Mark Ford

From Mark Ford, founder, Palm Beach Research Group: If you’ve ever thought about writing and publishing a book, I have some advice for you: Publish it yourself.

There is a stigma against self-publishing—the idea that it’s not legitimate. And historically, that may have been true.

But the publishing world has changed drastically in the past 15 years. Today, self-publishing is not only respectable. It’s entirely sensible.

Take me as an example.

I have written and published about two dozen books in the last 15 years. John Wiley, one of the biggest business book publishers in the world, published 12 of them.

Several of those books were best-sellers—not huge best-sellers, but enough to get on The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal lists… and to break the million-dollar sales mark. They were also published in about a dozen foreign languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Polish.

That was enough to put me in probably the top 5% of John Wiley’s authors. So you’d think they would want to support me by giving my books a marketing and promotion budget. But all I ever saw was the most routine efforts—the sorts of things that cost them very little.

The only thing they did of any value really was to make my books available through their distribution channels. That way, people could buy them in bookstores and my books could earn listings on the prestigious best-seller lists. (The best ones all are biased toward bookstore sales as opposed to online sales.)

As for money, I would say my compensation—advances and royalties combined—came to about 6% of sales.

If Wiley had done all the marketing and sales of those books, I might feel like my 6% take was within the range of reason. But the fact is that I sold 90% of those books by promoting them to my readers. (At the time, I was writing Early to Rise, a blog, which at one time had nearly a million readers.)

I’m not complaining about John Wiley. I didn’t understand their business model when I signed with them. But I understand it now.

The way mainstream publishers work makes it just about impossible for them to spend money promoting any but a tiny fraction of their authors. Even if you sell tens of thousands of copies, as I did, that’s not enough to get them to support you in any serious way.

Here Are 5 Reasons Not to Use a Conventional Publisher

  1. It’s largely a waste of time trying to get a mainstream publisher to publish your book. Unless you’re a celebrity, your chances of success are less than one in a thousand. All the time spent trying to get an agent and then a deal could be much more profitably put to use making and marketing your book yourself.

  2. If you do manage to get a deal, you won’t make any money. A typical deal for a new author is five grand and then royalties. But unless your book sells huge volumes, you’ll never see a dime of those royalties.

  3. Conventional book publishers will do very little or nothing to actually sell your book. They make it available for distribution. That means it goes on a list that’s marketed to buyers representing bookstores. If you’re lucky, such buyers will spend about two seconds on your book. If they take it, they won’t sell it either. They will just put it in the stacks.

  4. Your book’s time on the shelves is less than a year. Most authors don’t understand that getting your book into bookstores is a temporary accomplishment. At least once per year—and often more frequently than that—bookstores clear their shelves of underperforming books and “remainder” them—i.e., ship them back to the distributor.

  5. You’re giving away the rights to your books forever. Your book is on the shelves and then off them for 20 years. Now you get lucky and get famous. Suddenly, people want to read your book. Guess what? Your publisher may decide it doesn’t want to sell it. You can’t say anything about that because you’ve signed a contract that gives away your publication rights.

And Here Are 5 Reasons You Should Publish Your
Own Book

  1. You won’t waste time and money trying to get your book published. You’ll know for certain that it will be in print.

  2. You won’t have to be satisfied with 5-10% of the sales. Depending on how much you spend on marketing, your take might be as high as 60-80% of sales.

  3. You won’t have to give away your rights to the book. You will hold rights to it all: print rights, digital rights, audio rights, and international sales—even movie rights!

  4. You will learn the skills of marketing and distribution as you go, skills you can then use to sell more of your books or other people’s books.

  5. If something happens down the road and you get famous for some reason, you’ll be able to be in charge of all the decisions regarding your book. You won’t have to ask for permission or buy back your rights.

Now you know why I’ve self-published my last dozen books and why I will probably never go through a conventional publisher again.

Reeves’ Note: Mark Ford is hosting an online training event all this week. He’s explaining the ideas behind his favorite wealth-building methods and showing you how to create a sizable net worth in seven years or less… without touching stocks, bonds, or options.

If you’re ready to increase your cash flow starting tomorrow—and to stop being a slave to a paycheck—click here for 100% free access to his first training video.