Self-Publishing vs. Waiting for a real publisher

Whoa, I haven’t been updating for a looong while. Perhaps it’s time to dust off this little blog and put a new shine to it, eh? Lack of updates doesn’t mean lack of writing, though! I have been working hard on Island in the Mist, and it’s now mostly finished. It’s gone through a lot of editing, not in the least by an editor who kindly offered to do it for free and to whom I owe a lot of gratitude! Now it’s ready to be send to a professional who can hopefully also help me find the right publisher for this thing :)

This stage usually brings up an old question for me: do I want to try my luck with a real publisher, or should I be satisfied with POD – print on demand? 

Years ago, I knew only one POD Publisher, way out there in America…Lulu.com, the easiest way to bind a work of fiction as a real book for free. I’d order one copy for myself of every finished novel, put it in my bookshelf and move on to my next project. But times have changed…Today, tens of different POD Publishers are out there in the Netherlands alone. Boekscout, Free Musketeers…I know a bunch of people who have “published” their books there, with varying levels of success.

I say “publish”, because I still don’t feel comfortable with this seemingly easy solution. Suddenly, publishing is for everyone? Okay, I don’t mean to tell people what they can or can’t read, and I certainly don’t mean to discourage people from making their project into a real book, either for themselves, for friends and family or for a small circle of readers. POD Publishers are great for such occasions and I applaud that!

However, I get this uneasy feeling that writers with a little more ambition turn to POD out of, what is it…laziness? Lack of confidence? Because, yeah, it’s easier to “get published” this way – and it’s definitely a whole lot quicker. Now, I don’t mean to put people down, but just browsing around one of those online bookstores, it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time… Who buys books that have cover art that looks like a poorly drawn anime character? Who would buy my book, if it were being sold among those things? So unless you’re really good at promoting your book after it gets printed by a POD Publisher, you don’t stand a real chance of people actually buying and reading it.

And maybe, being turned down by one or more real publishers is actually a signal that you’re simply not ready for the big market yet? Self-Publishing is such a temptation…For me, also, because I can see the appeal of the amount of control you get, and with the Internet and all its resources, how hard can it be to promote the thing, eh? But I don’t feel it’s the right way – not if you want the real deal. Maybe I’d toy with it for a bit, if all my other options seemed to be unavailable. I still believe that writing and really getting published demands a lot of Very. Hard. Work. Probably years of work. It requires love and real dedication to your novels, to one single novel. I’m inclined to think that dedication is more important than “talent”…whatever talent might actually be. I believe in sticking with it, not choosing for the fastest, easiest option out there. It’s like fastfood or take home meals…they’re good for some occasions, but nothing really beats a healthy, homemade meal. For me, nothing but that would be satisfactory.