Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Should You Self-Publish or Find a Publisher?

It's an older dilemma than many book authors think: if you're going to write a book, should you get a publisher, or should you publish it yourself?

In this Lean Publishing Tip of the Day Livestream, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks about this complex topic, and why it's almost always best to self-publish your book if you're a first-time author.

AI-Generated Transcript

Hi everyone.

Welcome to today's Lean Publishing Tip of the Day livestream, where I'm going to be talking about the very sort of important topic for book authors of whether you should self-publish your book or try and find a publishing company to publish your book.

This is, as I like to say, an older question than a lot of people often think it is.

And it's certainly in twenty twenty six where I'm from when I'm speaking to you now. It's a very different question than it was one hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago or maybe even ten years ago.

As usual just to get the housekeeping out of the way uh most people who are going to watch this video are going to be watching it somewhere else other than live um so these videos are all recorded you can find them on our youtube channel on the playlist Lean Publishing Tip of the Day um and our channel is at lean pub pretty easy to find and um you can always find in for each of these live streams you'll find an accompanying blog post on our blog at leanpub.com slash blog.

If you don't find this particular blog post there, you'll find it just by clicking on the little magnifying glass and searching for the keywords and looking for those.

What I'm going to start doing is adding the transcripts to these blog posts, as well as often I'll go in afterwards and add little helpful links and stuff like that.

And anyone who's watched these before knows it's actually at the two minute mark that we really kind of get going. I like to give, if there are people who are gonna join the live stream, give them some time, but mostly that's to help people who are gonna be watching this recorded somewhere else jump to the two minute point and get past all my talking at the beginning.

If you like these lean publishing tips of the day, you can click the button to subscribe to our newsletter on the blog post. You can also find the newsletter on LinkedIn and stuff like that. But mostly what we recommend you do is follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube, which is the number one thing we hope people do. Follow us on X and Instagram.

And then you can get these tips of the day every day. So now we're going to the two minute countdown. So two, one.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's Lean Publishing Tip of the Day, where I'm going to talk about, I'll give you my thoughts on whether or not you should self-publish or find a publisher for your book.

The way I'm going to begin is a bit risky, and I'm going to be using an analogy from particle physics.

I just say that because, you know, analogies from particle physics are often misleading, both about physics and the thing that you're trying to do an analogy for.

There is a very good one here that relates an analogy from particle physics to how we talk about things and how language works in discussions.

So basically, if you're familiar with a little bit with particle physics you probably have heard of something like a wave function and the collapsing of the wave function what this basically is talking about is if you're if you want to know where a particle is you're a particle physicist you want to find out where a particle is you typically know look if I go looking for it if I measure its location I'm going to find it somewhere in this range of locations.

And the sort of cool stuff about particle physics is that until you measure it, the particle isn't actually in any of those positions. It only collapses down to one of those positions in that range when you measure it.

So to move on to my discussion of language and how language works in discussions, when we bring up the topic of books and book publishing, often people will think we must be talking about something very specific, but there's actually a broad range of things that we could be talking about.

And typically what people will do is they will think that, oh, it must be about the position in that range of things that you could be talking about when you're talking about books and publishing is the thing they care about or they're most preoccupied with, which is natural enough.

And it's not until you actually start talking about books and publishing specifically that you realize what you're really talking about here, and that'll depend on the context.

For a lot of people, when you start talking about books and books publishing it collapses down to status, concepts of status, socioeconomic status, cultural status, things like that.

So for people like that, the idea of self-publishing makes as much sense as knighting yourself.

If what you're looking for is status in an incumbent established hierarchy of statuses and you want to elevate your status, you can't confer that elevated status on yourself.

You need someone else who's already in an established position, in a superior position to you in that incumbent hierarchy, to confer that status upon you.

So if what you're looking for is elevated status or confirmed status within an established cultural hierarchy, then what you should do is you should try and find a book publisher that can confer that elevated status upon you.

That's one hundred percent what you should do. If your primary issue, what's primarily at stake for you or a big part of what's at stake for you is your status in this incumbent hierarchy, don't self-publish.

Typically that probably won't work out for you because you can't confer higher status on yourself unless you're kind of a revolutionary or something like that.

Now for a lot of other people, particularly Leanpub authors, when we start talking about books and publishing and the question of self-publishing, what we're talking about is more or less nonfiction and prescriptive nonfiction.

And we might, we're probably talking about something relatively niche.

And so, you know, a lot of Leanpub bestselling authors, they've made tens of thousands of dollars on books that no publisher would ever take because the perceived audience for that book is too small.

And one of the reasons those authors, of course, can make all that money for their niche book is that Leanpub pays, depending on your price, but more or less for most nonfiction books priced properly, we're going to be paying you eighty percent of your royalties, which is way, way more than you're going to be getting if you get a publisher for your book.

If you get a publisher for your book, it kind of depends on e-books, depends on the platform, depends on print and hardcover and stuff like that. But if someone buys a book for twenty dollars, if the author gets one dollar out of that, that author got a pretty good deal conventionally.

These things are evolving all the time.

But the thing about self-publishing is that if your project is too niche, you're not going to find a publisher for it, so you should definitely self-publish.

There's also other things about self-publishing. Self-publishing gives you a lot of freedom, obviously.

And so if your project is somewhat complex, then probably it's not going to be appropriate to go to a publisher.

And the example I've got in mind here is I'm going to try and find it and share the tab.

So what I'm talking about here is one of our best-selling books of all time, which is R Programming for Data Science by Professor Roger D. Peng.

This book came out of Coursera, a very successful course on Coursera, which is an online MOOC platform, if you remember that term.

