Do you think self-publishing is taking the easy way out?

Jodi Picoult, a New York Times best-selling author, does. Picoult posted on TikTok her thoughts on self-publishing (unprompted, it appears), and said ‘self-publishing is taking the easy way out.’ Normally, I don’t wade into online arguments about every last thing in publishing, but this is such an egregious misrepresentation of the truth, and sadly, something I hear all the time.

Nothing about being an independent author is easy.

It is lonely, demanding, and expensive. Not for the reasons she thinks. Picoult conflates self—publishing with vanity publishing in her video since taken down after the controversy she generated (link to the original video here). Vanity publishing usually consists of a ‘publisher’ offering you the chance to publish your book, if you pay them thousands of dollars.

Never pay anyone to publish your book. You get paid.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t costs associated with indie publishing. Transforming your manuscript into a publishable book requires software (and skill!) that ranges from hundreds of dollars to thousands. Learning how to do this is not easy. Covers cost money. Great covers cost MONEY. Again, hundreds or thousands of dollars. Finding a cover artist is not easy. Uploading your book onto Amazon, Barnes & Noble, insert distribution platform here, is not easy. The costs with this are negligible, but they can and will mount if you make mistakes. You will make mistakes in the beginning, because you don’t know what you’re doing. You will need to pay revision fees, sometimes. You will cheat yourself out of thousands of dollars in royalties because you set the wrong wholesale discount because Ingramspark doesn’t advertise that you can do something other than the one thing they steer you towards. If you choose to exhibit at comic cons or the like, you must pay for books to sell. You will need signage, business cards, a tablecloth, and you’ve spent thousands of dollars. Learning how to sell your books at shows is not easy. Learning how to become your own business – which is what you must do – is not easy.

It is demeaning for Jodi Picoult to suggest otherwise. 

She says indie publishing is easier for people who have a following, discarding the authors who have worked, struggled, and made it a viable path for established authors like Brandon Sanderson. If you don’t have a following, you are just ‘one piece of wheat in a sea of chaff.’ You’ll be ‘forced to carry your books around’ to get them at Barnes & Noble or a library. This isn’t true, which I can say from personal experience. This is an email. Some bookstores will want to get a sense of who you are unless it’s immediately obvious to them your sales and accolades, in which case it’s a very quick interaction.

Never mind how dismissive this is from a person of extreme privilege. It’s just more of the same punching down I’ve heard my entire life when it comes to the genres I was writing in or the mode. I didn’t choose self-publishing because it was easy. I chose it because I sold my first book to a traditional publisher in 2007 and they very nearly ruined my life. That experience was so damaging, I didn’t write another book until 2015. I tried to find an agent and publisher for Ever The Hero, but I think I always knew I wanted to control my own destiny. I expected to sell five or ten copies. I expected it to fail.

That was 7,000 copies ago.

That’s nothing. It’s also one of my books. And it’s in excess of the average traditionally published novel in America. It took three years for Ever The Hero to make money. It took Stargun Messenger a weekend. I’m on the right path, and it’s taken years to get here. Hard, lonely, bruising work.

I have worked, struggled, fucked up, overachieved, and continue to move forward. Independent publishing allows me to be the writer I want to be. To take full advantage of that, I have to learn things I was never meant to learn. Marketing. Distribution. Layout and design. Color theory.

I am learning so much, and developing new skills, and day by day, I’m making progress. It is hard. It is extremely hard when we’re dealing with long COVID, an ailing parent, and everything else life throws at you. I don’t have an assistant. I don’t have a marketing team. I don’t have an agent. No one is looking out for me the way they are Picoult, who represents a significant chunk of a publisher’s bottom line. However a book finds you, it finds you. You can find my books in any bookstore, online, and you won’t be able to distinguish them from a traditionally published book because I work very, very hard.

Picoult clearly knows nothing about indie publishing. Most people don’t. That’s fine. It’s unnecessary for anyone to smear it, in the same way it would be for me to say traditional punishing is easy because an author has all this infrastructure supporting them. Traditional publishing is not easy. It is very hard. Publishing is hard. Writing is hard. Believing in yourself, putting everything you have into your dream and your passion, and your need to tell stories, that’s hard. Going on TikTok to talk nonsense? 

That’s easy.