reassessing self-publishing

I've kicked into a higher gear with the fantasy novel, trying to finish the first draft before mid-August, when I'll be leaving the country for a few months. I'm currently at 76K words (about 250 pages), still hoping to wrap up somewhere around 100K, though throughout the process of writing this book it's taken more words than I'd predicted to carry out certain events. Maybe it'll take 120K to tie off the plot, in the end. If it does, I'm not sure how I'll manage to write that many words before my mid-August deadline.

Anyway, assuming I do, somehow, manage to finish the first draft, the plan is to let it rest for the months when I'll be out of country, and then come back to revise and polish it into a more-final draft. After that... I don't know.

When I started this blog on February 24, I'd just taken a heavy dose of J.A. Konrath's cool-aid. Read his blog and you'll feel like the money starts raining down the moment you self-publish on Kindle. The guy's had incredible success with his own self-publishing efforts, and he preaches that the eBook revolution is Shangri-La for authors.

There are several other high-profile cases of self-publishing success to bolster Konrath's position--it was Amanda Hocking's story that initially got me all excited--but even the idea of several dozen authors earning a living from self-publishing seems a bit less impressive when you start to consider the hundreds of thousands of other authors who have thrown their hats in the ring. And research is starting to emerge showing that 50% of all self-published authors never even earn $500. Furthermore, a lot of the people who are benefiting most from self-publishing already have a fan-base developed from previous books that were traditionally published--J.A. Konrath himself being a good example.

But traditional publishing still seems like a pretty shitty deal, too. The average advance for a debut novel in the fantasy genre is supposedly about $5K, and advances aren't always a good thing, anyway, as you can be held liable if you fail to earn out. If you're earning 6-8% percent of the cover price on a book that sells for $6.99, earning out that advance might take a while (you'd need to sell 10,000 copies, at 50 cents a copy, to do so; and keep in mind that if you do sell those 10K copies, the book has made as much as $70K, and you've only been given $5K of that money). Worse still, traditional contracts usually compromise authors to the point where they no longer even own the book they've written. If the publishing house fumbles your book and you want it back, you'll probably need to lawyer-up and prepare to go to war to get it.

So, while I'm working away at the novel, I'm also wondering what I'll try to do with it when I'm finished. I don't imagine that I'll find Shangri-La by publishing the book with a traditional press--assuming I'd even find one interested in taking it--but the experiences I've had with self-publishing, and the more-balanced view of it I think I'm getting now that I've looked beyond Konrath's blog, make me wonder if pursuing the traditional publishing venue might be worth considering.