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.

A hermit's life

I don’t have COVID-19 yet. Neither does anyone in my immediate family. Some are saying the U.S. will see a vaccine by Thanksgiving. That seems almost hopelessly optimistic. I’m not sure how Japan is doing on vaccines. My classes are all online, and the university has decided that will go on for the rest of the year. I am a hermit. It’s time to connect with some other hermits. It’s time to finish something.

I finished my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, months ago. For a long time, I was vacillating over whether to look for an agent and a publisher (as my editor suggested), or self-publish, as I had originally decided. A couple of things have made me shy away from the traditional publishing route. The first was the reaction I got to my first round of agent queries: silence. The second was my editor’s feedback on my second novel, Neyuki. It includes violence and sexual exploitation, and my editor doubted that in today’s climate, any American publisher would pick it up. It is also a book set in Japan, written by a foreigner (even though I’ve lived here for over twenty years, and if you should write what you know, Japan is what I know). I suspect interest in such books is narrow. A publisher is unlikely to want to squeeze into such a niche market. It’s also possible that even if someone took the book on, they would expect me to create buzz for it. If I will be creating the buzz anyway, I might as well just self-publish.

I want the book to be professional, though. I have worked with an experienced editor, but I still feel the need to hire a final copy editor—who is probably shut in somewhere because of this virus, a hermit like me. That will be expensive. Then there is the cost of hiring a cover designer, another likely hermit. This being my first novel, I would also prefer to work with someone on the book design, possibly a third hermit. Then I’ll need a fourth, a proofreader. None of these hermits will have taken vows of poverty, so all of this will push the cost high enough that I will almost surely lose money on the book.

It will be a great book, though.

So this month I plan to find a copy editor. Once the text is set, I will find someone to do a cover for it and possibly have the same person either do the interior or give me an InDesign template so I can do it myself. I want to get the book out in the fall. It will be a major challenge, as my other six novels are calling to me. There’s a lot to do. But when someone asks me how I spent my COVID isolation time, I will have a personal accomplishment to crow about.