“What publishing pathway should I use?” sounds like a simple question, until you realize every option changes who pays, who owns the ISBN, who controls the accounts, and how much visibility you get into sales. We walk through the three common routes authors consider: traditional publishing, pure self-publishing, and hybrid publishing, and we translate the jargon into a practical decision you can actually make.

We break down what “publisher investment” really means in traditional publishing: editing, design, production, distribution setup, and sometimes an advance. Then we get honest about the trade-offs: the long timeline, the need for patience and thick skin, the reality of rejection, and why platform matters so much (especially for nonfiction and book proposals). If the stamp of approval is part of your goal, we talk about that too, because ego and credibility can be real factors.

On the self-publishing side, we explain print on demand through Amazon KDP and IngramSpark, how royalties work, and why accessibility has exploded. We also unpack hybrid publishing and the common pitfalls: the publisher owning the ISBN, operating under their accounts, taking a cut after you’ve funded production, and the “distribution” promises that can be easy to misunderstand. The core takeaway is simple: no matter how you publish, you still have to market your book, so choose the path that gives you the control, speed, and support you actually want.

Be sure to check out our other article on this The Publishing Decision Tree.

Full Transcript

Welcome

Joel 0:10

Welcome to If I’m Being Honest, Straight Talk About Book Publishing and Promotion. My name is Joel Pitney.

Sayde 0:18

And I’m Sayde Walker.

Joel 0:19

And today we are going to be talking about a very important topic, which is what publishing pathway should I or you or we use to publish our books? It’s a very common question that every single author has to face at some point in their journey. And so we wanted to do a whole talk about it today. This was inspired by a workshop I gave on this theme at the Central Coast Writers Conference in San Luis Obispo this past weekend. If you’ve never been to that conference, I highly recommend it. It’s the kind of it’s a very, very well-run conference uh geared towards authors of all stripes. There’s publishers and writers and publicists and editors and marketers, and it’s it’s an awesome place. Um and also San Luis Obispo is beautiful, so it’s a great place to spend a weekend. So um anyway, let’s dive in, let’s tackle it. What do you think, Sayde?

Sayde 1:16

I think that sounds great. Yeah. You know, we’ve we’ve talked about this before, maybe not necessarily on the podcast, but we have a great article on our website, launchmybook.com. Uh that I think it’s titled The Self or Publishing Decision Making Tree or something like that. So if you’re a reader and you’d like to follow along, uh, you could pull that article up and there’s some there’s some great information in there as well.

Joel 1:37

And we’ll share links to all that in the comments.

Sayde 1:39

Absolutely.

The Three Publishing Pathways Explained

Joel 1:40

So the first thing we have to do when we’re trying to figure out, well, how am I going to publish my book is to identify, well, what are the pathways available to me? And there’s three general pathways when it comes to publishing a book. And I actually like to think of them as two paths, and then one of the paths has two branches. So it’s really two paths and then a second path that has these two options, right? So the the three the two paths would be either traditional publishing on one hand, and then on the other hand, there’s self-publishing. And then within self-publishing, you can either go with what’s called hybrid publishing, or you can do pure self-publishing. And we’re going to talk about those differences a little bit more, but it’s an important distinction and one that um I think a lot of people think of hybrid as a third pathway, but it’s not.

Sayde 2:37

Right. We want to be clear that it’s really self-publishing.

Joel 2:41

It is. And and the reason why, and look, we you know, we had a really great conversation on a past episode with Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, which is a hybrid publisher. And she had she she calls hybrid publishing author-invested publishing. And I think uh therein lies the distinction. In traditional publishing, uh that is the only publishing model where the company you’re working with will invest in your book, right?

Sayde 3:10

Right. So what does that mean, Joel?

Joel 3:12

So that’s gonna look a bunch of different ways. So the investment at a minimum, it means that they are going to do all the production work for you on their dime. They’re gonna, they’re gonna pay an editor, one of their in-house editors, to copy edit your book and proof your book. They’re gonna use their design and layout team to format your book. And then they’re gonna set up your book for sale through all of their distribution channels. And you, as the author, in traditional publishing, don’t have to spend a dime. They’ll also, in some cases, do some marketing, but that’s gonna depend on the size of the publishing house and how much they believe in your book. But at a minimum, they are going to cover all of the costs of production. Okay. Whereas in self-publishing, which includes pure self-publishing or hybrid publishing, you are funding everything. You are paying for all those services that in traditional publishing they cover.

