Why I Self-Publish

Today, Independent Judgment and Introspection, my third self-published book, goes on sale. Why do I self-publish?

In 1981, I bought and read a book titled the Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter. I was intrigued but at the time had nothing to publish!

In 1993, I submitted to five publishers a proposal and three chapters of a book I had titled “Advertising: Beacon of Capitalism.” One called me and offered a contract. Flattered beyond belief, I said, “Where do I sign?” In the course of talking to my editor, he said my title was “too flag wavy” and suggested the current one, In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism.

The editor also made a casual remark that made me a little uneasy, but I did not think too much about it. He said, “With the advent of electronic publishing, books may never go out of print.” In later years, I realized the message was, “Good luck getting your rights back!” I did not know about print on demand (today’s technology of printing one book at a time) and I doubt that my editor knew about it. I was aware that I had signed away all rights, which is what all but the highly successful best-selling authors must do to get a book published. Best-selling authors can negotiate with publishers and even receive a lucrative advance against royalties. The rest of us must take what the publisher offers, which may include copyright in the publisher’s name, not yours.

In 1994, In Defense of Advertising was published by Quorum Books, an imprint of the Greenwood Publishing Group in Westport, Connecticut.* Price was $45, hardcover only, and a lot of money in those years with similar books today going for $180-200 plus. Target market was “scholarly/professional,” which meant college libraries and motivated professors or individuals  who might be willing to pay that kind of money. The book did respectably. Sales in the hundreds, not thousands.

By the early 2000s the book’s sales trickled to almost nothing and I was interested in seeing it in paperback, even if I had to publish it myself. I joined the Author’s Guild, an organization mainly for the Stephen King’s of the world, but one benefit is that members can ask questions of the Guild’s lawyers. I asked for, and got, advice on how to ask for my rights back. I also got a stern sermon on why I shouldn’t have signed away all rights! The advice was to offer to buy all books in the warehouse at cost. There weren’t many, so the publisher accepted and I got the rights back in 2006. I self-published the paperback in 2007.

With the ease of print on demand (lack of need to carry inventory) and electronic publishing, I doubt that publishers today would be so generous in returning rights. In 1992 the same publisher (now under the Praeger imprint) published a scholarly collection that included one of my papers. I was asked recently to include the same paper in a new collection, but the 1992 book is still in print in Kindle and print-on-demand versions. The publisher wanted $1500 for the “privilege” of reprinting the paper. I once again joined the Author’s Guild to ask about my rights. The lawyer said I did sign away everything, but he also thought the publisher was unethical in “ransoming” my paper. He also gave me references to a statutory right of termination for papers in collections. It says I can get my rights back in 2026. If the publisher doesn’t play lawyerly games with me! (Permission to reprint academic papers is always free as long as credit is given—except in this case.)

For two or three years, I submitted my second book, Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, to about fifteen publishers, getting wonderful peer review comments (from a university press) such as “I don’t consider Ayn Rand to be a reference for anything.” (See my comment on the ethics and epistemology of peer review, Applying Principles, pp. 130-32). One publisher was willing to publish the book as is, but the copyright was to be in their name and I had to provide my own typeset page proofs (in Microsoft Word), copy editing (which most publishers provide for authors), and an index (which publishers do not provide). And, of course, I had to sign away all rights. I did attempt to negotiate but only got as far as, “I guess you can have the copyright in your name.” At that point, I exclusively became a self-publisher. Here are my reasons why.

The business model of publishers is much like that of the Hollywood movie studios. They make their money on hits, the best sellers, but it is difficult to predict which books will be runaway best sellers. So they accept as many books as they can handle, spend about three months on each one before publication date and three months after, then move on to the next. If the book doesn’t continue to sell well, it is thrown in the back pages of the publisher’s catalog.

