I make a point of walking up to an author’s table and talking to them, often buying their book. Having spent many an hour in their shoes, I understand the difficulty of sitting there (they ought to be standing, but that’s another article). Invariably, I’ll look at the book, and if I cannot tell who published it, I’ll ask. Ninety percent of the time it was self-published.

Once they know I’m an author, they often open up about the difficulties of publishing. We ultimately wind around to the point I ask they if they considered traditional publishing. The number one reason they give for not attempting traditional never fails to surprise me.

It sounds complicated. I don’t understand it. I don’t want to go there.

It’s not that they CHOSE self-publishing. It’s that they DEFAULTED to self-publishing because they don’t understand the options. Nine times out of ten, they just use KDP. Nine times out of ten, I can tell.

Just like you do not publish until you have rewritten a zillion times and had the book edited several times, you do not publish until you know all your publishing options. There is such a thing as publishing badly. And you can rarely undo publishing badly. There will always be used copies out there that someone will make Amazon put up for sale, reminding you of the mistakes you made once upon a time.

Just like you read dozens of successful books in your genre to see what works and what doesn’t, to understand good writing from mediocre, you also study publishing options before you publish. These books will not sell themselves, and to publish them the easiest route you can find will only make sales harder. The better a book is published, the easier it is to sell. This is not a step to shortcut because it’s too difficult to learn the other methods of doing it well.