Sayde 4:11

Developmental editing, copy editing, interior design, book cover design, proofreading, and then you know, the mechanisms of getting that book uploaded and distributed through print-on-demand platforms. So the author is going to cover all of those expenses, which vary quite a bit depending on if you self-publish or if you hybrid and who you go with. So you know, that there’s a there’s a quite a range of of what you could pay for those services.

Joel 4:40

Right. So we’ve got so that’s so traditional publishing, and we’re defining it as the model where they choose your book. You have pitched it to them yourself or through an agent, you’ve put a book proposal together, you have convinced them to invest their resources and their money in your book. Right. And so it’s a completely different paradigm. It means that you have to have a really amazing product and a s and a great marketing plan to convince them to do that, right? It’s very selective. It’s really hard to get a traditional publishing deal for that very reason. Right.

Sayde 5:13

You might have to come with your own platform. You know, if you’re a nonfiction writer, they’re gonna want to see who where’s your audience and who are they and how big are they? So yeah.

Joel 5:24

So that’s traditional publishing. And on the other side, we have uh self-publishing. And so self-publishing has these two buckets. And so on one hand, you have hybrid publishers, and the other hand, you have pure self-publishing. So

Pure Self-Publishing and Print On Demand

Joel 5:36

let’s start with pure self-publishing. So pure self-publishing means um that you are going to set everything, all your publishing, that you’re gonna run the entire self-pub publishing process yourself. And you could literally do it yourself, or you can hire subcontractors to do each piece.

Sayde 5:54

Right.

Joel 5:55

And with the advent of print-on-demand publishing, self-publishing has exploded. So print-on-demand publishing, for those who don’t know, means that um uh using companies like Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark, you can upload the files necessary to print a book, which is the cover in the interior, um, and uh and an ebook file. You can set those up with these accounts and enter the price and the description and all the metadata in those accounts. Everybody can do that. You can set up these accounts for free, put your book up there and then press publish, and then that book will be available everywhere online that books are sold. Right? Well, through KDP, it’ll be available through Amazon. And then if you go through Ingham Spark, it’ll be everywhere else, right? And and when someone buys a book online, they click buy, a single copy of that book is printed and shipped to the buyer. And you don’t have to print out, you don’t have to, you don’t have to store them in your garage and then fulfill orders yourself. You don’t have to uh do any of that. It’s all fully taken care of through this print-on-demand technology. That has allowed self-publishing to explode. It’s allowed people.

Sayde 7:05

It theoretically costs you nothing, right? Like every time a book is printed and shipped, your, you know, the the printing cost comes out of whatever you set your retail price to be. Amazon is gonna take 40% of the royalty, you get 60% minus the cost to print the book. So setting those accounts up is free and it really costs you nothing uh, you know, when books are even being purchased. So it makes publishing a book incredibly accessible.

Joel 7:32

Yeah. You put you pay to print the book, right? Which is in traditional publishing, by the way, they pay to print the book.

Sayde 7:40

Right.

Joel 7:40

Right. So again, another cover cut cost they’re covering, uh, you’re you’re paying to print. But then you get to keep all the profit after the bookseller takes their cut. Okay. Whereas in traditional publishing, they’re gonna take 85 to 90 percent of the of the profit because they’ve outlaid all the cash to set everything up. Um and when you’re doing that self-publishing, you can either hire your own team of subcontractors or you could hire a single company that does everything for you, um, like a company like Sayde and I’d company, which has launched my book. This is not supposed to be a sales pitch, but that’s it is something we do. And that’s for people who don’t want to have to figure out how to find all those people and manage it themselves. But um, essentially you’re still doing the same thing. You’re hiring either freelancers or a company to do all the work to publish the book under your name, your accounts, and you keep all the profit, right? The other

Hybrid Publishing and Who Owns What

Joel 8:37

form of self-publishing, which is called hybrid publishing. Some people call this vanity publishing, some but some people call this author-invested in publishing, um, is similar in that you are going to um you are still fully funding this. The publisher is putting no money into this process. You are paying them to do all the work. You’re paying them for editing, design, distribution. You’re paying if they’re gonna run a print run for you, that you’re gonna pay for all those books. You’re gonna pay to print those. They won’t print anything on spec for you. Okay. So it’s fully author invested. And that’s why I call it self-publishing, because it’s it’s all about who paid for it, right? But the difference between a hybrid model and pure self-publishing is that they are going to publish the book under their name. So uh a publisher, a hybrid publisher like uh SheWrites or Palmetto or Greenleaf or Archway.

