Self-Publishing Children's Books

Most every author has fantasized at least once or twice about the possibility of self-publishing, where you pay a company to publish your book. In the case of unpublished authors who can't seem to get an agent or publisher interested in their work, self-publishing offers the promise of still getting a book into print. For established authors who have one or more traditionally published books to their credit, self-publishing not only allows them to be free of the constraints put on them by their publishers, but also puts all the profits in their own pockets. And for the author who finally realizes that he's only making 50 cents from every book his publisher sells — and that he'll have to sell 250,000 copies to kick-start his royalty-based personal retirement plan — the siren song of self-publishing can be a very intoxicating melody indeed.

Regardless of your motivation, self-publishing is definitely worth considering. With today's digital word-processing and printing technologies, prices are lower than ever to produce professional results very quickly. Of course, self-publishing involves more than just printing up a bunch of books — you also have to figure out how you'll get them distributed and sold.

Reasons to self-publish

Maybe you've huffed and puffed and still no one is interested in your book. Maybe you want complete creative control and the only way to get that, of course, is to do everything yourself. Or maybe you just want to rake in all the money. You may have one of several good reasons for taking the self-publishing road less traveled:

• If a publisher won't take on your book, self-publishing offers you a viable (and perhaps only) alternative for getting your book into print. Some children's book publishers reject 95 percent or more of the manuscripts they receive for consideration. Thousands of children's book manuscripts each year fail to find a home and are left languishing, lost, and unloved. Self-publishing offers rejected authors a path to being published that traditional publishers may not be willing to provide.

• It's all yours, baby! When you publish your own book, you keep all the rights, you decide exactly what words and illustrations lie between the covers, and you control when and where it's sold — no pesky editors or publisher marketing people to get in the way. If you're organized, willing to learn about the business, and have a knack for marketing, you can make just as much money or more as you would if your book was published by a traditional publisher.

• You get to keep all the profits. When you sign with a traditional publisher, the financial picture is heavily weighted in the publisher's favor and against you, the author. Of course, it's the publisher that is taking the majority of the financial risk by laying out its money to pay you an advance and direct internal resources to the development, editing, printing, distribution, and promotion of your new book. So, it's no surprise that publishing contracts reward the publisher accordingly. By controlling your costs of production, distribution, and promotion — while selling lots of books yourself — you can end up with a very healthy profit, every penny of which goes into your pocket!

• You may be able to turn your successful self-published children's book into a successful, traditionally published children's book. Very occasionally, a self-published book can sell a lot of copies or garner significant attention in the marketplace — enough to attract the interest of a traditional publisher who will then beat a path to your door to get you to agree to allow them to publish it for a second run. Traditional publishers still have an advantage over self-publishing because of their extensive distribution and sales relationships with booksellers.

You have a much better chance at making a success of a self-published book if it's nonfiction, or fiction geared to a very niche market. General fiction is much harder to self-publish because it doesn't have a "hook" and is competing directly with all the other fiction in the stores. Also, you have to really understand marketing and have a way to reach consumers via a newsletter, Web site, targeted mailing lists, trade shows, and so forth to sell anything approaching a significant quantity of books. For example, a picture book about a child who has to have an operation and stay in the hospital can be displayed in doctors' offices and in hospital gift shops, and the author can attend medical conventions, send out flyers to medical centers, speak to support groups for parents of children with diseases, and the like.

When you shouldn't self-publish

Just as you may have plenty of good reasons to put your own book on the market, you're going to run across a number of reasons to pass off the work to someone else. Here are just a few:

• Self-published books are taken less seriously than traditionally published books. When your manuscript is powerful enough to attract the interest of a real, live publisher, that accomplishment says to the world that you've really achieved something (and you have). When you self-publish your manuscript, some observers automatically assume that the only thing going for it is the fact that you had enough money in your bank account to finance its publication. Few reviewers bother reviewing self-published books, and few bricks-and-mortar bookstores carry them.

• Self-publishing is hard work. Sure, you get to put all the profits from your book directly into your pocket, but writing, designing, illustrating, laying out, and arranging for printing, distribution, and promotion of any book is no small task — that's why the first choice of most authors is to approach a publisher or agent when they have a manuscript they want to turn into a book. The amount of success you'll achieve by self-publishing your book will be directly proportional to the amount of work you devote to the task. Even then, you get no guarantees.

• Self-publishing isn't cheap. If you think self-publishing your book means that you're going to print out an original of your manuscript on your computer and have Kinko's make and comb-bind 10 or 15 copies to send to friends as gifts, then self-publishing can be very inexpensive — you'll get by for well under $100. But if you want to do a first-class job (getting everything professionally edited, designed, illustrated, and laid out, and then having hundreds or even thousands of copies printed), then you're talking big bucks, potentially many thousands of dollars. Fortunately, the recent emergence of print-on-demand (POD) publishing can make self-publishing much more affordable.

• You may expose yourself to legal problems. Say that you find some really beautiful photographs on the Internet that would be just perfect to illustrate your book — no problem, right? Wrong. Whenever you use someone else's work without permission, you're setting yourself up to get sued. Depending on how much money is involved, you may find that not just your book's financial standing is in jeopardy, but your own as well. Get permission for everything you use that is not your own and make sure an attorney handles all the written agreements.

• You can get scammed. A number of shady operators know that some people will do most anything to get their books into print, and these folks are very well aware of exactly what buttons to push to separate you from your hard-earned money. Be careful with self-publishing promises that seem too good to be true — they may be just that.

To self-publish often requires a renegade's personality — a willingness to go against the grain, push huge boulders uphill, scoff off rejections as misguided, and simply forge ahead. Ready to give it a try?