Traditional Publishing vs. Ebooks

When you are in the process of writing your masterpiece you probably put off the decision over traditional publishing vs eBooks. It’s time to discuss this in a way that I hope will be inoffensive and simple to understand, since your baby, your creation, your labor of love, is sitting there waiting to capture its audience through publishing.

In general, here are a few key points to determine that traditional publishing vs eBooks is actually an easy decision.

Traditional Publishing vs eBooks Quick List

Choose Traditional if

• You are related to someone currently in the traditional publishing industry
• You already have a literary agent and/or book deal
• Fiction and the story totally rocks and people you’re not related to agree that’s true
• Non-fiction you are a PhD in the field, a noted celebrity, or willing to ghost it for someone who is
• You’re willing to invest a year or more sending out query letters every day

Choose eBooks if

• You’re not on the above list anywhere

It’s really that simple.

Carstensz, Stone Age to Iron Age = my best selling book on Amazon

There are some tiny exceptions to the traditional publishing vs eBooks decision making process but in general, a tiny exception is the one out of a million chance riskier than putting every dollar, your car title and house deed on #47 in Vegas. It’s not likely, so don’t fool yourself.

I’m only kidding a tiny bit there too. If you want to get your book published now, it’s going to be self-publishing via eBook. There are also publish on demand services like Createspace, but that’s the same process in general as publishing to Kindle so for now I’m going to just leave it in the same category as eBooks. Even if you have a literary agent ready to send off manuscripts tomorrow it might be a year or more before your book is in the stores and you earn your first dollar. It might take you a year or more of sending query letters to attract the attention of a small publisher or a literary agent.

Traditional publishing vs eBooks was an easy decision for me

There are stories about authors first publishing to eBooks then making a ton of sales and reviews and suddenly ending up with a multi-book traditional publishing deal and movie options. When you look into some of them you’ll see that they used similar marketing methods as the big paper publishers by buying up their own books in thousands of copies, and buying 5-star reviews to spike their sales stats and get first page search results. Whether that violates the spirit of self-publishing or not is up for debate. But to me it seems like playing Black Jack by Dealers Rules, probably one of the safest bets in the casino.

The 100 Calorie Diet Plan = my best seller on Google Play and B&N

That’s one of the faults to making your decision of traditional publishing vs eBooks in favor of eBooks. You’ll have to spend almost every minute of every day marketing your book. While Amazon has done a great job in sending out emails featuring my books, I have gotten hundreds of times more sales from my own Twitter and Facebook marketing plans. If you’re not up for doing that, or paying someone else to do it, you might be better off sending out your 3,000 query letters per year until you make it work.

If you need help at any stage of the process, check out my self-publishing/eBook consulting servicesHERE