Sayde 9:36

Page Publishing. Yeah, there’s lots of them.

Joel 9:38

There’s thousands of them. I fan every day I learn about a new hybrid publisher. Their publishing symbol will be on the book. It’ll be published by them.

Sayde 9:47

They will own the ISBN number.

Joel 9:50

They will own the ISBN number. You you still own the rights to the book, but they will own the ISBN number. And then in most cases, but not all cases, they will also publish the book under their in their publishing system. So the print-on-demand accounts through Amazon, KDP, and Ingram Spark, it’s the same technology, will be their accounts. And they will be publishing those books. Um, and the they will most of them will take a percentage of the royalties. So you’ve paid them to produce the book, and they will still take a cut. It won’t be nearly as big a cut as a traditional publisher would because they haven’t they haven’t had to fund any of this. There’s no financial risk for them. And then they will distribute those royalties to you on a regular basis, usually quarterly. Now, not all hybrid publishers are exclusively print on demand, right? And when we had our interview recently with Brooke Warner from SheWrite, she talks about how they do what’s called an offset print run, which is a large print, uh, a large run of traditionally printed books of you know at least 500 books for all their authors, right? Um, the author pays for all those books, unlike a traditional publisher. A traditional publisher will pay to have all those books printed. In a in the hybrid model, you will pay to have those books printed, but they will store them for you and then fulfill those orders, right? As in the same way a traditional publisher would. But you’re still you still have to sell those books. So those books that they print out are not going to automatically sell themselves. It just means that um when sales come in, if you have done an offset run with a hybrid publisher, some of those orders will be fulfilled through uh that bank of books that you printed.

Sayde 11:40

Versus print on demand.

Joel 11:42

Right. But all hybrid publishers will list your book through print on demand as well.

Sayde 11:48

Right.

Joel 11:49

Right. So no one is doing purely traditional distribution. So that’s kind of this is all very confusing stuff. And I recommend you also listen to our episode on distribution. You listen to our episode uh that we did with Brooke Warner to talk about the hybrid model. Um, but fundamentally have this traditional publishing on one side, then we have author-invested publishing, which is self-publishing on the other, which has the pure self-publishing where you are publishing under your name and your accounts, and then you have hybrid publishing on the other hand, where you’re using most of the same technology and dynamics, but they are publishing the book under their name and their accounts and taking uh uh a small cut of the of the profit.

Sayde 12:30

So why would someone choose hybrid publishing over just straight self-publishing?

Joel 12:36

Well, that’s an interesting question. So um, and and I I have to say I’m biased here because I don’t necessarily think that it’s a an amazing pathway for someone who’s chosen self-publishing, but I will go through some of the benefits that a lot of them will uh talk about. So one of them is people just want a simple one-stop shop solution, right? I talk to people all the time. They’re like, yeah, you know, I decided to hire a hybrid company because I didn’t want to have to deal with all that complexity on the on my own. And I just wanted to pay someone to publish this book and I paid this company, they took care of everything, and all I had to do was just kind of hang out, right? So that’s that’s one of the big reasons. Now, I think you can you you don’t have to hire a hybrid to do that, though. There are plenty of companies, including us, but not exclusively us, or individuals that could do all of that for you and you just pay them.

Sayde 13:26

Right.

