The stigma of self-publishing is typical of most prejudices — it’s based on a small body of facts. As a bona-fide published author of over a dozen dead-tree, bookstore titles, I’ll try to shed some light on why I went the self-publishing route.

I have no trouble with editorial changes; I’m a strong defender of the NEED for editors as a critical eye. I even have a successful real-world editor who looks over my stuff before I self-publish. Editors are not, in general, the problem with traditional publishing.

So what why did I go with self-publishing?

Economics, for one. Let’s say I sell a book to a publisher today. I’ll get an advance against royalties in a few weeks. Then I won’t see another penny for at least 12 months, and probably closer to 2 years. Biggest advance I ever got was US$12k for a technical book — for a fiction novel, we’re looking at half that in the current market. Now, if it takes me, say, six months to write a 100,000-word novel — I’m making, per month, 2k for non-fiction and 1k for fiction, which is below poverty level.

The majority of books don’t pay out their advance, simply because the advance is based on an educated guess about sales. Royalties run anywhere from 5% to 15% of wholesale price, and half that if the book is sold to a store for less than 50% of cover price. If I sell a novel with a cover price of $20, and I get a $6000 advance. Mom-and-pop bookstores will buy it for $12, while Amazon.com pays slightly less, often below the 50% bulk-discount threshold that halves my royalties. At a 10% royalty, I’m getting $1.20 per book sold; we need to sell 5000 books before I make back my advance and see new money again.

I’m using very optimistic numbers based on my real world experience as a full-time author. Economically, traditional publishing stinks. The Rowlings and Kings of the world are a microscopic and distracting minority.

Ignore economics for a moment, and consider the difficulty of making a sale. My fiction books tend to cross genres; my most recent novel, A Journey of Dragons, is a fantasy romance with elements of steampunk, set in a unique world without elves and with bespectacled lizards. I ran the manuscript through the agent/publisher gauntlet for a while — I have a box full of “great story, great characters, don’t know how to position it in the market” letters. I was told by one publisher that 90,000 words is too long, and by another that it was too short. not one REJECTION said anything bad about my writing or story structure. The book just doesn’t fit anyone.

So to crowd funded self-publishing I go. I have no idea if it will work, but I do know that it’s a whole lots of work and fun.

My current crowd funded book projects are:

A Journey of Dragons - A science fantasy romance

Doctrina Physicum - Math and Physics for a Steampunk World

Evolutionary Algorithms - Natural Selection in Software Engineering