team of professionals who have built relationships within the industry and understand the intricacies of contract negotiation. They hold the author’s hand while going through the hoops of finding the right publishing house that their books will call home.
But the process of gaining a literary agent is in itself a daunting task. It’s part of the reason why I chose not to have one at first, although for my next book, which will, more likely than not, have a different target audience, a literary agent will be needed. Finding a literary agent means scouring the internet for agencies that cater to the genre you write in and crafting an email pitch, called a query letter. The first 10 pages or first chapter are usually added to the query letter in the email pitch.
The query letter is structured like this:
Introduction that states why you chose to select this agent/agency, the TITLE, genre and word count of your manuscript (remember, it’s not a book until it’s published)
The hook, which is a punchy 2-3 sentence paragraph that provides the vibe of the book
Brief but enticing summary of the first 50 pages of the manuscript, which means you must get 3 things across:
Who is the main character?
What is the conflict they are trying to resolve?
What are the stakes that drive the plot forward?
The fourth paragraph is the closing wherein you provide a brief and relevant introduction to who you are and why the literary agent should choose to represent you
This is all in hopes that they are interested enough to ask for the full manuscript. From there, they may have your full manuscript for up to 6 weeks, reading through it and taking notes. They may come back and ask for a rewrite and resubmission, to test how well you handle constructive criticism and what you do with it. Or they may offer you a contract without an R&R. Or they may reject you.
2b: The Proposal
Say you decide that the literary agent route isn’t for you. This could be for a number of reasons such as you have a niche target audience, you want more control over the process, and/or you want to retain certain rights to your work that you would otherwise have to sign away.
So this means that you create a proposal to send to editors within small, boutique publishing houses as well as hybrid publishers. A proposal is a hefty document that isn’t for the faint of heart.
It’s essential for writers to understand that to be an author is to be an entrepreneur. The proposal showcases your business acumen and that you know how to properly market your book, create your public relations strategy and effectively sell your book.
It’s essential for writers to understand that to be an author is to be an entrepreneur.
Ideally, the writer is already has or is working on many of the things mentioned in the proposal. This is because a publishing house takes a financial risk by signing on a new author. If the author doesn’t have an already engaged audience, then it will make marketing and selling harder. So what all goes into a proposal?
Overview
The overview is reserved for a brief, attention-grabbing summary of your manuscript, a bird’s eye view of the proposal’s details and a summary of who you are as the author. This first section may be all the gatekeeper reads if they are not enticed by it.
Marketing Strategy
What is the target audience for the manuscript? Be specific. Like suburban youth aged 13-19 who enjoy X, Y & Z and may have read/watched A, B, & C. There may be more than one target audience.
What is the market size of the target audience? Find stats on how many people are in your target audience, their spending power, and where they shop (because if/when it becomes a book, it should go on the shelves there).
What really is the genre of the manuscript? This is where you start to build the marketing material for the future book. Search keywords that will resonate with your audience. For example, is the manuscript more of a mind-bending horror or suspenseful thriller? How you describe it will depend on your intended audience(s).
Competition. Find recently ( within the last 1-3 years) published titles out there that are similar to yours. You should also know how it was published, how many pages, who their target audiences were, what their sales have been, and reverse engineer everything that you put in your own marketing and public relations section. Then ask why would yours perform as well or better than theirs? Your answer to that question should be in the proposal.
Public Relations Strategy
Building your public persona. While, traditionally, this has only been important for non-fiction authors, the digital age has forced the issue on every aspiring author. How do you want your readership and the public to see you? Mind map your public persona and the words that come to mind that you view yourself. Craft a pitch with this.
How are you going to build your platform? Choose your social media accounts based on where your audience is, because you don’t need to be on every single website. Then, figure out your content strategy based on your public persona. Are you a self-help writer? Then your social media accounts should focus on providing tips and giving your audience a glimpse into your daily self-care routines.
Outreach. Find blogs, podcasts, and news publications that might accept a press release, guest blog post, or interview from you. Put it all in a spreadsheet for your reference. For the proposal you may list a few. If you already have working relationships with people, mention that.
Chapter Summary or Synopsis (Read their guidelines)
So, you may need to keep a couple versions of your proposal on hand because of this section right here. A chapter summary is where you write a 1-2 paragraph summary of each chapter. A synopsis is where you summarize the whole book in about two pages. I know it may seem like you’re ruining the book by telling them everything that happens, but they need to know the whole manuscript before knowing whether or not it’s a good fit for them to read it –and possibly sign a contract with you for it.
Sample Chapters
This is the final portion of the proposal, which includes the sample chapters. Read the guidelines to know how many chapters to place at the end of the proposal.
Step 3: The Contract
3a: The Literary Agent
Signing a contract with a literary agent means that you have agreed to let them represent you and your manuscript when reaching out to publishers. If you write multiple genres you may have more than one literary agent because they usually specialize in a set of genres.
The contract outlines several things:
The term of the agreement, which should be about 12 months.
The scope of the “Project”, which is the working manuscript and the task at hand to find a publisher for it.
What will happen to the Project in the extreme case of the agent leaving the agency, the agency goes out of business or restructures.
The contract includes the agent’s commission, which is usually between 10-15% of the sale or profit of each book sold.