Joel 13:26

And and then you keep everything under your own accounts. But that is one of the big reasons people hire hybrids. The other reason, another reason is that um I think some people like to have a publisher name on their book. Right? I I recently, a friend, uh I was at a I was at a gathering at my church, and we were all sharing good news uh from the week. And someone spoke up and said, Hey, my book just got picked up by such and such a hybrid publisher. And they love to be able to say that. They love to be able to pronounce that their book had been accepted by a publisher. Now, no one in the group knew besides me that that was a hybrid publisher and that this person had paid them to take their book. And this was a somewhat selective hybrid, but um, because the hybrids are not investing financially in your book, their acceptance rate is it’s like going to the state school instead of Harvard. Right? You gotta, you know, you can’t have a you can’t have a D average from high school to Gaine, but you don’t need straight A’s and you don’t have to be in the National Art or Society and all that kind of stuff. So, but no one no one knows that. And so by having the name of a publisher on your book, you get that accolade, you get that feeling of being accepted and validated.

Sayde 14:43

Which is arguably where the term vanity press comes into play, right? Like you are paying all of the costs up front to have someone else’s imprint and logo stamped on your book. Yep. Because to the layman, they’re not gonna know necessarily that that’s a hybrid publisher and that you paid for everything. And so it can look like and feel like you got a publishing deal. And that feels good. We get, you know, we totally get that. And we didn’t wrong with it. This we didn’t talk about this necessarily, but some hybrids are selective, as you mentioned, not all of them, but some of them. Certainly, if you were to hire a company like ours to publish your book, there you there isn’t a selection process, right? Like there are people out there who will publish anything for sure. Yeah, sure. And hybrids As long as you pay for it. Right, as long as you pay for it. And hybrids, whether you’re being they’re being upfront about it or not, are going to have this, they often will have this process of submission. You are submitting your material for review, they will accept it or they won’t. Uh, you get accepted, that feels really exciting. When in reality, you know, the a huge chunk of if not everyone who is submitting is being accepted, right? Because it’s pay-to-play. And that’s how they’re they’re making their money is uh by having authors pay to publish. And so yeah, so that I think kind of is where that term vanity press really is is quite true with a hybrid. You’re you’re just paying for someone else’s name to be on your book.

Joel 16:18

And you know, if if you don’t want to say, if if if you don’t, if for you that doesn’t matter, being told that, you know, being able to tell people that your book is being published with someone, then you know, there’s not as much value there. Plus, you know, when we when we and again, I’m not trying to plug our business, but that we’ve set ourselves up because it makes sense to us, um, you can you can make up your own publishing company name and put it on on the book, and you don’t even have to create an entity. So as long as that, as long as no one else is using it, you know, um you could call it, you know, Joel and Sayde books if you wanted to, and and put that and put that as create uh that’s called an imprint, and you can put that on your Amazon page and on your on the spine of your book, you can have a little logo, and so you can still you know create the appearance of having a publisher on your book. But you know, you will not have been quote unquote accepted. So so that’s another benefit of why people will go with hub hybrids. And then I think another one, and this is where and this is where I kind of want to move into our next topic is distribution. And there’s

Distribution Myths and Bookstore Reality

Joel 17:26

a lot of confusion about distribution. Again, you should listen to our episode all about what is distribution, but I think this is this is where the devil is in the details when it comes to choosing your publishing pathway. And so in when it comes to distribution, traditional publishers use uh they they have distribution channels set up, right? So they will distribution means where the book is available and then also how it’s printed and fulfilled, right? And it’s important to remember that because when you hear the word distribution, you often think, oh, they’re gonna actively distribute my book to places. But what that really means is they’re gonna make the book available and then fulfill the orders when they come in. So it doesn’t generate sales for the most part. Now, traditional publishers do have relationships with book buyers and booksellers that could potentially be interested in ordering large quantities of a book to sell in Barnes and Noble bookstores, for example, or um independent bookstores, big independent bookstores around the country. And they, uh, traditional publishers have sales agents that will go to these conferences and wine and dine the sales rip from Barnes and Noble. I’ve been to these conferences before and I’ve been in, I’ve been involved in this process. And what they’re trying to do is convince these buyers, hey, this is a strong book, and the author has a really great marketing plan, and they’re already selling books online. So you all should do a big order and carry them in your stores. And so these traditional publishers, some will promote some of their titles actively in that way. And that would be a dimension of distribution that’s traditional. Um, but even a big traditional publisher is not gonna necessarily promote your book if you haven’t given them a reason to, based on your own legwork, and if they don’t believe in your book. And, you know, traditional publishers have many, many, many titles, and they don’t promote all of them to these booksellers. You have to give them a reason. So that’s how traditional distribution works. And so the reason I’m talking about that is um when it comes to the hybrid versus self-publishing, some hybrids offer a form of traditional distribution, right? Self-publishing, they don’t. Self-publishing, it’s just gonna be print-on-demand. You can do a big bulk order and you can try to get bookstores to carry your book yourself, but you will have no sales team. You will be mostly print-on-demand, that kind of thing. But uh there are some hybrid publishers that have traditional distribution through partnerships. And, you know, Simon and Schuster is starting to partner with a bunch of different hybrids and they offer their same printing technology that’ll print out large batches of books for hybrid authors at the author’s expense, unlike their traditionally published titles, and then some a handful of the hybrid publishers have marketing teams that will go out and just like a traditional book, promote some of their books to book buyers, but it’s a tiny amount. And this is where it’s really important, right? And I’ve seen some of these publishers’ websites, I’ve seen them. Uh they’ll have this big thing all over their website trying to get you to pay them to publish your book that they offer traditional distribution to bookstores.

