Authors tend to view the question of traditional vs. self-publishing as aspirational, when it's better seen as practical. Your costs of production and profits per copy sold aren't just footnotes in a publishing contract... They're the foundation of your ability to turn writing into a living.

To make a sound decision, you'll want a nuanced enough understanding of the two paths to know exactly who does what, what it costs now, and what it costs later.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly what you need to know, including:

• Who does what during each step of the process (and how much it costs to do it yourself)
• How the money works: advances, royalties, and what it takes to make a living as an author
• The main factor outside of publishing model that impacts your lifetime royalties

By the end, you'll be able to make an informed decision about whether you prefer to partner with a publisher or do it on your own.

The very, very short version

The best reason to self-publish is when you view your book as a cornerstone of your career and/or income, and you’re willing to accept the upfront risk and effort to make that happen.11Self-publishing tends to result in 4x higher earnings per copy sold, at the cost of taking responsibility for your book’s editing, layout, printing, and distribution. There's nothing overly complex about any of it, but it does involve a lot of moving parts, which takes an extra 1-3 months and is admittedly kind of annoying. If you can learn new software, hire freelancers, and oversee a moderately complex project, then you can self-publish at a professional level. A good checklist also helps.

The best reason(s) to traditionally publish are: you want to minimise the fiddly busywork of producing a book; you care more about reputation than royalties; and/or you really need placement in major brick-and-mortar bookstores.22Bookstore placement only matters for the "impulse buy" genres like pop psych, pop sci, and manifesto nonfiction. For useful nonfiction and genre fiction, bookstore sales are a rounding error compared to Amazon.

In either case, the vast majority of your effort will go into writing a good book.

Also in either case, you’ll probably have to do your own marketing.

The biggest misconception about self-pub vs. tradpub is about who handles the marketing. Authors tend to believe that a publisher will do it for them, which simply isn’t the case.33If you need proof, just look at a standard book proposal, which hinges on how you plan to promote and market your own book.

A publisher will help produce and distribute your book (including bookstore placement), but they won’t help market it—at least, not until after it’s already succeeding. Publishers are great at amplifying success, not creating it.

To become successful in the first place, a modern author is on the hook for selling the first 10,000 copies of their own book, regardless of how they have chosen to publish.

For the details, let's jump into a phase-by-phase breakdown of exactly who does what, from proposal through to publication:

Phase 1: Writing and revising:

The first phase is about making a great manuscript. A publisher will save you some money by providing your editor44If you're in a financial position that makes it impossible to hire a freelance copy editor, then the traditional option becomes significantly more appealing., but the experience of writing (and rewriting) a great book is otherwise largely the same.

Phase 2: Preparing for publication:

This is the moment where a tradpub author relaxes55When I was earlier in my career, my time was worth so little that I was happy to do all of this myself. These days, I'm more inclined to outsource large chunks of it to good freelancers (or to a good hybrid publisher, which is essentially a team of freelancers with a bundled price).I do sometimes fantasize about sending my manuscript to a publisher and then slipping off somewhere to sip margaritas for three months, but the difference in royalties is too much for me to actually do so., and a selfpub author becomes a project manager for the next 1-3 months.

Phase 3: Marketing, audiobook, events:

The big task here is Seed Marketing. I know every author hates to hear it, but that's on you either way.

Royalties, advances, and earning a living as an author

Royalties are annoyingly complex: each format is handled differently66For example, a publisher's paperback royalties are a percentage of retail price, which is easy to understand. Whereas ebook and audiobook royalties are a percentage of what the publisher receives from the sales platform, so that 25% ebook royalty is actually 25% of 70%, or 17.5%., contracts can be individually negotiated, the platforms do wacky stuff with deals and discounts, and new publishers keep popping up with different models.

So for the sake of sanity, I’ve attempted to “normalize” everything into the unified language of cover-price royalties. And although this simplification will create plenty of opportunities for nitpickers to nitpick, it should allow the rest of us to make a like-for-like comparison without going loopy.

Here's what that looks like:

"Normalized" royalties

Overall, with reasonable assumptions about pricing, printing, and deals, a self-published author tends to take home about 4x more per copy sold.77For a more detailed justification and explanation of some of these figures, see the sections on self-publishing paperback royalties.

Dollar earnings per copy sold

Royalty rates are all well and good, but what matters most to me, as an author who uses books to pay my mortgage and support my family, is dollar earnings per copy sold.

This tells me how many books I need to sell per week, which tells me whether I need to be hustling the hands-on marketing, or whether I can relax and rely on back catalog sales.

After accounting for printing costs and cover price88These numbers assume a $14 paperback with 140 pages, and a $9.99 ebook. For a detailed explainer and justification of these figures, see How it works: Self-publishing paperback royalties, your per-copy earnings might look like this:

One takeaway here is that per-copy earnings for paperback and ebook99Audiobook is a whole other story and excluded for sanity's sake. are actually quite similar. This won't always be the case, but it's usually close enough to simplify your mental math.

Now that we know our average earnings per copy, we can estimate some income tiers:1010This table uses the same assumptions about pricing and printing as the previous one, and the numbers may vary for your own book.

Decide how much you want to earn from books, check the number of copies required to get there, and then follow whichever route feels more viable.

Back catalog or bust

Beyond the publishing path, there's one other critical factor that can significantly improve your expected outcome: whether your book continues selling after its launch window has ended.

“Book publishers make more than 90% of their profit from books they published more than six months ago. And yet they put 2% of their effort into promoting and selling those books.”

— Seth Godin, Understanding the Backlist

This is called entering the back catalog (or backlist), and if you can achieve it, it transforms the world of books from a scramble for survival into a paradise of plenty.1111The whole concept behind Write Useful Books is to write nonfiction in a way that can more reliably achieve back catalog success.

Imagine that you’ve spent a hard year writing your book and only sell 5,000 copies before the launch hype fades and it stops selling. In that case, your year of effort has returned only $35k if self-published (or $8k if traditionally published).

If, however, your book enters the back catalog and continues selling an additional 5,000 copies per year, then that same year of effort has created a potentially life-changing extra income.

Plus, aiming at the back catalog allows you to reframe your overall goal into a far more bite-sized weekly target:

The big question: Selfpub or tradpub?

As you may have judged by now: it depends.

My personal preference is probably clear by now (i.e., self-publish if you can), but it certainly depends on the genre, since traditional publishers are better-suited to helping books in some genres than in others.

Here's how I would personally think about publishing each genre:

FAQ and Appendix