Traditional Publishing is Great, Actually

Don't be deceived like I was...

Before we dive in, I’m announcing the first pre-order bonuses for Crypto Confidential next week. One of the bonuses will expire on Friday, May 10th, so be sure you pre-order the book before then to get it! Hardcover, Kindle, and Audible all count.

"Like Ready Player One and The Social Network, but with an underlying, Liam Neeson 'just trying to protect my family' vibe. It's really f#@*% good." - Nathan Baschez, founder of Lex

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When I told other online writers that I was working on Crypto Confidential, one of the first questions I would get was:

“Are you self-publishing? Or traditionally publishing?”

It was the first question I had asked myself, too, when I decided to write it. I’d seen self-publishing influencers on Twitter discussing all the incredible benefits of doing it yourself. I’d seen the success of people like David Goggins, Eric Jorgenson, and Paul Millerd. And I’d heard all the horror stories from people working with traditional publishers.

It felt like everywhere I looked, people were complaining about what an outdated, dysfunctional, obsolete industry publishing was, and how ripe it was for disruption.

But… I had a nagging suspicion that I might not be getting the full story. That maybe I was being lied to. That maybe traditional publishing was actually way better than I was being led to believe, and the critics weren’t making an honest representation of the pros and cons.

It turns out I was right. Traditional publishing is fantastic, and many of the self-publishing-influencer talking points are anywhere from misleading to straight-up lies.

And to be clear, I am not against self-publishing. There are great reasons to do it, and I outline some later in the article. I don’t want this to be seen as an anti-self-publishing piece. It isn’t!

I am against the self-pub influencers on Twitter and elsewhere misleading people into thinking tradpub is a terrible decision.

If you’re working on a book, I don’t want you to be misled like I was. So here’s what I learned once I was on the inside.

Why Would You Self-Publish?

To keep this fair, it’s important to explain the very-convincing-sounding arguments in favor of self-publishing before I explain why they’re wrong.

I’m sure you’ve heard some of these before, you might even believe them!

You Earn More with Self-Publishing

When you traditionally publish your book, you sell the rights to publish it to a publisher. They handle putting it together and getting it out in the world, and then you get paid a share of each sale.

Typically, that share is 10% for paperback, 15% for hardcover, and 20-25% for digital (kindle, audible, etc.).

But if you self-publish, you get much more. You’ll earn 60% on paperback if you publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, and you’ll earn 70% on ebook. Audible it’s less clear, but it’s somewhere around 50%.

That’s incredible! You’ll earn 6x as much on paperback, 2-4x on digital. You’d be stupid not to do this.

And this is the most important point. If you’re giving up THAT much of your earnings on each book, then what you’re getting back from a publisher would have to be wayyy better than what you get self-publishing.

You Have Creative Control

Everyone’s heard the horror stories about an author selling their book to a publisher and being so proud of it, only to have them slap on some awful title, hack together an ugly cover, and then say “too bad we’re shipping it” when the author protests.

If you self-publish, no one can say no to you. You can title it whatever you want, get the perfect cover art, meticulously lay it out, it’s your baby.

You’re Going to Do All the Marketing Anyway

Traditional publishers are these old relics of companies who think that getting you in the newspaper or on TV is somehow going to help you. They might arrange a few interviews, but you won’t see any sales off of them.

Instead, you’re going to have to do tons of outreach to podcasts, newsletters, TikTok dancers, and the other people who really sell books to get your book out there.

Since you’re going to do all of the marketing anyway, selling your book to a publisher and making much less money per book is just dumb.

Every World Class Editor Freelances on the Side, You Can Hire them Directly

Part of why you might want to traditionally publish your book is so you get access to a professional editorial team to help get your book to the finish line.

But all of these great editors are so strapped for cash at their normal jobs that they’re willing to take freelance gigs on the side. So you can simply email them and ask if they can help with your book, and they’ll often say yes!

So again, instead of giving up 50-75% of your revenue from the book just to get an editor, you can keep your money and hire the editor directly.

You Can Build a Network On Your Own, You Don’t Need the Connections

The beauty of the Internet, especially Twitter, is that it unlocks the door to so many opportunities for you.

If you’re putting your work out there and building an audience, then you can easily contact professional authors or influencers to talk about your book. You don’t need a publisher, agent, or editor to make intros for you.

Publish your work online, DM people, make friends, this isn’t worth giving up a huge chunk of your earnings for.

