The E-Book Experiment

So in response to my last post about querying, I got an interesting comment about self-publishing.

Joe said:

I've never queried etc. but I do think that if you're good enough you should self-publish an E-book, sure you're going to have to raise a little capital for cover design and formatting. I'm not saying that you're going to become instantly successful like Amanda Hocking but if you can market your book properly then you have just as good a chance as any self-publishing indie author and will probably surpass that original capital raised at the start and get some nice profit.

Just my thoughts, and this is the route that I am going to be taking. Traditionally publishing is going to get HARDER to get into, where anyone can self-publish, even that of the slush...so everyone is fair game, right?

Joe

It got me thinking.

Before I tried querying again, I spent a long time considering self-publishing. It looks like a good deal. You get 70% royalties one-books $2.99 and up and 30% on e-books under that. They never go "out of print" and if you keep them up, will literally sell forever. Plus, while Borders is going bankrupt, the e-book market is skyrocketing.

But there is a down side. Horror stories of authors who published books that weren't ready and got slammed with scathing reviews.

So in the end, what scared me away was the fact that I couldn't hire an editor. I just don't have the money.

Everything else, however, I knew I could do. I'm a Photoshop nerd, so the book cover isn't a problem. I even have a mock-up about halfway done.

The formatting I was worried about, but I found a bunch of guides that take you through the process step by step (The Smashwords Style Guide, for example, is free in the iBookstore and online). It took me about two hours, but I was able to correctly (I think) format my manuscript for Smashwords.

So far my experimental mock-up and e-book formatted manuscript seems to be progressing nicely. But the editor thing still stalls me. I'm a perfectionist by nature, and it scares me to think that I might put something out there that isn't ready, even though it's been through complete re-writes and I've edited the hell out of it.

I've yet to make a decision, but I'm curious to see what you guys think.

So on to the eternal question!

What do you think? Self-publish? Or go traditional?