I highly encourage writing and publishing your own books. This is an exciting and ever changing time for anyone who wants to create and send their content out into the world. Publishing has changed a lot over the last several years. Authors have more control of the content and rights of their books and with the explosion of e-books, tablets, and print-on-demand there are more and more options for publishing and distributing your creations around the world. Below are highlighted some of the ups and downs of today’s ever changing publishing environment.
Upside
- Control over your own destiny, the word no doesn’t exist. You have control over the editing, the book layout, cover design, inside design, the marketing and the rights.
- Speed to market is very much higher, traditional publishers can take 1-2 years to get your book to market if you can attract the attention of a publisher
- Much higher royalty payments from the print-on-demand sites like CreateSpace and Lulu.com
- More opportunity to create additional products from your content because you keep control over all your rights
- Publishing can be close to free and with print-on-demand there is no need to have excess inventory hanging around
Downside
- No book advance
- You have to do all the work yourself, editing, design, formatting, publishing and marketing
- You don’t have a group of professional marketing people to support you. Often though these don’t really exist and a lot is put on the author to promote and market
- If you are actually self printing physical books you would need to front all of the printing costs.