It also outlines the rights that author retains while in the working relationship with the agent, which I will do an entire post about later. For now, one of the most important words is “copyright”. You as the author will want ownership and authority of the complete copyright of the Project.
How and when the author will get paid. Do they hand out royalty payments quarterly? Monthly?
What state’s laws will the contract be governed by, in case of a legal dispute? So, if you live in Minnesota, but your agent lives in Florida, then the contract may be disputed in Florida courts.
There should be a way to terminate the contract at any time. If there isn’t, you don’t want to do business with them.
If you’re curious to learn more, literary-agents.com is a good source for understanding the nitty gritty details of literary agent contracts.
3b: Self-Publishing
When it comes to self-publishing, there is no contract. It’s a pay-to-play service wherein the writer edits, formats, designs and pays a distributor to put it on virtual shelves so the author can market it. Or sometimes the self-publishing platform will have a package wherein they do most of that for a pretty penny and mixed results.
If you go the self-publishing route, it’s best to have a strong platform already as well as time and money at your disposal.
3c: The Hybrid Publisher
Hybrid publishing is a rapidly growing field with flowers of many shapes and sizes. What I mean is, it was only recently that a set of guidelines for what a hybrid publisher is was agreed on in the publishing industry.
This article by Brian A. Klems has broken down the different types of hybrid publishers.
Because it’s kind of the wild west of publishing right now, hybrid publishing contracts may vary. The common things found though, should include:
Who keeps and/or manages the rights of the work
What the author’s royalties will be for each book sold, which should be substantially higher than the traditional 5-15% profit her book
Who pays for what part of the book production process? In hybrid publishing, the author could front all of the costs like in self-publishing, but the publisher plays an active role in the process as well as in marketing the book
Step 4: The Working Relationship
4a: The Literary Agency, The Publishing House & You
When it comes to traditional publishing, the literary agent is your spokesperson and liaison to the publishing house. You’ll work with your literary agent for a preliminary round of editing and put together the proposal for the publishing houses that you’ll pitch.
Once you land a contract with the publishing house, which looks similar to the contract with the literary agent, you’ll work alongside an editor and if you’re lucky maybe even people who are on the design and marketing team.
The process will take several months of revisions, edits, and proofreads before it goes to the printer and distributor. If you land a bigger publisher and you have a solid following, then they might even provide a reasonable marketing budget for the book.
4b: The Distributor & You
As mentioned before, self-publishing is a pay-to-play game. You’re basically paying the self-publishing platform for access to distribution channels like Amazon and Ingram.
But before you can get there though, you will either need to pay for their hit-or-miss editing and design service, or pay freelancers or do it yourself. You’ll also have to format your book into the acceptable standards for ebook and print publishing.
Here is a great article of David Carnoy, a self-published author, explaining his journey.
4c: The Hybrid Publisher & You
As outlined by the Independent Books Publishers Association, the hybrid publisher working relationships should feel more like a partnership. You pay them for high quality editing and design services and work together to create a distribution and marketing strategy that the publisher actively engages in with you.
Again, it’s a new frontier in terms of the publishing industry that’s been driven in large part by the high barrier to entry in traditional publishing and the overwhelming mediocrity found with self-published titles. Hybrid publishing is an attempt at finding the middle ground.
Step 5: Marketing & PR
5a: The Publishing House & You
In traditional publishing, you may or may not have a big marketing budget. The publishing house assumes all the financial risk in the production and distribution process. They bank on finding a few hundred solid projects that can sell a few thousand copies of books.
This means, that you may be assigned a publicist or you may be on your own, it really depends on the size of the publisher. So, traditional publishing is more for those who already have a large audience or are subject matter experts who can easily gain the publicity needed to sell books.
In terms of marketing and PR, think conferences, guest speakers, leveraging media contacts and the like. The publishing house may set this stuff up for you, based on your proposal, or it may not.
5b: It’s All You
Self-publishing is not for the faint of heart. It has become another popular avenue for subject matter experts to quickly write and release books for their audiences.
This is why the vast majority of self-published books only sell a few copies. Because there are writers who don’t understand the entrepreneurial side of being an author and fall flat on marketing themselves.
Publicity for self-published books may include blog tours, podcast interviews, local school/library visits, and leveraging local media contacts.
5c: The Hybrid Publisher & You
The hybrid publisher is supposed to succeed where traditional publishers and self-publishing fail. Time will tell how successful this is.
For now, it seems that the hybrid publisher should be side-by-side with you, helping you execute the marketing strategy that was outlined in the proposal and then some. A solid hybrid publisher should have knowledge of the book publishing industry as well as design and marketing expertise.
Part of the IBPA guidelines state that they should have demonstrated success with selling titles. This only happens if they have a good marketing strategy to offer you.
The price tag for hybrid publishing is hefty. Some charge as little as $5,000 and others as much as $25,000 for their services. But with the new industry guidelines, hopefully, the predators will be weeded out.
Conclusion
Publishing is a massive, confusing and almost mysterious industry. I hope this cleared a few things up for you. The next few Read. topics I will cover will include the author’s rights and how to tell if you’re looking at a publishing scam.
As far as the next post, I’ll discuss the differences between Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising and how Journalism fits into all of it.
Until next time,
Rochele