Traditional publishing is what the big publishing houses offer. Everything in this is conventional. Standards exist in the printing, production, marketing, and distribution processes. Traditional publishing is generally perceived as the best way to validate authors. Prestige and reputation, as well as resources and machinery, have put traditional publishing houses on the top rung of the publishing business. On the other end of the spectrum is non-traditional publishing. Often equated to “self-publishing,” this concept is generally defined as ‘vanity press.’ Vanity Press or Subsidy Press is “a publishing company that applies its ISBN to a book and charges the author for the cost of production. The author receives only a few copies of the book, and is promised royalties on those copies that might be sold by the subsidy press.” Vanity press is another term for subsidy press. Self-publishing or subsidy press or vanity press will always remain an alternative mode of getting oneself published. It will never be mainstream.
The term ‘self-publishing’ is perceived to be misleading. An ordinary author who wants to be a ‘published author’ cannot possibly publish his work by himself. He will still need publishing machinery (production, promotion, marketing, sales, and distribution). It takes more than personal cash and personally-acquired ISBNs and LCCNs associated with the author to make him a published author.
Writers choose to self-publish for a variety of reasons. Foremost of these reasons is the thought that their work will not be of commercial interest to a traditional publisher because the topic is either remote or controversial, or the writer is unknown. Many times, the self-publishing author has chosen to be so because he wanted more control over his topic and content. In some occasions, he simply wants a bigger cut of the retail sales.
Stephen Crane, Deepak Chopra, Benjamin Franklin, Rudyard Kipling, Carl Sandburg, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, John Grisham, Jack Canfield, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair, and Edgar Allan Poe are just some of the self-publishers that went on to claim fame.
Nowadays, non-traditional publishing authors are those who are cautious about the prospect, scale, and challenge of traditional publishing due to fear (of the challenge and enormity of traditional publishing), ignorance (of the way to get their work published traditionally), even contempt (over past experience with traditional publishing).
But really, you can be a self-published author if you are any or all of these: you have actualized your talent to write, you have the knack for writing, you simply dream of getting down to writing but have been unable due to inability to actually start it, or you are simply determined to write. You can also be a self-published writer if you have the cash to burn and the burning desire and need to be a published name – but without pertinent and sufficient talent to boot.
Just have your manuscript ready. If you do not have it yet, simply hold on to that story in your head. A ghostwriter-for-hire can be ready on the wings for you. Dream big and dream often. Lastly, take up the services of a self-publishing company. You may not rake up sales as much as Stephen King does, but you are sure to have your name on one book’s cover – a book you can call your very own.
Self-publishing can make writers out of plain dreamers, and make dreamers out of plain writers.
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