So, the commenters on Rachelle Gardner’s blog indicated “affirmation” was their number one reason for seeking publication through a traditional publisher and avoiding self-publishing. Another reason mentioned was cost—it costs too much to self-publish. Here’s a sampling of the comments.

Because as a self-published author, either you are limited to e-books…or you have to pay a lot of money up front – on editing and professional-quality cover art – to produce an attractive print version….

One, because I lack the ability to do two things at once (ie: write a novel AND market it). If I self-pubbed, I’d need the resources to hire someone to do that part for me, and I am too broke to do that currently.

…I chose to persue the traditional route for a couple reasons. I don’t possess the resources required up front for a first class publication….

It seems, however, that these and other commenters who mentioned cost are using old information. Or they haven’t conducted complete research and discovered the full range of self-publishing options available. Not so long ago self-publishing involved paying a hefty set-up fee, then having to purchase a large number of books you would sell yourself. Stories of boxes of books in writers’ garages are legendary. The initial investment could easily be two to three thousand dollars.

Today, however, while that arrangement is still available, two other options to self-publish are very reasonable. Electronic self-publishing (eSP) involves zero upfront cost, unless the author needs to hire out formatting and covers. Well, a freelance editor may also be needed to make the text book perfect. Still, the cost of covers and formatting are very reasonable for a full length book. Freelance editing could be expensive, I suppose, though I haven’t looked into the cost of that. Options such as critique group and exchange of beta reader time and effort are ways to offset those costs. But for the writer who can format and edit sufficiently, and if you accept just a slightly lower quality of cover cost (presuming you can’t do it yourself), the upfront cost to eSP is quite minimal. And there’s no initial inventory of books.

eSP, of course does not put a physical book in anyones hand; thus this may not be fully satisfying. For physical books, the inexpensive alternative is POD—print on demand. This relatively new technology has improved by leaps and bounds the last few years. Cost of the equipment has come down, and the quality of the bound book has improved. People who have bought these (I haven’t yet; haven’t been any place that had one of the machines, nor ordered any books that came that way) say you can’t tell the difference between an offset print book and a POD book. Offset printing costs more for a small print run than does a single POD book, but a POD book costs more than an offset print book in a large print run.

So the negatives about the cost for the author to self-publish as compared to the traditional publishing route have pretty much vanished. Part of the reason for this is the cost to the author to traditionally publish. Yes, there are costs involved, and I don’t mean lower royalties. I mean up-front costs. First, the best way to break in to trad-pub is to attend conferences, meet agents and editors, attend classes, network with anyone and everyone you can, and pitch your book at each opportunity. Those conferences cost money. With travel and tuition it could be $1,000 per conference, and you might have to do that for years before you attend the right conference with the right agent or editor having the right product to pitch. Thousands of dollars.

Of course, you could say that you need to attend conferences for the classes and networking, even if you don’t pitch a book, just to grow as a writer. I won’t argue that point, other than to say conference attendance would be a whole lot less if you eliminated the chance to meet editors and agents. I don’t think that many people would go simply for the classes and the networking.

Then there’s the cost of a freelance editor. Yes, read carefully all the advice given by publishing professionals (agents, editors, publishers, already published authors), and you will see they all recommend that you hire an editor to edit the manuscript you intend to submit to a traditional publisher. When signing a first time author, publishers want a manuscript that doesn’t need a lot of editing. That’s what all the experts say. So really, there’s not cost savings there. If you need an editor to self-publish, you need an editor to pre-edit your work before submitting for traditional publishing. The cost is the same.

Then there’s the cost of time and emotions. Once the quality of your writing is where it needs to be for acceptance by a traditional publisher, that doesn’t mean you will be successful at getting it placed. Publishers are the buyers in a buyers’ market. They turn down excellent books all the time, making a judgment of what might sell by the time they can get the book to market. Or they may have just contracted for another book the same as yours, and don’t want to have two competing books. Or any of another hundred reasons why they may have to pass on your book that is just as good as others being published, and maybe better.

And finally there’s the emotional cost of dealing with rejection after rejection, of waiting, and of wondering if you’ll ever break in. That will be more of a concern for some than for others. Rejections strike different people in different ways. We all know it’s part of publishing, and so we become philosophical about it. Still, there’s an emotional cost for everyone as they process the rejections and the wait times. Those costs can be beneficial, but they are still costs.

So, all in all, it seems to me the cost to traditionally publish is not less than the cost to self-publish, and may in fact be more.

I blogged some days ago about the post and comments on Rachelle Gardner’s blog concerning reasons why readers of her blog continue to seek traditional publishing when self-publishing has become an easy and relatively inexpensive option. By far the most common reason was VALIDATION. Here’s a couple of examples.

I’m pursuing traditional publishing because I want the affirmation from publishing professionals that my novel is good.

…traditional publishing is an acknowledgment that you have actually crafted something worth reading.

The validation, for lack of a better term, from professionals in the industry. The stamp of approval from people who have given that same stamp to others I respect….

As a fiction writer with sights set on a writing career, I want the legitimacy of acceptance into the traditional publishing industry.

That’s enough. Through over two hundred comments this theme was most often repeated. To have your book printed by one of the big six publishers, or even the next dozen publishers, in both the general and Christian markets, you need to pass muster with the gatekeeper. Actually, several gatekeepers, in sequence. Since these large houses are closed to direct submissions, you first need an agent to accept your work. Then you need an acquisitions editor to be willing to present your proposal to a committee; call it the acceptance committee if you like. If the acceptance committee likes it, you are mostly home free. Although, your book can still fall through if: the economy tanks and the publisher decides to cut back; if your story is later judged not up to par; if after editing the book simply isn’t good enough for the editing gatekeepers.

