Another success story

I'm sure the bulk of self-publishers are not great and don't go far. But there are just so many amazing stories that I can't ignore them.

Theresa wrote romance novels for 19 years. She wrote every day. She reached the finals of writing contests, and she was represented by two separate agents over this period. But she never made a sale. She resisted self-publishing, because she wanted, as she told me, “to do it the hard way, the right way.”
In 2011, she heard talk of self-publishing on Amazon and figured she had nothing to lose. Her first two books published via Kindle Direct Publishing were medieval time travels, Return of the Rose and A Knight in Central Park. She expected to sell 10 books. Instead, she was selling hundreds within a month, and after a favorable mention in the Pixel of Ink blog, the hundreds turned into thousands.

If you are already successful, I guess a Publisher can make sense. Even though they have basically stopped doing any publicity for books, and expect the author to do all that anyway. But sometimes they still give a nice advance, some of them. Even if they only in the end pay the author around 5% because of their big, obsolete overhead.

But for a new author, I don't see it. Even if you make it through the slush pile, it still takes at the very least a year to get the book out, for no good reason. A good friend of mine had a book accepted by a publisher, and then was strung along and along and along... the editor got sick for a while... and in the end it all became a big nothing, and she had wasted three years.