The Incentives Aren’t Aligned, Publishers Want You to Do All the Work While They Make Most of the Money

Once a publisher has bought the rights to your book, they’re going to get the majority of the profit regardless of how much work they put into it.

So the incentives aren’t aligned at all. They’re incentivized to do as little as possible and let you do all the work, while they collect all the money.

Self-Published Books Look Just as Good as Traditionally Published Books

You can hire the same cover and interior designers that the big five publishers use for a few thousand dollars, and then you can get your book printed on demand based on those specs. And it will look just as good as a traditionally published book!

Why would you give up so much of your profit for a “professional looking book” when you can make a professional-looking book on your own?

You Can’t Just “Be a Writer.” You Have to Be a Business Person Too

Gone are the days when you can just pen books, ship them off, and let a publisher do the rest. If you want to succeed as a writer today, you need to think of your writing like a business. Your book needs to be leading to some larger, more profitable purchase. You need to have other revenue streams.

And a smart business person doesn’t give up most of their profit to someone else!

Traditional Publishing is Too Slow

Once you get a book deal, it might be a year or more before you turn in your final manuscript. And then even after you turn it in, it might be another year before your book is published.

Why would you waste two years getting your book out there when you could get it out there in 6 months?

Are You Convinced?

This sounds pretty great right?! You’d be an idiot to traditionally publish your book given all of these very compelling reasons.

But now let me show you why they’re wrong.

The Money Problem

Many of the self-publishing arguments hinge on the idea that instead of giving your book to a publisher and letting them produce it for you, you can pay freelancers and use tools to get your book produced instead.

When I talk about “production,” I’m talking about:

• Editing (structural, copyediting, legal, sensitivity, etc.)

• Indexing

• Cover / spine / back design

• Interior design (fonts, kerning, spacing, page layout, chapter headers, etc.)

• Printing

Basically everything that goes into turning your draft into a finished book.

Now to be clear, the self-pub crowd is correct that you can do all of these things on your own, and that you can hire professionals to help you with them.

But if you do that, you will end up somewhere between two poles: on one end, you can do it all yourself, for free. But your book will look cheap. It will have errors. The interior will look off. The cover will scream that it’s a self-published book.

It will be clear that you did not put serious expertise and time into finishing it, and if you didn’t respect it enough to make it beautiful, why should anyone respect it enough to read it?

Picking up a book is a big commitment; you’re deciding to put 4, 10, 20 hours into downloading whatever’s inside of it. So the production quality of the book is the first test we use to decide whether it’s worth our investment or not.

So, recognizing that, you go in the other direction. You hire the best editors, the best designers, the nicest printers, you go all out to make it look the best it possibly can.

In that situation, you could easily be spending $100,000 to $200,000. I know many serious authors spending $100k+ on editing alone. Then you throw in thousands of dollars for a great cover, thousands more for an interior design, thousands more for legal reads and copyediting… your book is getting extremely expensive, and you haven’t even gotten to the marketing yet! You don’t even know if anyone is going to pay you for this!

Now, the six-figure number is extreme. I’ll grant that. But unless you’re already a professional author who can comfortably lighten the editing load, you’re probably looking at a minimum of $25,000 to $50,000 to get a book done properly.

So your options are to throw tens of thousands of dollars at it for the chance of making something that might earn back the investment. Or go cheap and make something that looks like it was slapped together by a high schooler.

Or… and here’s a wild thought… you work with a publisher, and they cover all of these costs for you!

For Crypto Confidential, here’s all of the resources Portfolio committed to the book:

• My editor, who did a full read with feedback three or four times over six months

• His assistant, who also did two or three full reads for feedback

• A legal editor

• Two or three copyeditors

• A cover designer

• A layout designer

• A sales team, whose job it is to get the book into stores, lists, etc., also read it for feedback on positioning.

• A PR lead who’s reaching out to newspapers, traditional media, podcasts, etc.

• A marketing lead who’s reaching out to influencers, preparing launch packaging, designing visual assets for the launch, etc.

• Not to mention them printing it, getting it into warehouses, managing the Amazon listing, managing all the other web listings, selling the foreign rights…

If I hired all of these people on my own, at the quality level Portfolio is providing, I would easily be spending well over $100,000.

But, instead, they’re paying for all of it, and they gave me a nice advance on the future earnings of the book! Fantastic deal if you ask me.

