To Self-publish or Not

My first novel was titled Signs which I sent to a literary agent in New York. He liked it but said he had another client who was working on something similar. I panicked because the last thing you want is to spend a couple of years creating a manuscript only to be scooped by someone else. So I self-published.

The process was actually a lot of fun. I had a student who was into graphic design, and she did a fantastic job with the cover. The only thing I paid for was to have it reviewed by Kirkus. Using Amazon's CreateSpace, which is now called KDP, I put it on the market and sold enough copies to cover my costs.

After writing five more manuscripts, I decided to go the traditional route only to find the odds of acquiring a literary agent is about the same as winning the lottery. Most agents are swamped. Some got back to me, albeit via a canned response, but that was preferable to being ghosted.

I thought through my options again. The problem with self-publishing is you have to ruthlessly self-promote, and you end up with 500 copies of your own novel boxed up in your garage. When you go the traditional route, you have a literary agent who takes 15%, an editor who takes a cut, and a publisher who gets the lion's share. You end up with 6-10%, and you still have to ruthlessly self-promote.

I'm at an age I'm not sure how long I'm going to be around, so I decided to slap my books back on Amazon. I created the covers using ChatGPT which was a hoot even the the program put a random cat in some of my designs. Just so you know, I did NOT use AI to create the manuscripts. Those were original, but I was back in the game and thoroughly enjoying the process. Will I make any money at it? Probably not, but I won't get stuck with 500 copies of my book crammed in my garage either.