Publishing Series: #12 The Difference between Indie and Self-Publishing

We've been exploring publishing options now that you have your book crafted. We explored traditional publishing in the last entry in this series, and there are two other options: Indie Publishing and Self-Publishing.

There is a huge difference between these two methods of publishing your work.

With self-publishing, an author finds a printing house, usually a small one. This printing house agrees to publish the work, but the author will have to pay to have a certain number of books published. This will usually cost the author several hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for a run of, say, one thousand books -- possibly more. After paying the agreed amount, the publishing house will print the books and deliver them to the author. It is then the author's responsibility to sell this inventory of books. He might talk bookstores into purchasing them, or he might sell them at author signings. Usually, the author is left with a large number of boxed books that he doesn't know what to do with. This method is also often referred to as being printed by a "vanity press."

Independent publishing has one major difference from self-publishing. It is a print-on-demand process, so that the author never has to carry an inventory. There are several ways to indie publish, but I'll probably talk a lot about Kindle Direct because that is the method I use and that I am most familiar with. Kindle Direct is the independent publishing arm of Amazon. When one of my readers purchases one of my books through Amazon, their copy is printed just for them. It's not pulled off a shelf somewhere. Amazon pays me my royalty. I am also able to purchase a small number of books, say 20 or 30, at a low author cost, when I have an author signing, so I never have to worry about boxes of books that I have to store. I also haven't invested a ton of money.

To me, this is a no-brainer. But it probably also depends on the type of book you are publishing. Explore the products of each method. Look at the quality. What do you want your book to look like? You want your name associated with the best-looking product possible.