Your Time & Your Limited Expertise

Now you might look at that reasoning and go:

“Sure, but after a certain number of copies you’ll make much more money. You just have to get over the initial cost hurdle.”

And that’s correct! Sorta. The problem is that finding and managing all of these people takes a considerable amount of time and energy.

You’re becoming a project manager who now has to manage anywhere from three or four to a dozen freelancers to get your book produced. That’s a significant additional mental load which is taking away from your writing time, or your business time.

Or, you do it all yourself, and now you’re wasting time tweaking the fonts instead of writing or running your business.

Whichever route you take though, doing it yourself or hiring a team, you will still have the problem of expertise. However smart and talented you think you are, you are not a multi-billion-dollar publishing behemoth with decades of institutional expertise on creating books that sell.

Publishers aren’t always right, but they know much more than the expertise you cobbled together from reading a few blog posts and listening to a couple podcasts.

I’ll give you one brief example from my process. The original title for Crypto Confidential was Is Everyone Getting Rich Without Me?

I loved it, my agent loved it, my editor loved it. It was fun, piqued your interest, and it was something many people have thought to themselves over the last few years.

But as we neared finishing the book, the sales team started their work on it and came back to us saying the title had to change. It was too hard to pitch it, because it wasn’t obvious that it was about crypto. It could have been about anything.

Now, one reaction I could have had would have been to go “UGH THESE IDIOTS DON’T GET IT HOW DARE THEY CHALLENGE MY ARTISTIC EXPRESSION” but as I thought about it I realized that the sales team knows much, much more about selling books than I do, and they were probably right. So we changed it.

I lost some creative control, but that was a good thing. Because their expertise is much higher than what you can get by doing it yourself or putting together a team of freelancers.

The Network, Connections, and Media Opportunities

Self-pub maxis like to say that you can meet anyone influential just by building an online audience, or that you can line up all the useful media promotion you might need by again having an online audience, but it’s not entirely true.

Podcasters, news people, influencers, and other authors will take you much less seriously if you self-publish your book. Anyone can do it, there’s no barrier to entry, and if you self-pub then it implies that you weren’t good enough to get your book accepted by a publisher. And if you couldn’t cross that hurdle, or weren’t willing to invest in getting that seal of approval, then they’re much more hesitant to take you seriously.

Now, this can be overcome. But it’s a much longer road. You need to have a significant amount of respect in your field already, or you need to sell a ton of books. You don’t get the badge of approval simply for publishing it the way you do in a tradpub setting.

Reaching out for press, trying to get other authors to endorse your book, trying to get included in book reviews and traditional media roundups, it will all be considerably harder.

And not only is it easier to do this outreach once you’re with a traditional publisher, they help do a considerable amount of it for you. We have a spreadsheet with hundreds of podcasts, traditional media, new media, etc. people we’re reaching out to, and we review it every two weeks to make tweaks and give each other updates. It’s a massive amount of outreach work and it would be an incredible challenge to do on my own.

And some people will scoff at that and say “well the data show that traditional media doesn’t sell books!” but they’re being naive. It’s a narrow-minded view of marketing that is endemic to the online world. Legacy media has a massive impact on book sales, but it is not attributable in the analytical way that we Internet people like to rely on.

Think about the last 10 books that you bought. When did you buy them? Was it that you clicked on a link in a podcast or something and then went and bought the book, or did you hear about the book from a few people and then also on a couple of podcasts?

It often takes 10+ impressions of a book before you buy it, and each of those impressions is contributing to your ultimate decision. Most people do not whip out their phone and buy a book on Amazon when they see it in the news, yes. But when they’re in the bookstore or on Amazon next week and see the book that they heard about while getting ready for work, they’re much more likely to buy it than one they’ve never heard of.

Obsessing over direct attribution is a trap that stops you from doing things that move the needle long term. But it's fundamentally short-term thinking and a big mistake when thinking about growing your audience and your sales over time. All of these big connections help get your book sold, and it’s much easier to make the connections if you’re on the inside instead of the outside.

You’re a Writer, not a Business Person

You could go the route of building a business around your writing. Speaking, courses, consulting, memberships.

Or… you could just write. If you get good enough and publish often enough, you can absolutely make an incredible living from writing. The idea that it’s impossible and you need to diversify is simply a defeatist mentality.

And someone might retort by saying “but you need other income streams until the writing takes off!” And that’s true, but they don’t have to be writing related.

