Vanity Publishing and Self Publishing, I Have Thoughts.

Diary of Being a Writer; Month 68

The journey to being published is long.

Unless you decide to vanity publish.

To be clear, I am not talking about self publishing. I am talking about paying someone a bunch of money to publish your book.

Even if you want to skip all that agent and publishing house malarkey and self publish, it takes time to get a book done properly.

Self publishing is a completely legitimate option, but it shouldn’t mean compromising on the process.

One reason that self publishing is a viable alternative is that in the past the idea was that by being published by a publisher, especially one of the bigger ones you would be publicised, they would do all the hard work of marketing for you. These days there is no guarantee of that, so why not just skip the middleman and get your book out there?

My problem is when authors think this gives them the licence to skip the hard work. Everyone will have a different process and that’s fine, as long as you have one.

My process has been writing for much of my life, doing a shit load of courses, writing a bunch and discarding it, and then writing a bunch more. Then it was all about the editing, by…