Faster timelines
Anyone who has ever wanted to publish a book and has gone the long and disheartening route of trying to find an agent to sign up a publisher willing and able to take on their book, knows the time and effort it takes. It takes long enough to find an agent if ever you do and then that agent still cannot guarantee to find you a publisher. Finding a publisher may take years if at all especially these days with increased costs of publication and decreasing budgets for new authors.
Let us then imagine that the agent does eventually find a publisher for you, the actual publication cycle (from start to finish of having books available) can take a year or even two for the traditional publisher to complete. In other words, from the time you begin searching for an agent and publisher and the book is actually completed for readership, many years may have passed. In this time, you may have lost the desire to publish, your finances would be stretched with no income from the work and on top of it all, if your work happens to be time-sensitive i.e. relies on the speed of publication due to changing technologies, advanced science and procedures, current affairs changing, then your book will be outdated by the time it is published.
Self publishing guarantees you publication and is also sure to be a much faster publication cycle timeline. The average timeline from start to finish is approximately three months depending on the specifications of the work and on the speed of your own feedback. It can be more or less, but the difference is that with much of the process, timelines often depend very much on the self-publishing author.
Longer shelf-life
As with any product or service, marketing and sales is a huge part of the success of that product/service. Of course the same applies for books. You may have the best book in your genre but it’s no good if no one knows about it or where and how to find it. It’s therefore vital to get the word out about your book or else it will simply get lost in the endless and vast library of books available worldwide. There are various ways to do this and it can take time, effort and money to do so. Traditional publishers will often have a set budget for marketing and sales and will initially give a new book a big marketing drive for a season, but then if it doesn’t fly off the shelves, the book is relegated to the backlist and any further marketing or sales efforts are often stopped i.e. the book is finished and often not even given another thought.
Self publishing on the other hand, has the benefit of affording your book a much longer shelf-life. The benefit of long-tail marketing for self publishers cannot be understated. It means that self publishing authors can comfortably still promote their books for years after publication as and when it suits them. This will depend on the resources and contacts the author may have available at any given time. So as and when the author’s budget and time pressures allow, effort can be channelled into marketing and sales. Alternative markets and methods can also be applied through niche contacts and avenues only available to the author over time. The author can further use marketing and sales methods that make the most sense to him or her considering the author’s intimate knowledge of his/her own work.
Interested In Self-Publishing?
If you are considering self-publishing, let us help you produce and print a quality book and show you how to market it to the world. Not only do we have a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude, but we also have the experience to back it up. We can proudly say that we have been in operation for over 20 years. We are just a phone call away and handle each book very personally and professionally. Contact us.
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