Go work a job where you’re mostly a warm body in case something comes up, and write while you’re at work (that’s what Sanderson did). Or work some kind of manual labor that leaves your creative energy free for the evening (King).

You probably need to pay the bills, but if your goal is to BE A WRITER don’t waste your creative energy building a business. Spend it on writing. It certainly won’t be easy and it will take a long time to succeed, but it’ll be much harder and much longer if you don’t fully commit to it.

Publishers Are More Aligned than Freelancers

Once a publisher buys the rights to your book and pays you an advance, they are committing a huge amount of resources to putting your book into the world.

If it doesn’t sell, they lose money. And they don’t want to lose money!

But a freelancer makes money whether or not your book succeeds. They’re much, much less aligned with your interests than a publisher is.

And you might say: “But publishers make most of their money from big wins and their back catalogue, not their new authors.” That’s true to an extent, but they’re always looking for the next big winner, and if you make a book that could be their winner, they’ll move heaven and earth to sell it.

The truth is that publishers CAN make a book succeed when they really want to, but most authors DON’T deliver a book the publisher ends up being that excited about. The advance just gets your foot in the door. After that, you have to write something they’re excited to get out there, and that they believe in. If you don’t do that, and they don’t put as many resources behind it, that’s on you for delivering a poor product. Not on them.

On top of that, when you work with a publisher, you have a whole team who is invested in helping you get the best possible book to the finish line. It’s a long, challenging process, and having people who you can talk with and bounce ideas off of along the way helps immensely.

Last, a Note on Speed

Working with a publisher will certainly be slower than doing it yourself. I was very concerned about this going into the process; it seemed like a colossal waste of time.

But, I now realize it’s a feature, not a bug. Having a year to work through five drafts of the book was very helpful, in part because it gave me around a month in between each draft to let it sit and to let my subconscious work out problems with it.

And the nine months between when I turned it in and when it will be published is a good amount of time too. It let us strategically line up publicity, plan the launch, get all the additional editing done, spend time on the cover and interior. If I had tried to push to get the whole thing done in a year, instead of two, it would have been a much worse product.

A book is a product that can continue to sell for decades if you do it well. That demands a certain degree of care and attention; it isn’t something that should be sped through like a blog post.

So Who Should Self-Publish?

Now like I said in the intro, I like self-publishing, and I do intend to do it at some point. I think it makes a lot of sense for certain situations. Specifically:

You TRULY Can Do It All Yourself

If you can comfortably throw $100,000 at the project, if you’re already very well established and can get publicity intros and make connections before the book succeeds, and if you have some business built around you where other people can take on managing the process, go for it.

Examples: Can’t Hurt Me, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

You Can’t Get a Good Book Deal

If you know you want to write a certain book and no one will pick it up, or they’ll only pick it up for a small advance, then you should probably just self-publish it.

With small advances, publishers put much lower resources into the success of the book, and your odds of succeeding will be lower anyway.

And if you can’t get it picked up at all, then there’s no reason to throw it away. Just self-publish it. Having it out there at a lower production value is better than not having it out there at all.

Examples: Tons of fiction fits in here.

You Like the Challenge

Some people could get a good book deal but they prefer the ownership, and the challenge, of doing it themselves. And that’s great! Admirable really.

This is honestly the main thing that attracts me to it, I just think it would be a fun thing to try at some point.

Examples: The War of Art, The Pathless Path

The Book is a Business Card

This is a niche category, but it's worth mentioning. Many professionals publish books to secure better speaking gigs, give them to businesses, or get better consulting deals. You will always look like more of an authority in your field if you’re also an author in your field, and self-publishing a book is a great way to create that authority for yourself.

If that’s you, then it’s definitely worth self-publishing it, since you can probably afford to do it and you don’t need all of the bells and whistles of traditional publishing.

The Important Thing is to Write It

At the end of the day, whichever route you choose, the most important part is to write the damn book.

If you don’t fit into one of those four categories I mentioned at the end, I strongly believe you should try to get a trad deal.

But if your goal is to be a writer then you need to write, and you need to publish. Publishing it in some fashion is better than not publishing at all.

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Thanks for reading! Remember, the first pre-order bonuses for Crypto Confidential will be announced next week. One of the bonuses will expire on Friday, May 10th, so be sure you pre-order the book before then to get it! Hardcover, Kindle, and Audible all count.