With All The Reasons: Is Publishing a Book Worth The Effort?

There seems to be a great divide about how many pros and cons there are to self-publishing and traditional publishing. In fact, ask a person who has seen success with self-publishing (or traditional publishing) and more often than not, there are more pros to self-publishing than there are with traditional publishing. Those who believe in traditional publishing and those who are firm in their belief on self-publishing, seems to always point out the many good points to their style or type of publishing.

The fact remains that yes, publishing your book is worth the effort of writing and the publishing of your book. But the question really becomes what is the cost of publishing that we do not often think about?

For Both types of publishing: Lack of sleep, late nights editing, correcting, rewriting, rereading your manuscripts. Then doing it all over again. There are other commitments to think about such as family time, working another job, learning the basics of marketing, getting a blog up and running on the internet. Being interactive. Speeches, public speaking, book signings, getting reviews for books, so that when you finally get the book published you can ask others for reviews of your book. Sending out letters, which cost money, sending out books which cost money. That is the basic costs of both styles of publishing.

For self-publishing: If you are well versed in publishing there is both an emotional cost and in some cases a monetary cost. I recommend self-publishing for somethings, self-publishing is not for everything. The hidden emotional costs? When a book does not do well or does very well what do you do? Do you know the average number of books sold by self-publishing companies? Are you a great do it yourself for everything or are you willing to pay, sometimes dearly for “needed extras”? There is a cost, always.

For traditional publishing: From writing a novel, or a book profits, to getting it edited to late nights to editors to less quiet time, to loss of a regular routine, to meetings to a little less control. In case you are wondering you do have some control just not as much as if your were self-publishing. You also need to understand how to promote your work since you might be doing this on your own based on the budget given. The cost of publishing in this case in time, effort, a bit of money and time.

Still, is publishing a book worth it? The answer is easy: if you understand the costs then yes, publishing is worth it.