5 Trends in the Self-Publishing Book Market

I just finished teaching a week-long course in self-publishing for ministry. As I teach it every year, I watch for trends, and here’s what stuck out this year: 

• The continuing rise of audio. As demand continues for audiobooks, it also gets ever easier to produce audio versions. Writer’s Digest says “Audiobooks are the fastest growing format in publishing.” By 2027, projected income is in the billions. Creating an audio version of your book means more listeners, from commuters back on the road to parents scrubbing floors needing free hands to the visually impaired. Podcasts are up; so are audio books.

• More iterations. We used to think of self-publishing in terms of either print-heavy e-books or stacks in the garage of print-heavy print books. Now we have gift books. Workbooks. Print-on-demand books. Books with black-and-white photos. Books with color photos. Audio books. And so many more.... And let’s not forget comic books and graphic novels. In fact, let’s talk about the latter. 

A graphic novel is a narrative or collection of comic stories, often hand-drawn and separated into panels. Maus (Pulitzer and American Book award honors) and American-Born Chinese (National Book Award and Printz Award honors, plus a Disney+ series) are both excellent works that have helped take the graphic-novel genre mainstream—along with some help from Manga, once a niche genre. Newsy.com says the sub-genre of graphic novels saw a growth of 171 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, and that amounts to a little more than 24 million books sold last year. The self-publishing market has continued to expand to accommodate writers and visual artists who, in the past, had a tougher time publishing. Demand has driven invention.

• More data journalism. One of our speakers, Brandon Giella of Giella Media is an expert on data journalism. He showed us this holy-moly graphic on five megatrends in data journalism. Visual storytelling is hot. And it’ll reach boiling as we continue to shift away from words toward visuals. The graphs in this blog post tell stories at a glance. People love sidebars and graphs, narratives in visual form. Even a Bible study can include a graph—like the number of times the apostle Paul uses gunh to mean "wife" instead of “woman” (more often). I’d love to see a Bible study that includes a word cloud showing how often the word “love” shows up in Ephesians 5.    

• Continually growing global reach. Here are the number of internet users in a sampling of five countries with large English-speaking populations: 

1. Australia, 21 million

2. Canada, 33 million 

3. Kenya,  46 million 

4. USA, 288 million

5. India, 749 million 

Internet use means demand for downloadable information. E-books can go where it would take months to deliver a physical book, even if people could afford to order them. So e-book publishing companies increasingly pitch their international reach as a reason to publish with them. 

• More library distribution. In a New Yorker article last September, “The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books,” author Daniel Gross said, “Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do.” Instead of selling e-books and audio books to libraries, publishers sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders like OverDrive, which sells lending rights to libraries. Often expiration dates accompany those rights, making e-books more expensive than print books for libraries. But that development is great for writers, because it gives our publishers more power over prices. That higher price tag has actually not discouraged libraries from buying, as they see such demand for e-books. According to Gross’s research, in 2020, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from 20 percent the previous year. Libraries now join an elite group when their "borrows" reach the benchmark of more than a million e-book downloads. What that means for my students: When considering which self-publishing companies to select, writers are more apt to look for distributors such as Overdrive on a list of publisher’s partners before committing. And often they find it.  

At one time, people said e-books were dead. They also said that about print books. Want to self-publish a book? What are you waiting for? 

Why Now is the Best Time Ever to Publish

Should I Self-Publish?

Despite having authored a stack of traditional books, I have twice engaged in self-publishing. With increasing frequency people ask me about self-publishing. So here I offer a few thoughts on the subject.

If you have a good book, can do self-marketing, and have access to a good cover/layout artists, and can pay a good editor, you might be a good candidate for self-publishing.

When might self-publishing work better than a traditional publisher?
• When the product you want to get out there is for a niche market.
• When you need to get product out there more quickly than the typical book production cycle would allow.

A writer I know got booked to be on a panel for a national radio show with about two months’ notice. No books on the market offered his particular point of view, which reflected the most recent research. So we drafted one, sent it to a copy editor, wrote back cover copy, had a graphic designer do covers, applied for an ISBN number, priced printing options, and got it printed. We did every step ourselves. Niche market; fast turnaround, great marketing opportunity. We cut a deal with the radio producer so the show would sell our product and mention its availability on the air. We have recouped our costs and then some. A year later, we took the idea to a traditional house, and they bought it.

What are the pros and cons?
CONS:
Copy editing, book cover design, layout, ISBN number, ISBN bar code production—all the things the publisher would do for you, you must either do for yourself or hire someone else to do for you.

You must do 100% of your own marketing. (But you probably wouldn’t get on “The View” even if Harper/Collins produced your book, right?)

Instead of receiving an advance, you fork over cash.

You have to find a place to store your extras unless you do a print-on-demand piece. Garages = humidity = curled pages. So you need storage space inside.

PROS:
You have more control over every detail of the final product. Nobody cuts your favorite chapter.

You have a product that probably would not otherwise exist, and it meets a specific need.

If the product sells, you sniffle all the way to the bank. I made 80% of the profits instead of 12-15% by going the self-pub route.

Your book never has to go out of print.

Isn’t there prejudice against those who self-publish? How can I overcome that?

Absolutely. But an excellent product that sells is all the vindication necessary. I like to think of indie book publishing as being a little like indie movie producing. People didn’t turn up their noses when Independent Artists released “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” They didn’t care who made it because it was so good.

What are the best method/companies/marketing tips/sales outlets?

www.lulu.com has excellent tutorials so you can understand the process, even if you don’t publish with them. I also like Smashwords.com for transferring copy to Kindle and other e-devices.

I paid a lot to have ISBN labels made the first time around. The second time I found a place online where I could make my own for free, once I had the number. We incorporated the bar code into the back cover design rather than adding stickers to each copy of the book.

One more thing: Even the best writer/editor/copy editor needs an editor. Do not skimp on this step.

Check out this NY Times Book Review piece about self-publishing that ran this week.