Sayde 20:44

Right.

Joel 20:45

But they won’t do it for all their authors, they’re only gonna do it for a handful, and they’re only gonna do it for the ones that are proving that their book is sellable through their own marketing efforts, um, which is the same for traditional publishers as well. And that’s okay. And that is a benefit that you can get through a hybrid, but you have to be clear about what that means.

Sayde 21:02

Right. Right. And and just like you said, you know, recognizing the difference between distribution and what that means and book sales. And just, you know, offering distribution does not mean that you’re gonna sell books, which is tricky and nuanced. And I think that people see that when they are investigating how they want to publish their book. And of course, when you are, when you are thinking, how do I want to publish my book? You are also envisioning how do I want to sell my book? How is my book going to be sold? And anything that feels like you can kind of offload that piece to someone else feels who knows what they’re doing. That that can feel very reassuring. Um, but I think what we’re trying to convey here is that that is not necessarily the case. And selling books is still on you, the author, to drive that.

Joel 21:55

And that that’s true across all forms of publishing.

Sayde 21:58

Yes.

Joel 21:58

Traditional publishing is. well. Right.

Sayde 22:00

And so don’t get distracted by the language. Get into the details of what distribution means when you’re choosing your publishing path.

Joel 22:09

So this is another this is another thing I want to just I want to just give a quick story about this. It’s very important to remember that in no scenario traditional hybrid pure self-publishing is there such a thing as someone else just marketing the book for you, even if they’ve invested in it. So I I recently had a uh I ghost wrote a book that was traditionally published with a large publisher. They gave a significant advance to the author, right? They paid out that royalty, the the author’s royalties because they believed in the book. So they didn’t ever they didn’t just cover the cost of production, they also paid a large advance to them. And then the publisher did very little marketing. They did almost nothing right and so you can be rest assured if a publisher that’s paying advances and fully covering the cost of production is not doing that much to promote their books you’re not going to get that in any other format. You’re definitely not going to get it in a hybrid and um it’s just not going to happen. So no bad news regard every regardless of your pathway you’re going to have to promote. You’re going to have to figure out a way to promote your books. So why don’t we talk okay so we just talked about these you know in exhaustive detail and I hope that was clear for everybody how do we do these three different publishing pathways or what are these three publishing pathways which are really two and then one of them has a sub a subpath traditional versus author invested and then author invested is includes self-publishing and hybrid publishing.

How To Choose Your Best Path

Joel 23:44

So now let’s talk about well what should you do? What makes the most sense to do before we do that though please if you’re enjoying this episode please please subscribe to us on whatever your platform on YouTube or on Spotify or on Apple or wherever please subscribe and leave us a review if you’re able to. It helps us reach more people with all this advice and education that we’re trying to offer. All right so Sayde, what do we think?

When Traditional Publishing Makes Sense

Joel 24:11

Should we tackle traditional should you go with traditional publishing that’s probably the biggest question.

Sayde 24:16

And who should go for a traditional publishing deal?

