Corner House Coffee, at 109 Aghmashenebeli Avenue in Tbilisi, recently hosted an evening about self-publishing, which I attended and found especially helpful. Presenting the topic were several successful practitioners of this craft: Max Moyer, Cristi Slate, Craig Phillips, and Sabrina Redman, all American and ranging in age from late teens to late 40s. After the panel, the four of them began together answering general questions from the audience, they each took a session in separate rooms with whoever wanted to join them for their subject. I stayed specifically with the details of self-publishing, run by Cristi Slate.
It is safe to say that publishing today is a far cry from what it used to be even a decade ago. While self-publishing has been around for many times longer than this, until fairly recently it has been much rarer than now. Some famous authors who initially self-published include Andy Weir (The Martian), Beatrix Potter (The Tale of Peter Rabbit), Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility), William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style), Margaret Atwood (Up in the Tree), Hugh Howey (Wool), and John Grisham (A Time to Kill).
At the moment it is a very viable alternative to the usual route of getting an agent’s attention enough to have your book promoted to the big publishing houses. These, in turn, can take years to get your work into the bookshops, and the profit percentage you tend to make is also minuscule compared to what self-publishing can offer. However…
While you retain so much more creative control when self-publishing (cover design, layout and much more), and can get your book to print much faster, self-promotion takes up mush more of your time, because it’s all up to you. Advertising? Touring? Putting onto Amazon or other websites? E-books, physical prints, audio versions? You do have to do all this yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
According to Cristi’s statistics, self-publishing it 1/3 writing and 2/3 marketing. So, anyone not having the latter gifts or skillset should definitely have someone alongside to help. I would put myself into the group of those needing such assistance.
Cristi added that there are over 4 MILLION book titles self-published each year, across all the genres and sub-genres: how old is “romantasy”? Not very. 90% of these books sell… less than 100 copies each. So, while self-publishing might be relatively simple, doing it profitably is not. Can you go beyond your small or large circle of loyal friends and family members who will buy a copy just because YOU wrote it, and find many times more than this number of committed fan buyers? There’s the rub.
This is all of great interest to me, as I consider my own set of (currently) six short stories set in Svaneti, each with its own group of photos which inspired it and must join it in print. I hope to put them all out in a single volume, with my own photo also on the cover; possibly in separate or parallel English original, Georgian AND Svan translations. Physical printed copies (likely POD, or print on demand, and then mail out, instead of mass printing which needs storage); as well as an ebook version such as pdf or epub. I now have many more ideas and resources to guide and help me. My printing will not have any color photos, which keeps the cost of including all of those photos to a minimum: all black ink on white paper, including the cover (full-color printing is usually CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks).
I was very glad I had gone to the event, to hear “from the horses’ mouths” the actual experience of self-publishing right now. It helps me plan for a hopeful future for my own work.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
