From Self-Publishing to a Big Five book deal.

A guest post by my husband, James Winestock.

My wife is sort of a big deal.

Of course, to me, she’s a massive deal, but for the first time in the fifteen years we’ve been together, other people are starting to realise it too.

In the middle of last year emails started popping up in her inbox from publishers. The same publishers who, for the last ten years hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. Who, in the face of hundreds of rejections, she had decided to bypass by self-publishing.

Now, after six self-published books (two fiction and four non-fiction), the seventh, We Need Your Art, will be done traditionally with onfe of the Big Five publishers.

It’s been a weird journey, but one I am 100% confident we did in the right order.

I say we because, we’re a team. I was on every zoom call, in every' publisher’s office, at every brunch schmooze. I co-wrote the proposal, and I was the first pass editor on every draft.

So. We.

Slow vs. Fast

This week is the cover reveal. It’s been eight months since we handed in the manuscript, five since the structural edit, and one since the copy edit. The book won’t be out until March.

Traditional publishing is long and it is slow. Which is the opposite of self publishing.

Self publishing teaches you to be lean, to move fast, to try things. When we self-published Amie’s non-fiction, I was the structural editor, the copy editor, the proofreader, and the typesetting. I built the website. I organised payments and dealt with customer support.

Amie was in charge of marketing (which was more work than all my jobs combined) and the bulk of the writing. We paid a school friend to design the covers for us.

We did our best. We learned SO MUCH.

Now that we have a publisher, there is a seperate person for each of those jobs. Sometimes more than one. And they are all better at their one job than Amie or I ever could have been at any one of our myriad tasks.

But our time as self-publishers made us. Because we had to become mini experts on every aspect of publishing, we can talk confidently to publishers about every step of the journey.

We know how to do it.

We spent ten years preparing so that, when we got called up to the big leagues, we were ready.

We weren’t overawed by the occasion. It was just a continuation of what we’d already been doing.

I look at authors whose first projects are with gatekeepers and I wonder how they could have been prepared. I think most of them aren’t. Which is okay! You can absolutely learn on the job. But from what I can see, those first few years can be terrifying if you haven’t already learned to do it yourself.

I am so grateful for self-publishing for giving us a skill set that let us slide seamlessly into traditional publishing. Even if our books hadn’t made us good money and supported us in those early years, they were incredible teachers. I can’t believe there’s an MFA or Masters of Publishing that would teach a tenth of what we learned in those years.

Sell-sufficiency

The other huge blessing of self-publishing first is that we know we don’t need the publishers.

We’re grateful for them. We’ve had a great experience so far.

But we know if everything goes to shit, we can do it ourselves.

And you know what? They know that too! They knew our background going into the relationship. We talked about it several times. It made the transaction feel much more equal.

We also know that, if the publisher loses interest in us (which happens all the time), we can soldier on.

Many authors feel let down by their publishers around their book launch. The truth is, most publishers are under resourced and overworked. They simply don’t have the ability to run months long marketing campaigns for their authors. This is a huge shock to many first time traditionally published authors who expect that signing with one of the Big Five publishers will ensure them huge coverage in the press, displays at bookshops, and whatever other outreach people still thinks works.

As self-publishers, we are a well oiled marketing machine. We have spent a decade building a direct relationship with our audience, and growing our professional network. When it comes time to go, we hope the publisher will have our back, but we’re also ready to move ourselves.

Not only that, we’re used to supporting our books for months and even years after launch day. As self-publishers, we don’t let our creations die. We re-launch them again and again because we know their worth and we know how long it can take for momentum to build.

Books should have long tails. It’s much more efficient to promote a book you’ve already released, than spend months or years making a new one.

Embrace Failure

As self-publishers we are masters of failure.

We’ve found typos in published manuscripts, gotten zero traction from email campaigns, and straight up seen whole products flop.

Without those things, though, we never would have made books we’re proud of, learned how to write a sales pitch, and made the products that now financially support our whole life.

We know that failure is a part of the process, so we can enter this stage of our journey battle-hardened and ready to fail. We know that failures are never final and that we’ll always learn and grow from them.

Prepared For Success

We were also able to find success slowly and organically. There was no big break for us. No giant windfall. We built up our writing career from nothing and then slowly slowly over a decade found incremental gains.

What now?

I want to share more about this process here, and hopefully Amie will do the same! There’s a lot of mystique behind the publishing industry, and I’d love to help demystify it for you!