Joel 24:19

Why why go with a traditional deal? So the the first thing is you it’s for someone who has patience. You have to have patience because a traditional deal can take a very long time to get not only do you have to fully write the manuscript in some fiction books usually have to write the manuscript memoir you usually have to write the manuscript. Nonfiction you don’t but you also need a book proposal. And in nonfiction you would need a full book proposal. That’s going to take you time to develop all of that and that requires a lot of marketing muscle in addition to good writing right then in most cases you also have to go out and find an agent who can then help you sell the book to a publisher. So you’re selling it to an agent first then selling to a publisher. Now there’s plenty of unagented presses so you can skip that step but it doesn’t necessarily save you a lot of time. So it can take you know I’ve I’ve done books where when we when we when I first started working with the author developing the pitch for the book to try and sell to the agent to try and sell to the publisher and then the publishing process itself it can take four to five years.

Sayde 25:22

Oh my gosh.

Joel 25:24

Four to five years. It’s very common. It’s definitely going to take if you’re trying to sell and then publish a book it’s definitely going to take a minimum of two to go from starting to sell that book to that book being published. So you have to be patient. The the next thing you’re you’re going to need is uh you’re going to need thick skin. I have I have successfully uh sold books that I have ghostwritten to publishers and it felt awesome and they were like this is great you guys did a great job awesome and I have completely whiffed and been like nah not for me good try. Rejection is part of the game.

Sayde 26:02

Yeah.

Joel 26:02

And if if you’re going to go out there and try to sell your book to agents and publishers you have to be patient and you have to have thick skin because you’re going to get mostly crickets or rejections even for great books.

Sayde 26:14

And even if you have an agent you know whether you’re doing this with or without an agent mostly rejection.

Joel 26:20

So you also you need an amazing book unless you’re famous which you might be but uh you need an amazing book because you are competing against with so many other writers I’m sorry to say it. And you know we talked a lot about writing in the last episode and imposter syndrome and getting over imposter syndrome and all that kind of stuff. That can be very difficult. And if you believe in your writing go for it. But you need to make sure that what you’re putting forth is absolutely amazing. And so that might mean that you need to work with a developmental editor in the early stages or or really really really hone your craft but it’s got to be awesome. Awesome. So patience thick skin amazing product that you’ve been willing to develop you know invest in then you’re probably going to need a decent sized platform.

Sayde 27:09

Yeah.

Joel 27:10

There’s some exceptions but publishers are getting less and less willing to invest in an author who even if they have a great book has no following and no platform and has exhibited at least sometimes you can get away with having a nominally sized platform but you need some kind of platform. You know you you need to have started your Substack and proven that you’re willing to work on it and start to grow. That kind of thing.

Sayde 27:37

I would say maybe the exception to that might be if you’ve written a really amazing fiction book, right? Because fiction readers fiction you know they’re going to care a little bit less about who you are than the nonfiction world. But even then the folks that are getting book deals have hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, right? Like it you have to bring your audience with you.

Joel 28:02

So I I think I think those are all those are all criteria. And I think another criterion this is this is important to talk about is ego like do does it matter to you to have a traditionally published book would you feel like it’s a lifetime accomplished for accomplishment for you to have gotten through the gauntlet of getting someone to pick up your book like for real to really invest in you to get through all those gatekeepers the agents and the editors and all the skeptics would you feel that that in and of itself is an accomplishment for you and if so then that’s a goal worth working towards and if it takes you years it takes you years.

Sayde 28:44

And that’s that’s fine.

Joel 28:46

And similarly you know if you have a company or a a a complimentary business and you think having a published book with the stamp of approval of a traditional publisher on it would help you improve that business, then it might be a good incentive as well. So now that isn’t I can’t we can’t answer the question for you but those are the criteria and that’s how those are the things that I would think about. And everybody’s calculus is going to be different. So so then then let’s say you’ve chosen let’s say you’ve chosen to the author invested model either hybrid or self-publishing.

Why We Favor True Self-Publishing

Joel 29:18

So who should choose hybrid versus the other? I think we’ve kind of already gone into that uh we again I think Sayde and I are quite biased that if you’re going to invest in your own book, we tend to think in almost all cases you should just go ahead and uh and do it yourself under your own brand and keep all the profits.

Sayde 29:39

Yeah.

Joel 29:40

Because there’s plenty of great companies and we are not the only ones um uh that individuals and companies that can do this for you and give you that one stop shop solution where you don’t have to figure out all out any of this. You can just focus on the writing and then the marketing part, right? But the production of your book, the publishing thing, you can you can do that.

