While there are many reasons why authors self-publish, I break down self-publishing authors into two main categories:

1. The Cultural Author, and
2. The Commercial Author

A Cultural Author is someone who has written a family history, a memoir, a collection of poems, a scrapbook, a children’s book or some other book that has significant personal and family value, but probably little commercial value. The Cultural author seeks to preserve his or her heritage, or that of a community or club in the form of a professionally printed book.

A Commercial Author is someone who has written a book with the intent to sell as many copies as possible. These authors include novelists, non-fiction writers and national public speakers who may not sell a lot of books, but the books help them sell their consulting services.

Before continuing, I should mention a third category: the Cultural author who becomes a Commercial author. To see a great example of such a writer, go to http://www.richardpaulevans.com/biography.html to read Richard Paul Evans story, one of the most successful authors who began by writing a story for his daughters and then one day he decided to self-publish 20 copies to give to friends. Eventually his book, The Christmas Box, sold over 8 million copies and Mr. Evans is now a huge commercial author with several best-sellers.

For the Cultural author, the most costly part of the self-publishing process will most likely be the printing and binding costs. Usually family and friends will help offset these expenses by buying the books or the Cultural author will present the books as gifts. Finding a trustworthy printer is critical to the Cultural author. You will want someone who can give you ideas on the proper size of the book, the type of paper, the best way to bind and so forth. As the owner of ZDocs, I can assure you you will receive this kind of consultation. But of course there are many on-demand printers and I would encourage you to look into several companies to test their prices and their approach to helping you print the best book possible.

For the Commercial author, the goal is to sell as many books as possible and make the best return on the hard work they’ve put into their book; not to mention the out-of-pocket expenses to design, edit and print the book. A Commercial author’s plan may be to find an agent and submit his/her manuscript to mainstream publishers. But only 1 to 2% of all titles are accepted by publishers and the author may spend months or years getting a publisher to accept and sell his/her book. And if the book does get accepted, the author may get a small advance and then receive a 5 to 15% royalty on the sales of the book.

Self-publishing does a few things for a Commercial author. If you plan to just self-publish, you can earn 40 to 80% of your sales price. A general rule of thumb I use is you’ll need to sell about 800 books to break-even. The actual number will depend on many variables that I walk authors through once we know more about the book’s specifications.

Now if your main goal is to get your book published by a mainstream publisher, self-publishing is still a good investment for you. First of all, you’ll have time to self-promote your book while you wait for the agents and publishers to respond to you. Second, if a publisher does show interest in your book, you will be able to negotiate a better deal if you can show the publisher you’ve already sold several thousand books on your own. By the way, a great website to visit if you are interested in mainstream publishing is www.writersmarket.com.

The primary key I stress with our authors at ZDocs is minimize your initial investment and get your book to a break-even position as quickly as possible. I’ll write more about this topic in a later blog.