Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:
– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.
– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.
As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?
First, by one count, 70% of traditionally published authors fail with their first book and are not offered a chance to publish a second. Said another way, 70% of the time the agents and publishers are wrong about a given book becoming successful.
Second, on the other hand, we all know the many, many stories of authors whose books became bestsellers but were rejected by scores of agents and publishers.
Third, sometimes agents and publishers may just be incompetent. Speaking from personal experience, a couple decades ago I sent a full manuscript unsolicited to a highly regarded medium-sized publisher of history books and asked them if they were interested. They were trying to get into fiction. My historical novel seemed like it would be a good fit. They responded to my manuscript a month later with contracts and advances for it and two more. Obviously, they loved it. We spent about a year editing it during which time they launched about 15 more novels, all of which failed. I eventually got a letter telling me they were exiting the fiction market. So was my novel really that brilliant or just another bad choice they had made because they did not know how to discern good from bad?
(To digress and finish this story… By the time they gave up on getting into fiction, I had an agent with JCA, and we submitted my novel to a few other houses and got a couple of near misses. The consensus seemed to be “Too violent for general literature and too literary for ‘men’s adventure'”. Cormac McCarthy, where are you when I need you?)
Even though getting an agent only loosely correlates with being a competent writer, unless your writing is a debacle, getting an agent and subsequently a publisher is really a function of odds. And I very much believe that anyone who has sent a novel through a site such as CritiqueCircle.com for community review and feedback at least twice and has had it professionally copy edited is well positioned to get an agent, the qualifier being that the more unusual the work is the more agents you might have to engage to land one. 100 may not be near enough.
IMHO the only way we will know if our writing does not suck – no matter how we publish it — is if we get generally positive reviews (and at least 30 of them) once it is published. Whether or not it sells well and generates a lot of cash is another discussion altogether.
I’ve reviewed a number of self-published books. Some were good. Some were not so good. I’ve also started thousands of traditionally published books. Many I’ve stopped before I finished because they were very poor.
We can say that on average, traditionally published books are better than self-published books. Trying to generalize that into absolute truths is foolhardy and will result in flawed conclusions. And you’ll miss out on some great self-published books.