Sayde 30:00

So I, you know um and I would just say that you know we we have come across a lot of scenarios and we’ve talked about this on other podcasts where we have we are unpublishing a book from someone who went with a hybrid publisher to republish to re-self-publish it for the author. And um and when you are fully and truly self-publishing there you have so much control over every aspect of your publishing career. And that means you have access to your publishing accounts you know when you hire someone like our company to do it for you we are setting everything up under your name. That means you get to log in to Amazon KDP and you get to log into IngroSpark and you get to check your sales data. You get to order books directly through the system and only pay the printing and shipping of that book, right? To get your author copies. There’s no go between there’s no gatekeeper of like I have to reach out to so and so to figure out how many books I’ve sold and I have to pay higher prices to get copies for myself. So you have you have full transparency and full knowledge over what’s going on in in those accounts. You also usually have uh and and this is true for for uh authors that work with Joel and I, we’re gonna we’re gonna show you how to use those accounts. We’re gonna make sure you understand how to update your metadata and how to change your pricing and how to order author copies so that you don’t so that you do feel supported in that transition from writer to independent publisher. And and so you you know you’re gonna have all you’re gonna have access to all your accounts you’re gonna have full transparency over your sales data. You’re gonna get to as you’re doing different marketing endeavors, you’re gonna get to see what’s working because you can track your sales day to day and you can track your sales ranking and that kind of thing. You’re gonna have all of your files right we don’t own them. We create them for you but then we give them to you for for any any future usage that you may need for those right one of the difficulties that we’ve run into a lot when we’re republishing a book from someone who went with a hybrid is they can’t get their cover files because that artwork is a registered whatever copyright with that particular company. So we often have to like recreate cover files or things like that. You own all of that when you self-publish and I do think that that’s really important to not have a go between and that and and you’re right we are biased obviously this is what we do for a living but I I feel very passionately about independent publishing the accessibility that it brings and you shouldn’t be limiting your accessibility by picking a hybrid who may or may not you know may or may not be communicating with you at a level that you would like and giving you access to data. They often like you mentioned you know they they cut royalty checks every six months or even sometimes 12 months depending when you were truly self-publishing you’re getting those royalty deposits you know every month after you start um selling books and I had another point I was going to make but I just lost it. And so anyway so so I think that the the what you’re giving up to go with a hybrid and to have their logo on your book it is not is too much versus just just self-publishing. The one caveat I would say to that is and this is where I think a lot of people do choose hybrid publishers over anything else is they are very very fast and if you not necessarily well some of them are much much faster than we are um and and and in my opinion that also means that they’re sloppy um but if you are just the high quality the high quality hybrids are not fast. I just they’re not sure the top the top ones the the the discount ones are the discount ones the ones that are going to come up first when you Google for a publisher um the ones that are on the radio and doing a lot of marketing are very fast. And so if you’re trying to get a book out fast um that can that can feel appealing. You might get caught in that trap of like oh they can do it in four months whereas you know I talked to Joel launch my launch my book and it’s going to take him eight months. And so there’s that piece like they have a they have bigger teams they have lots more people working on these things and so they can do things much faster than your small uh smaller uh self-publishing assist company like ours yeah and yeah and again I think we talked about the reasons someone would choose a hybrid enough um we’re obviously biased uh but this is not just a sales pitch for us at all um there’s plenty of great self-publishing assist companies you can hire.

Joel 35:05

So I think for us then the big question is, you know, so it’s like all right should I sell traditionally publish? So I’ve decided no I’m not I’m gonna do the author invested model. Should I do hybrid or should I do pure self-publishing? Well you know if if if you find that um that the the author the pure self-publishing model makes more sense than the hybrid model then the big question I think this is honestly this is the one of the biggest questions that a lot of people face and when I gave this workshop this was the real big question everybody was talking about is do you hire a company to do everything for you or do you do it yourself? Do you assemble