I admit it. I would love to have the validation of traditional publishing. However, that must be weighed against the lottery of the acceptance process. The gatekeepers pass up good books all the time. A book is not always rejected because it isn’t of the required minimum quality. Books are often reject—perhaps as often rejected—because the gatekeepers don’t think it will sell. They are trying to project a point in time two years away (or even three years away at the agent level) and guess what the book-reading public will be buying. That’s a long time to look into the future.

So, for various reasons, the mainstream publishers reject good books. Writers feel un-validated, and keep plugging away on the query-go-round, looking for other publishers or other agents, writing new books and looking for agents, all in search of validation. Eventually they begin taking chances with smaller, independent presses, the ones you can submit to without an agent. Still searching for validation.

Self-publishing, however, can provide another type of validation, provided by the last gatekeeper in the sequence: the book-buying public. Everyone says that self-published books are awful; the quality of writing and production are poor. Yet, the public does buy self-published books. It’s difficult to get your book noticed, but it does happen. In the era of search engines, it’s perhaps easier than ever before. In the era of e-reading devices, the eSP book can be less expensive than the traditinally published book, giving the eSP book an advantage: the book buyer still considers price before they buy.

Sales are a form of validation. The two sales of “Mom’s Letter” to people I don’t know are validation. When Documenting America appears either later this month of in May, any sales I make will be validation. Will it be equal to the validation that would come from having a book accepted and published by the Big Six or the Medium Twelve? I guess I’ll find out.

Yesterday I blogged about re-thinking my decision to go with self-publishing and cease beating my head against a wall of traditional publishers and their gatekeeper infrastructure. I suppose I’m not really rethinking that decision, but rather re-stating it and expanding on the reasons why I made it.

I actually wrote that post some time the day before that and scheduled it to post later. Since then, several other posts to TWV2 have been made. One writer who is under consideration for a contract with a traditional publisher for a Bible study said she received an e-mail from the publisher, saying what they are expecting of her for a platform: so many Facebook followers by a fixed date; so many speaking engagements by a fixed date. More on platform later.

Another writer, who has been at it full time for close to thirty years, told how he has seen the pub house editing function change over the years. Once they had multiple editors assigned to a project. An editor for proof-reading, and editor for checking quotes, a general editor, etc. Five or six different editors touched and tweaked the contents of a book before it went out. But that changed, this writer said:

About 20 years ago I saw a drastic change: Publishers eliminated many of those positions, citing smaller profits. Today the responsibility is on writers. The most I get from a CBA or ABA publisher is what I call a broad-brush editor, who makes a general edit. After I respond, I receive the copyedited manuscript. Sometimes that version is the print proofs, but usually, I receive one final time to catch typos and punctuation errors-and there are always a few.

So again, I ask myself, and the traditional publishers in the world: What is the advantage to the writer to go with you? If you aren’t even going to edit our books, not even proof-read them, we might as well publish them ourselves.

The debate rages in the blogosphere about traditional publishing (or, as some call it, legacy publishing) and self-publishing. This debate has always raged, waning and waxing according to what new self-publishing company is ripping off how many writers, but technology has brought it once more to the forefront. Electronic self-publishing, or eSP as I call it, along with affordable print-on-demand printing processes, have changed the game. The cost to self-publish, especially to eSP, has gone way down. The playing field between traditional and self-publishing is much closer to level.

I’ve blogged about this before, but want to again. Rachelle Gardner, Christian literary agent, wrote a post in defense of traditional publishing and asked readers to say why they intended to publish traditionally. I want to say that Rachelle is very fair and even-handed about the two methods. She doesn’t overstate the advantages of traditional nor trump up the detriments of self-. I found the 200+ comments to be quite interesting, and wanted to discuss the reasons people give for wanting to embrace traditional publishing or avoid self-publishing. Those are not the same thing.

The first issue is one of quality. Self-published books are poorly done, the commenters said. The writing is poor, the editing is poor (or non-existent), the printing is poor, the binding is cheap, and the covers are amateurish. You look at a self-published book, you can tell right away that it was self-published, and then shy away from it.

That might have been true at one time, but I think the quality gap is closing. At least it is closing for the best produced self-published books and the average pub house’s book. Again, this is partly a technology thing. POD is now so inexpensive to set up any computer literate person can do it—provided it isn’t an illustrated book. Computer art technology makes excellent cover production inexpensive, and again can perhaps be done by the writer with only a modest learning curve to climb. Binding and paper quality are also overcome in the POD process, so I’m told. So you can have POD self-published books that are as good in physical quality as a traditionally published book.

What about the editing? On The Writers View 2, the current question is what would you like to ask an editor. One member said she wanted to ask an editor at a major Christian pub house why their books are so full of errors: typos and grammar. She marks the books, she says, and reports them to the pub house, which invariably then asks her to send them the needed edits, a request she declines to fulfill without payment. An editor who is on TWV2 panel responded this way:
Wow! I just watched an earth-moving machine, maybe a D-7 dozer (a big one), take a huge swipe out of the playing field. If pub houses are no longer going to guarantee their books to be as error-free as they can possibly make them, then how are they better than self-published books? Content editing, copy editing, line editing, and proof-reading have always been touted as a reason why traditionally published books are better. As Inspector Clouseau would say, “Not any more.”

Other issues in Rachelle’s blog, including quality of the writing, will have to wait for another post.

…the rising incidence of typos is inevitable as revenues and time allotted for the final proofing stage decline, I’m afraid. The final proof is usually the last in a long line of missed deadlines, and all involved often have their hands tied. Those with responsibility for quality control before print often have their hands tied because of scheduling, lack of competent freelance proofers, or even incomplete collating of those proof edits in-house (if there were an uncommonly high number, some always get missed).