Do you know what literary masterpieces like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have in common? Both of them were self-published by the respective authors.
The rising number of people opting for self-publishing has created a narrative around the topic that directly links its popularity to online book production methods. Today, authors can produce an ebook with a few strokes of the keyboard and curate content for a global audience. However, publishing one’s work independently is not a novel phenomenon. Many prominent authors of the 18th and 19th Centuries like Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf and e.e cummings began their careers by adopting this practice. They used different distributing methods to gain a readership.
Self-Publishing books
Self-publishing simply means publishing one’s work in the public domain without the involvement of an established publisher.
Self-publishing is about creating your own opportunity instead of submitting a book proposal and waiting to hear back from a publisher. While traditional publishers manage and cover the costs of the entire publishing process, from editing to illustrations to cover design and more, a person who is self-publishing must use his or her own resources and set aside a budget that will be used to hire the team that will bring the vision of the book to life.
Copyright & royalty
Copyright is a legal right of the owner of an original work which in our case is the book. It allows the author to copy, distribute, perform, broadcast or adapt their work in any which way they want. A book royalty is the amount that a publisher pays an author in exchange for the rights to publish their book. According to the general publishing standards, an author who publishes through a traditional publishing house is paid about 5-15% of the print price of the book for each edition whereas this can hover around 60% if he or she self-publishes. Although going the traditional way will save a lot of time and money, the creative freedom that comes with self-publishing is one of the major reasons why it is gaining a lot of support and attention from aspiring writers.
Some best-selling self-published books include:
- The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- The Secret Lake by Karen Inglis
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini
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