And what basically Roger wanted to be able to do, and his colleagues actually wanted to be able to do, was be able to offer their book for free or for a paid price. And that's why they chose Leanpub, because Leanpub has a variable pricing model which lets you set a suggested price and a minimum price. The minimum price can be as low as free. So people can choose what they want to pay—they could pay more, they could go down to the minimum.

They also wanted to make the book available with some data sets and some R code files. And they also wanted to make the book available with some lecture videos and data sets and R code files.

Basically, the sort of funny thing is, if you've ever published a book, you'll know that getting this kind of arrangement—as far as I know, there's basically no established book publisher out there that would even know what I'm talking about, really, all of the things I just said.

They wouldn't know.

So you're going to find a lot more freedom if you self-publish your book. If you're publishing a technology book about something that can change, obviously you're going to want to probably self-publish, because getting changes through a publisher is going to be really difficult.

You're probably not going to be able to just, like, if you found a typo on page ninety-nine, someone told you about it, just go update it yourself as a published author. But as a self-published author, particularly on Leanpub, that's totally available to you.

When it comes to—let's talk a little bit about the history of self-publishing now.

I just wanted to talk about publishing generally, because like I said, when it collapses down—when you're talking about books and publishing—a lot of people think about status and conferral of status and getting kind of accepted and stuff like that. And that's just not—that's a part of the history of book publishing, but it's only one part of it.

You know, I think of when I think about books, one thing I think about is the old Wycliffe Bible, the first translation of the Bible into English. Was there a publishing company for that? No.

Would they have cared? No.

Would a publisher have allowed this kind of radical act of translating the Bible into English? Probably not, because they would have been protecting the status of the Bible and keeping it behind languages most people couldn't understand in England would have been a way of preserving status.

So they wouldn't have probably done it.

Another self-published book—and this is a game people in the self-publishing world often like to play—but Leaves of Grass, a very famous book of poetry by the American author Walt Whitman, was self-published.

I've got here another thing that came to mind when I was preparing for this video: the Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott. His first two books of poetry were paid for by his mom. He asked his mom for the money, took his poems to a print shop, and the print shop printed his books for him. Then he went out on the street and sold them to people passing by that he could convince to buy his book.

So there's one way poetry publishing works.

One of my other favorite examples of self-publishing is The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, one of my favorite—one of the most important books ever written.

Basically, he had this idea for his book, took it to a publisher, and the publisher wouldn't do it. So he printed a bunch of it and distributed it to his friends because he thought it was important and wanted to do that. Eventually, they found a publisher.

A couple of examples from my own life of how publishing works: when I was a graduate student at Oxford, I had two friends there who realized there was no graduate student kind of magazine at the University of Oxford. So we started it.

The sort of funny story there, if you're interested in publishing, is we wanted to call it the Oxford Review of Books. As I recall, I had a meeting with someone at Oxford University Press because they owned the trademark. And they said, no, you can't use the word Oxford in that publication. So we called it the Oxonian Review of Books. It's now called the Oxonian Review.

And yeah, that's how that started. It's now been around for over twenty years.

There’s a list—you can see all the people who have edited it—and that started because some people had an idea and they wanted to start a magazine. No one gave us permission. We had an idea, we got some funding, we worked hard, we solicited articles, edited them, formatted them, and produced them.

Another example from my own life is a student paper at the University of Saskatchewan called In Medias Res. As I recall, I was nineteen years old, and my Shakespeare professor said, “I want to make a magazine. There’s no artsy-type magazine at this university for students. So let’s start it.”

And yeah, I was the first editor-in-chief. I remember how we got money for it: me and another student went to the president of this college called St. Thomas More, and he gave us some funding. We got a computer, got an office, bought a copy of PageMaker—this old formatting program. I learned it, edited all the issues myself, did all the layout myself, and there I was, the editor-in-chief of a college paper.

There was no permission structure, really. We just needed some money and some backing, and there we go.

That’s how that got started.

When you think about how publishing companies themselves got started, someone started them at some point. I guess what I’m getting at is the philosophical observation that all things are self-something when they begin.

The idea that self-publishing is somehow—you’ve got to be really institutionalized to look down on that kind of thing—and probably have a kind of unexamined view of how social hierarchy and things like that work.

If you are interested in finding a book publisher and you’re an ordinary person who’s not famous, Jane Friedman has a lot of really great resources available to you, including a course on The Great Courses Plus, How to Publish Your Book.

I believe she has a more recent book out about this. But if you want to get a sense of, like, if you think, “I want to get a book publisher,” I recommend watching Jane’s course. It’s twelve hours long, as I recall. You’re going to learn a lot.

What you’re going to learn about is how much work you have to do to get your book published by a book publisher.

No matter what, you’re still going to have to build what they call your author platform, which is your website, social media presence, stuff like that. You’re going to have to learn how to write a book proposal. These days, you’re actually going to have to write your own business plan for your own book that you then give to the publisher.

And if I’m starting to sound a little pissy, you’ll see why I started out talking about how the main function of a book publisher is to confer status on you in the eyes of other institutionalized people who are interested in perpetuating an incumbent hierarchy.

Of course, Jane does at the end of this course talk a little bit about self-publishing and stuff like that, which is great. But this course is mostly about getting published, and it’s very good. You’ll learn a lot.

But you might learn that what you don’t want to do is try and get your book published by a publisher.

The best way to get published these days—I’ve got to stop in like fifteen seconds—is to actually self-publish your book and make it a success yourself. And then you will find that a bunch of publishing companies are probably interested in you.

So anyway, there are my thoughts on self-publishing and publishing. Thanks very much for watching this livestream today.

Clips From The Livestream