Why not self-publish already

You may be saying to yourself, “Ryan, you man among men. Your book will change the world, cause the blind to see, and the clouds to separate revealing the mysteries of the universe. Why don’t you just self-publish?”

Well young scholar that is not such an easy question to answer.

True, the world of self-published novels has exploded in recent years. Some great work saw the light of day that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, but it is still not a perfect system. Truth be told I see multiple reasons why I want to exhaust the search for an agent before going that route.

1) Discoverability - The unseen consequence of the emerging self-publishing world is that a great novel can get drowned out in the sea of equally intriguing novels. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some stinkers out there. Books that may have an audience, but that is very niche. Part of the problem is that in a sea of novels that are “niche,” the ones with broad appeal get lost.

The Whole reason I started a social media profile, and this webpage, and this blog, and have lost sleep, and… Well, all of this is so that I can get people paying attention to a story that is worth telling.

2) The Physical - There is something about walking into a store and seeing a book that you can pick up, you can flip through, you can smell. You read through a few pages, you get lost in the cover art, you fall in love. All because the book is right there in front of you. Heck this same feeling can happen at a supermarket.

I remember picking up Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind. The cover grabbed me - as much as we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, humanity intrinsically does, you can either ignore the truth or roll with it. When I felt the heft of that book, read the first chapter, I was sold. At the time it was the longest book I had ever read, and every page was worth it.

You cannot recreate that feeling on websites and digitally distributed. Any flutter is a facsimile, a shadow of the true feeling.