My only prior experience of self-publishing was when I was in my 20s and I sent something I'd written off to a publisher in response to an advert I'd seen in some magazine or other. Pretty much immediately, I received a letter back telling me how wonderful my book was, and they would be very happy to publish it for me. All I had to do was pay them £3600 up front, and then a further £1500 when they'd completed printing the books. I did not pursue this venture - for a start, I didn't have a spare 360p, never mind £3600. I realised that this particular publishing company was something called a Vanity Publisher, and it's from this that self-publishing has been tainted with the incredibly bad reputation it seems to have, particularly if you read this article in the Guardian... https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/mar/21/for-me-traditional-publishing-means-poverty-but-self-publish-no-way
However, in more recent years, self-publishing has been enjoying a bit of a revival, and if writers like Rachel Abbott are anything to go by, it can be a pretty lucrative and rewarding process. This is a writer who seems to have struck the right balance between creating excellent books and marketing them brilliantly. She tops the charts in her genre, has been traditionally published as a direct result of all her hard work as a self-publishing writer, and currently enjoys life writing for a living - the writer's ultimate dream.
The choice, finally, has to be yours. If you want to go down the traditional publishing route, and search for a literary agent, who will then try to sell you to a publisher, then you have to steel yourself for what is probably going to be a very long, and self-esteem battering journey. On the other hand, if you fancy having a stab at the self-publishing route, there are many things you need to take into consideration before you even begin exploring the map.
I made my decision by asking myself a simple question: What did I actually want from my writing?
And that, my dears, was a very hard question to answer, because it meant facing up to several truths - but they were truths that I was at last ready to tackle, heart first!
But for now, I'll leave you with this little bit of wisdom from Rachel Abbott: "You have to be able to put in the hours and enjoy it, because there's no point doing it if it's gonna be a complete slog..."
Was I prepared to put in the hours? You betcha!
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