Considerations of a Author: self publish? trad publish? either way - be prepared.
Be prepared. Because you honestly never know what will happen.
Sage advice from a fellow author over a delicious breakfast.
I’d just spent a lovely few days with my writers group. The rain didn’t stop us from finding inspiration, adding to our works in progress, and sharing some of our creations with each other. It was a beautiful week of connection.
(Disclaimer before we move on. It didn’t rain the WHOLE time. Check out the weather we got on Day 1):
Birubi Beach - Port Stephens, New South Wales.
One of the lovely women in this group is a published author*. It was my first time meeting her. That week she was anxiously preparing for the release of the next book in her series. I sat next to her at breakfast and asked her to share her story with me.
She went down the self publishing route for her series. She’d written other books before, all self published. But this series, she said, took off exponentially fast after it was picked up by a social media influncer.
“I watched my sales start to climb overnight. I had no idea what was happening.”
My new author friend told me she always had a plan to use social media to promote the book, but this Bookstagrammer picking up the book and raving about it put certainly some speed on her plans.
She gave me important advice that day. Important advice that has prompted me to set up this site even with no books to sell yet.
See, this author had been really smart about this. She had already put thought into her branding. She already put thought into promotion. She had the business infrastructure set up as much as she could. So even though she had to put a rush on things, the point is, she was in a position to do that.
So here I am, on the back of that retreat:
Registering as a business
Setting up a website
Setting up a spreadsheet to clock expenses and archiving receipts for tax time next year.
All things very much outside the realm of writing books. But all things that independent authors have to learn in order to get their works out there.
In a post I made on Threads back in May 2025, where I commiserated over receiving yet another string of query rejections for my novel, I asked about the perks of self publishing. Because that’s the advice we keep getting, right? “Just self publish”.
But what does that mean. A very helpful reply summed it up:
Querying is a job Interview.
Self publishing is starting your own business.
And that made so much sense!
To be clear, I am still querying, and that experience gets its own post! But I am starting to prepare for the possibility that I may have to go this alone. Be completely independent. Be my own business owner.
After all, another piece of advice that people on social media have made to me was this:
You have to decide when accepting any offer - can they do better for you than you can do for yourself?
This one was in the context of:
Hybrid publishing: they’re those ones where the author does some things and the publisher other things, usually at some cost to the author
Doing your research on small presses to weigh the benefits of being published with them
Back in May, I was at Lake Macquarie Writers Festival listening to Benny Agius, a woman with extensive experience in the Australian publishing industry, talk openly about the industry in a workshop she gave: including some hard truths about it. It made me reflect on this: even if I do get traditionally published, I can’t take for granted even then that all the work is getting done for me.
Because at the end of the day, as a debut author with no sales yet, I’ll be a small fish in a very big pond.
So here I am, learning a few business skills along the way, preparing for the possibility that no agent or publisher will see the potential of my book to make it.
Here’s my conclusion: even if you’re aiming for trad publishing and you are hardcore against being self published: learn some of those skills anyway.
Learn how to promote yourself and your book: you believe in it right? Show that.
Set up some infrastructure: consider whether you need your own website, socials, ABN ect.
Have a bit of a plan for the commitment you’re prepared to put in to get your work out there.
And if someone picks up my work and wants to do something with it: you know what? That’s awesome too! But at least I know that so many options are there to consider.
*I’ve de-identified my author friend at this stage as I don’t have explicit permission to share her story. If I get said permission, I may do but that will be her decision.