Why Not Truly Self Publish?

by Carol A. Miller
(Tavares, Florida, USA)

Award-winning author and publisher Carol A. Miller is truly self publishing and d/b/a Defiance in Print, which is not an easy task.

The publishing business has drastically changed over the last few decades due to the Internet. I'm not so sure this is a good thing. Unless you are picked up by a traditional publishing company, I firmly believe self publishing is not worth the effort or expense. Certainly you will never get rich. There is so much fraud and deception with Internet publishing that unless you are famous, or better still infamous, you might as well simply buy lottery tickets for chance.

I've been in this game for over four years now, and I will never recoup my investment. Don't believe any Internet company that leads you to believe they will promote you or your book. They don't. After the initial investment, unless you pay them an additional fortune for marketing and advertising, you won't get sales. You are lost in a see of 200,000+ books that are published each year. Don't bother entering contests that cost money either unless you have a block buster story.

Get used to rejection. Even my award-winning books haven't been acknowledged by any traditional publishers, literary agents, book store chains or the like. I've mailed out hundreds of copies of my three books to libraries, colleges, celebrities, agents, traditional publishers and never even received a thank you or an acknowledgment. To add insult to injury, they turn around and sell even authographed copies of my books at deep discounts on ebay and the like. Very disheartening.

After writing two fiction romance novels, I jumped into the children's picture book market thinking it might be more profitable. I came up with a great concept to write a sweet story that teaches science and has a puzzle ending. Maurice the Mole is the first in my Can You Guess series for children. He won the 2006 Royal Palm Literary Contest sponsored by the Florida Writer's Association as an unpublished manuscript. That is why I went to the expense of publishing it. But regardless of this award, this wonderful educational idea and cute character, my sales are slim to none. I went the whole route using a distribution and fulfillment company to facilitate the sales. All this company did was charge me exorbitant fees for this service which paled in comparison to the sales.

Even though this seems like doom and gloom, I can proudly say that I am an award-winning author. Because I am a dreamer and a hopeless romantic, I still feel that you just never know...

Visit Carol's website.