No Guarantees

There are some real sharks out there in the world of self-publishing.

I’m a writer – and have been for almost forty years. Kev Howlett, the owner of Busybird Publishing, has been a photographer and illustrator for just as long. His wife, Blaise van Hecke (who formerly ran Busybird Publishing until her unexpected passing), was also a writer.

We’ve always treated the prospective client the way we’d expect to be treated.

We’re not corporates. Anybody who’s visited us can attest to that. We’re laid back, the place is relaxed, and a big, bumbling blond Labrador greets you at the door.

But there are others out there who only care about making a buck. They will flatter you outrageously, stroke your ego, and fill you with unsupportable claims.

Take Shawline Publishing, for example. A Ballarat self-publisher, they went belly-up last year. The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC wrote articles calling into question the practices of their CEO.

One of Shawline’s promises was to build you into a “midlist author”.

Great claim. Genius, really. Promise bestsellers, and it sounds too fantastic to be true. But midlist? Well, that doesn’t seem that out of reach, does it?

Is it manageable, though?

Uh uh. And that has nothing to do with you, the author.

The reality is there are big multinational publishers out there with marketing departments that, despite their best efforts, can’t build their authors into “midlist authors”. 

We can’t control these things because we can’t control the consumer, the market, or what the trends are at any given time. You might’ve written a fantastic horror story about werewolves, but just a week earlier a werewolf story came out and captured the market. Or tastes might’ve morphed into romcom.

Anybody who makes you a promise that they can guarantee any level of success is outright lying. They can try. That’s different. But they have no control over the outcome. This isn’t Facebook marketplace.

If there was a formula to this, then publishers would have hit after hit after hit.

They don’t.

We had a situation a couple of years ago where we spoke to a young author about his nonfiction book. I read a few chapters and gave him some honest feedback. He went elsewhere, where they told him his book was fantastic and it just needed to get out onto the market. Six-thousand dollars and eighteen months later, he has no book.

Now this blog isn’t an attempt to exalt us, and condemn everybody else. It’s simply to warn you to be careful. Whoever you’re dealing with, ask questions. Check websites, like Writers Beware for any red flags.

If somebody’s selling you a scenario that sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Most importantly, keep all your rights and royalties. If you’re self-publishing, there is no reason to surrender even a single percent of these, unless the self-publisher is selling your book directly. But even in this case, they should only be garnering commission from the books they’re selling.

The writing life is tough enough already – some people will call that outlook pessimistic. But it’s true. It’s hard. You can have every confidence of success, you can believe in yourself and your work, and I commend that. You need to nurture that self-belief.

You need to persevere, to push and push and push, to give yourself every chance of succeeding.

Just know there are no guarantees, and anybody who tries to tell you different isn’t being honest.