I’m back. I just finished a good sized freelancing project which took up most of my attention. I’m back though, and here’s a link to an interesting discussion.
This is an intelligent discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of choosing self-publishing over a traditional route. All too often these discussions degenerate into insults and absolutes that are useless. This discussion is pretty good though.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider self-publishing to be vanity publishing. I think some writers do have unrealistic expectations though. I frequently read comments where writers hope that their self-published work will be “discovered” and published traditionally.
Of course, I know that happens from time to time, but how often? Really? For ever book that gets discovered how many hundreds, or thousands, are left unnoticed? If you’re thinking of self-publishing with that hope in mind, I’d think hard about my plans for discovery. You’ll never get discovered unless you do something to get yourself discovered. That may mean getting an internet following, submitting your book to agents/publishers, doing your own marketing, or all or more of those things.
For me, what it boils down to is learning to do my own marketing for the novel. To get the book “out there” and discoverable, I’ll need to get as many people to see it and read it as possible. That means advertising. I know it’s an ugly topic for many writers, but I think it’s unavoidable.
And why am I thinking about this topic again? Well, now that the freelancing project is finished, I’m going to get back to the novel in earnest. Unfortunately, I find that I just don’t have time to balance my freelancing, fiction, blogging, etc. all at once. If I’m busy with one, then one or more of the others suffer. When I figure out how to stop sleeping and eating, I’ll get more done.
I’m catching up on comments, so if you submitted one and it hasn’t popped up yet, it’s probably stuck in my spam filter. I’ll get to it as quickly as I can.