T he arguments for self-publishing vs partnership publishing, and indeed traditional publishing, have been raging for many years now. The topic was a prominent feature of the London Festival of Writing which Jack and I attended this summer, and it’s a decision that looms constantly for anyone hoping to publish a book.
I have been talking about self-publishing vs partnership publishing for The Banana Road for the past couple of months and yesterday afternoon I had an email from my publisher which has now prompted me to take the self-publishing plunge.
The email informed me that my royalties for the first six months of this year were, once again, under £20. The upside was that the publisher, Cranthorpe & Millner, have decided to discontinue the book’s publication and all rights will revert to me from the 1st October. Yay!
Partnership publishing
F or readers of this website who haven’t been following the saga of my partnership publishing journey, I have experienced multiple highs and lows along the path.
I began with the memoir’s exciting, if somewhat restricted, virtual book launch event orchestrated from the Pousada de Pontevedra in Northern Spain, in the middle of the pandemic, while Jack and I were walking the Camino de Santiago through Galicia. And just in case that wasn’t challenging enough, it was only a couple of weeks off our relocation to the UK and we were neck-deep in packing crates and bureaucracy.
At the time, I described the launch timing as being a bit like adding a blindfold to your highwire walk across the Grand Canyon, just for a bit of added frisson.
But the launch seemed to go pretty well, and I hoped for some decent royalties in its first half year.
Royalties on self-publishing vs partnership publishing
U nfortunately, I received what can only be described as ‘disappointing’ royalty returns. What I had failed to understand when I signed my contract was that Cranthorpe Millner, like many publishers, use distributors to get the book to market. The deal for distributors is that they pay just fifty percent of the final sale price for the books. For the author, that means an immediate fifty percent cut on returns.
With the realisation that my royalties were, to use a technical term, diddly squat, came a plummet in my motivation to promote the book. Why was I putting hours into publicising something to earn money for distributors? So I stopped promoting the book altogether. Since then, unsurprisingly, royalties have continued to remain below £40 per annum.
And that’s where self-publishing wins out every time. When you self-publish, all the profits come back to you, no middleman, no discounts, no hidden costs. But you have to work harder to get sales.
Self-publishing The Banana Road
T o the credit of Cranthorpe & Millner, the quality of The Banana Road is excellent, and I learned a great deal about the art of publishing and marketing a book, all of it very valuable. I have no complaints at all about the overall process, and they are now being extremely helpful in arranging the transition.
When you make the decision to go for self-publishing vs partnership publishing, you usually take the time you need to do all the preparation before you launch your masterpiece onto an unsuspecting public. In my case, a lot of that preparation has already been done. I have the print-ready text, the fabulous cover designed by my uber-talented niece, Emily, and I have lots of five-star reviews. That puts me way ahead of the usual starting point for self-publishing.
I’ve learned some hard lessons along the way. I was gutted when the book didn’t sell a million in its first few weeks, nail itself to the top of every bestseller chart in the English language, and become a Netflix series. But I’ve learned to temper those expectations. Now I’m hoping for steady sales that bring in a respectable return.
There’s still much to be done before my re-launch, not least, to get my historical fiction fit for submissions to agents… or should I just go straight to self-publishing? I don’t want that project to languish while I focus on this new objective.
It’s been a fabulous summer, and I’ve gallivanted endlessly but now it’s time to get my head down and move forward. Autumn’s the optimal time to publish a book on Tenerife, and it’s also a good time to get subbing to agents.
In the meantime, if you haven’t yet bought The Banana Road, don’t buy it this month. Wait until I re-launch, you’ll get a better deal. Watch this space, as they say.
