Self Publishing Vs Traditional

This subject causes many heated debates. And that is just with myself. I see the pros and cons of both. Let's compare...

Traditional Publishing is very hard to break into, unless you already have a famous name. If you do, you can easily get anything you want published, including actual trash. If you have no fame at all as of yet, then you must fight as if your life depends on it. Putting up with total snobs most of the way. It is rather shocking to know the names of now famous authors that had to swim through tons of rejection letters before they finally had someone with a brain really read their manuscript. At first I didn't mind the rejection letters because they addressed me as; Dear Author. By the way, I've saved every one of them. For various reasons.

Going the traditional route can take a long time, 18 to 24 months. And if there is not a very good reason to promote you or your book, don't count on anyone doing it for you. However, they can distribute the book straight to the Big Bookstores. If someone in the publishing firm believes in you, you may get a nice advance so that you won't starve to death while you are trying to promote the first book and write your second one.

Self Publishing costs you money upfront. Roughly $1000.00, depending on whether or not you want all the bells and whistles. Post cards, business cards, book marks, posters for book signing events, etc,... and they come up with new ideas to charge you for on a daily basis. However - it's fast. You can have your book in about 90 days with some of them! And they make it available on all on-line book stores almost immediately. You still have to do a lot of work to promote your own book, but remember you usually do, either way. If you do choose to self publish, be sure to pay extra for return-ability. If a bookstore knows you are self published - and they will, many assume it would be to much of a risk to stock your books, or even let you do a book signing. You get a lot further with them, and a lot faster, if you bring something from the publisher with you to prove it is returnable.

Also, be sure to get a qualified person, or people to proof read your manuscript BEFORE you submit it. The self publishers charge quite a bit to do it for you, but if you don't know anyone to do it, it's worth paying for. Think how horribly embarrassing it would be for someone to buy your book and then complain about too many mistakes. Unfortunately, I know this from
experience. You may think you can proof it yourself. You can't. Your mind knows what is coming next, so it somehow reads the text as it should be. Really, I'm not the first person to say this.

So far, we are self published and the Rebel in me really likes it this way. However, things are going really well for us, we may even have a movie made based on the book. So, maybe once our name is famous, we may sell-out and let the big guys have it. Or - maybe not.

K.T. Banks is a pen name we use. We are a husband and wife writing team. We have just published our first mystery novel, 'Stand and Protect' and the second one is almost finished. Don't hate us, but we feel that we have the family thing figured out. Besides our good relationships with our children, we have a great marriage.

Despite many ups and downs financially, we are still madly in love. Once we came into a lot of money, and through mostly our own ignorance, we lost everything after a while.
Sometimes we have in-law problems. We've had to deal with death in the family. Our 18 year old lost one of his best friends in a car crash about 6 months ago. That was really hard to deal with. I have anxiety problems. And yet we are always there for each other. We're in this together and learning how to compromise is huge.

So, while we really enjoy writing novels together. We like this avenue to try to help others that may need it. A happy family life is one of the greatest blessings you can have. You can read about our novels at http://www.KT-Banks.com
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