We’ve been having more conversations about privilege lately, and I’ve had a lot of thoughts about it when it comes to self-publishing.
It’s no question that you need a professional product if you’re going down this road. You need proper covers, proper editing, proper typography, etc. I knew that coming in. After years of living in essentially abject poverty in a leaky trailer, struggling to finish college, I got my first professional job in 2012. Around that time, the query process and the state of the industry had me admitting defeat. I didn’t believe I would ever get published traditionally, because I really didn’t think I had the sort of books that would sell. I began saving up.
At around the same time, my friend started her business World Tree Publishing, which allowed me to publish my first novel by exchanging editing duties. Not easy when you’re juggling these with family life and a full-time job and writing and getting those last couple of courses out of the way so I could graduate. But I was happy to do it. So much about writing and publishing is a labour of love, and I wasn’t any different.
Anyway, there was no way in hell I could afford to drop $1000 on a cover, let alone a whole series. Or around the same amount of cash on editing and proofreading. I wasn’t saving a lot–everything was going into childcare and paying off the mortgage of the land underneath our trailer and worrying about what we were going to do once the trailer became uninhabitable. Which looked like it was happening soon. We had mice, the roof was giving in, we woke up to the smell of rot and damp and I was worried about my children’s health. My husband was working like a madman, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day.
Even if I HAD a thousand dollars to spare, my mind wouldn’t give in. When the love of your life is running on four hours of sleep a day, randomly nodding off in the middle of a conversation, you don’t want to spend money on what is essentially a whim. Because most books don’t make an income. It’s the hard truth. Unless you’re privileged enough, you don’t waste two months’ worth of grocery money on a whim.
So I did what any (in)sane person would do: I learned what I couldn’t afford. Beyond that, I was so, so very lucky that my friend Ash Navarre was offering to do my covers for essentially free. I would be doing them myself if not.
But the landscape for self-publishing is becoming more competitive, and I’ve since learned how important getting the right “look” for a cover is when shoppers have less than a couple of second to click on your book. So, that was bad news. On top of all the challenges inherent in competing in this field when you’re marginalized, you also have to deal with how your everyday affects your writing career. How you probably have a family wondering why the fuck you don’t get a proper job that pays when you’ve got X relatives starving here and Y relatives dying there. How you can’t look your kids in the eye when you dare take the very food from their mouths to splurge on something for your ego.
Self-publishing is lucrative if you hit the right margins, but I would caution anyone talking about it to understand that it isn’t as simple as telling people to “hire a good cover artist and get an editor.” Because both things cost money, most of which many don’t have to put into an endeavour many of their communities wouldn’t understand. It’s first and foremost a business, and as with many small businesses, to get noticed you need a certain amount of capital or a whole lot of luck. This leaves traditional publishing as the sole option for many. And yet traditional publishing has limited seats, which means the odds for the marginalized are stacked way high regardless of which route they “decide” to take (more often, it’s not really a decision).
I can only tell people who may find themselves between the cracks to toughen up. It’s a slog, but we need your voices more than ever.
