Revisiting the decision to self-publish

It excited me when my editor told me my first novel was good enough for a publishing house to pick it up—excited enough to give up my plan to self-publish it, which I wrote about in this blog in May 2018.

The normal way to find a publisher is to land an agent first. So I sent query letters to agents, a few each week. Interested agents will email back and ask for a copy of the novel. No one was interested. So after a few months of knocking on virtual doors, I stopped. My editor was amazed that I had gotten no nibbles. As I worked on other projects, I thought time and again about whether I should go back and contact more agents. But Under Shōko’s Bed is an odd book about a foreigner in Japan. That’s not the sort of thing the average reader is clamoring for. I don’t know what publishers could tap that narrow niche of readers. I also worry that after finding there to be too few, the book would go out of print and that would be the end. Almost every book goes out of print, but I don’t want to face that disappointment so soon.

So after months of vacillating, I have decided to go back to self-publishing. It gives me total control. I get to choose the cover and book design. I get to write the cover blurb. I get to set the price. It also puts all the weight for book sales on my shoulders. There will be no one out there pushing the book but me. That is a sobering realization, since I’m not very pushy. If I end up selling five copies, it will be my fault. If by some miracle I sell more, well, I’ll be thankful for miracles.