Most of the publishing work, which includes production and marketing of the book, falls on the author. Typically, publishers will copy edit and typeset the manuscript, design a cover, list the book with top wholesalers (which gets the books listed online at retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble). They will send the book to some pre- and post-publication reviewers and put the book in their catalog that is mailed or emailed to the “house list,” an amalgam of past buyers and interested readers. If your book looks like it may sell well, you may be offered a book tour and some ads may be placed. There are no guarantees that your book will end up in a retail store. (Retailers require discounts of 40-60%  and if the books don’t move off the shelf, they are returned for refund and shipped at your cost. Refunds and shipping are deducted from royalties.)

The author must do and provide everything else. The author is asked to provide lists of contacts that might buy the book and possible review outlets. The author must provide an index, which if hired by a professional indexer can cost one or two thousand dollars. (This is the reason many books have no index or a poor one. The author does not want to pay for an index or want or know how to do one.) The author must proofread the typeset page proofs and return them in a short turnaround time, usually within two or three days. Advertising? Book tour? Convincing local retailers to carry your book? The publisher won’t stop you from spending your time and money on any of these ventures, though your contract probably has a veto or approval clause about the advertising!

So how many books actually get sold? Nielsen Bookscan in 2004 tracked 1.2 million books. Ten books sold more than a million copies, 500 more than 100,000, and two percent (or 24,000) more than 5000. Ninety-seven percent, however, sold fewer than 1000 and 80% fewer than 99.** The numbers are sobering and I doubt that they would be much different today, perhaps worse considering how many self-published books are on the market now.

The advantage of self-publishing is, in one word, control. I have total control of my books and my heirs can keep them in print after I’m gone. In the old days traditional publishers would just let books go out of print, often with excess copies destroyed (“pulped,” in the publishing lingo). Now they probably will never let them go out of print, making it difficult, if not impossible, to get your rights back. The drawback to self-publishing is that you have to do all the work yourself, although there are many advisors and consultants willing to do the work for you and gladly take your money, which can quickly add up to thousands of dollars that probably cannot be made back in sales. Self-publishing is work and you must enjoy doing it. Otherwise, the traditional path is the way to go, with a membership in the Author’s Guild and/or a good lawyer.

Scholarly books, which mine are, may not make the bestseller lists, but they can be discovered by graduate students and professors while browsing the stacks of a library or by noticing them in the bibliographies and footnotes of other books and papers or just by doing a “books-in-print” search on our modern day books-in-print (and not-in-print) database, Amazon.com.

Years ago, I was impressed by the lesson of Hermann Gossen whose book in 1854 was nearly wiped out of existence (most copies destroyed), until discovered in 1878 by a colleague of William Stanley Jevons. Gossen had anticipated the law of marginal utility, as later elaborated by Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras. (See Mises on Gossen, p. 331.)

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, pp. 41-44), I expressed optimism about the future of “good—meaning rational—ideas” (though the leftists have challenged this premise a bit in the past two or three years). I related how in the eighth century BC the Greeks came out of their Dark Age and immediately wrote down their entire oral tradition, which led eventually to the Greek Golden Age. And I noted how Europe in the fifteenth century, with the invention of moveable type, published within a hundred years all extant written work, which gave us the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, and the standard of living we all enjoy today.

In the twenty-first century, the move is toward digitization of all of the world’s literature. Does this mean there will be a new Renaissance?

“Good—meaning rational—ideas” do eventually seem to be discovered and advanced, if they are available in permanent form.


* “Imprint” is the publishing industry’s substitute for brand name. Most publishers, who likely were English majors in college, prefer not to be associated with the Procter and Gamble’s of the world.

** This and other data from the early 2000s can be found in a thinly disguised business case at jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdfhttps://jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdf. It is a thin disguise of yours truly’s experiences at self-publishing. More recent data: brick-and-mortar book store sales, now only 39% of total book sales, peaked in 2008 and are declining slowly. The number of Barnes & Noble stores also peaked in 2008 and have also been declining slowly (1, 2). Independent book stores, interestingly, have grown almost 40% since 2009.

(Cross posted on the books' website.)