DIY Team Vs Hiring a Company

Joel 35:42

your own team? You know and so uh hiring a company is pretty straightforward you just hire a company that does all the things you need to get done that we’ve been talking about. Uh if you’re DIYing uh you’re basically pulling you’re creating your own band. You know you’re gonna go hire a bassist your cover designer because cover designers are cool like bassists right uh you’re gonna hire your then your drummer is gonna is gonna be your interior designer right so you’re gonna hire that group individually you might even do some of that yourself especially like setting up your print on demands accounts that’s something that a lot of people like to figure out how to do um there’s these pieces that you can DIY versus um hire for but you’re essentially hiring your own team and as a result you’ll save money you know when we’ve done our analysis on this uh if you’re if you’re if you’re like comparing like quality so high quality work high quality subcontractors that do the different pieces like editing and design and distribution and then a high quality company or at least same quality level, you’ll probably save about a third if you’re bringing your own team together because there’s no overhead, right? There’s no a company like Sayde and I is we have we have people that that that work with us but we manage it and we run the process and so we there’s a little bit more expense there that you’re paying for. So that and um but if you’re the kind of person who wants to figure this out on your own then you can save a lot of money that way. So that’s kind of a big question. And um who should go that route versus who shouldn’t you know I I remember I a woman came up to me after the workshop and she’s like yeah it’s very clear that I am not going to be able to I do not want to do I do not want to figure this out. I don’t want to have to go out there and try to find cover designers and vet them and then try to find an interior designer and vet them. And then and even more importantly I don’t want to try and manage the process of making it all work together. There’s a lot of people for whom that’s the answer and they’re just like you know what I’m just gonna hire you. I’m gonna hire a company like this. I’m gonna pay a little bit more for that. But then there’s some people who love to figure this stuff out. Sayde and I were on the phone with a group that’s hired us to do some marketing yesterday and it’s a it’s a group of friends uh they’re probably listening to this podcast they told us they really liked the podcast so a shout out to these guys I’m not gonna say them by name but it’s a group of friends who are publishing this book together. I think one was the primary writer but then and but another guy has a lot of experience on the tech side and the design side so he’s figuring out how to do the cover design and then and then someone else is figuring out how to set up the distribution and they’re kind of kind of they’ve kind of figured out a way to do all this themselves, right? Mm-hmm and that’s awesome. And they’re saving money that way and you can still do a great job. So if you have that if you have that passion and that know how um I think another type of author that would benefit from the DIY model is someone where you know you’re gonna publish a ton of books. And so when you’re when you put all that work in up front to get your band together, you know you’re gonna play a lot of shows.

Sayde 38:50

Yeah.

Joel 38:51

You’re not just doing it for one night.

Sayde 38:53

Yeah. And so once you think so it’s gonna be worth that investment of vetting and learning to work with these people and and all of that because just like Joel said you’re building your team and your team is going to be with you for a long time.

Joel 39:06

Yep. When I go to Author Nation which is this great self-publishing conference that well indie publishing is what they say but it’s it’s both same thing there are a lot of people who have published like 40 books, right? And everybody there has their own publishing team right because these people who are who are in it for the long haul and are doing their serial authors and they’re just going oh publish publish publish they’ve all figured out their own publishing solutions because they know it’s more cost effective and they’ve kind of streamlined. But their first one, two, three books, they they had to figure out a lot of stuff and they they kind of stumbled a lot and made a lot of mistakes but then they learned so that’s kind of the difference between you know once you’ve if you’ve chosen this pure self-publishing dimension of author invested, do you want a DIY or do you want to hire a company? So those are kind of the options and you know um like Sayde said we have a we did a we actually wrote an article on this um that has where we’ve Sayde did these really cool graphics that actually show you the decision tree and we do pros and cons of each and all that kind of stuff. I we’ll link to it in the comments here. Please take a look at that it’s a great way to get a visual um depiction of everything that we’re talking about.

Sayde 40:18

And I

Resources, Questions, And Closing

Sayde 40:19

I guess I would just add if you have questions, you know, reach out to us. We covered a lot in this podcast and uh but probably you know there’s probably a few things we missed or things that are unique to your specific situation and you’re going, gosh, what what should I do here? Reach out to us and we’ll talk through it.

Joel 40:38

Yep our Joel at lunch my book and Sayde at lunch my book. It’s easy to get a hold of us. All right y’all well thanks for spending uh spending your morning or afternoon or evening or wherever you are with us and uh we’ll see you next time