It used to be that if you wanted to publish a book you had to write it, find an agent, have that agent scope out publishers who wanted to buy your book, and then go the whole nine yards with the publisher through a traditional publishing process in which they helped edit and market your book. In 2024, however, things are a bit different.

While traditional publishing still exists and many people go the route of querying agents and trying to have their book traditionally published, an increasing number of people are going the route of self-publishing.

Amazon’s platform Kindle Unlimited makes this process even easier because not only can you publish and sell your book directly on Amazon for a price, but you can have it added to the Kindle Unlimited library – readers can read your book any time they want if they’re paying $12 dollars a month to access the library of books that KU has to offer. There has been an exponential rise in self-publishing in the past several years that today we’re going to explore.

Traditional Publishing Versus Self-Publishing

Traditional publishing refers to when a large company that specializes in publishing books buys the rights to print and distribute your books in exchange for a monetary value. Typically, this means that you receive a royalty check based on sales, and the publishing house helps you tackle things like the developmental editing, formatting, cover design, and marketing of your book.

Traditional publishing requires you to have an agent – a person who will represent you and your book in formal communications with the publisher, and it’s a very competitive business. Your agent will talk to you about the vision you have for your book, then they will communicate with editors at different publishing imprints and pitch the book for sale. If an editor is interested in the book, they’ll make an offer on behalf of the company, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find your match.

Self-publishing takes away all of that. If you self-publish your book, you do all the work yourself. You must edit your manuscript into a polished and ready-to-publish book, you must format the interior and exterior of the book, find a cover artist or design one yourself, market your book on social media and by word of mouth, and all the other steps involved in publishing.

Companies like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram Spark all offer options for self-publishing and distributing your book once it is finalized, but you must ensure that it is ready to go on your own. Amazon’s “Kindle Direct Publishing” is probably the most common method of self-publishing nowadays because it offers the opportunity to distribute paperback, hardcover, and eBooks, in multiple ways.

The Game Changer: Kindle Unlimited

Kindle Unlimited has opened the door for many authors to distribute their works in a unique landscape. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service like Netflix, but it is for books, magazines, and graphic novels. Once an eBook is published through Kindle Direct Publishing, the author can also opt-in to allowing their book to be read through Kindle Unlimited.

This allows subscribers of Kindle Unlimited to read the book any time they want as long as they’re paying the subscription fee for the service. Readers can also choose to purchase the book as an eBook if they want to, but many readers opt to read through Kindle Unlimited because it saves them money in the long run. Kindle Unlimited is a game changer.

By opting into the service as an author, not only is your book instantly accessible to hundreds of thousands of readers, but the Kindle Unlimited algorithm will help market your book within the KU library based on keywords and similar books that readers enjoyed. While the Amazon website does this automatically anyway, the Kindle Unlimited recommendations are highly personalized based on the reader’s history. So, if you market your book right and use the right tags, your book can gain traction very quickly.

The Rise of Self-Publishing

Self-publishing as a whole has grown over 250% in the last 5 years and much of this is due to Kindle Unlimited and how easy it is to market your book through it. There are groups and pages on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok that dedicate their time to finding and recommending the best books on Kindle Unlimited. Word of mouth travels fast in these circles.

Kindle Unlimited is not the only reason that self-publishing has grown so rapidly, however. Self-published authors argue that this method is more accessible, more affordable, and less frustrating than going through the traditionally published route. Many authors began their self-publishing journey during the COVID-19 pandemic, using writing as an outlet from the stress and to cope with the fact that they had so much free time.

The community that self-published authors have built since the pandemic is astonishing and inspiring. If you look up #bookstagram on Instagram or #authortok on TikTok, you’ll find an outpouring of support and love from fellow authors who are working on self-publishing their books. While traditional publishing also comes with a community, it is more exclusive and harder to connect within, because it is harder to break into traditional publishing in the first place.

Self-Publishing to Traditional Publishing

An unexpected path that has cropped up for many self-published authors in recent years is the path from self-publishing to traditional publishing. It is becoming increasingly more common for authors to be found through their self-published works and offered contracts for the same books to be traditionally re-published, or for more books to be written and traditionally published.

Jessa Hastings, author of Magnolia Parks, and Hannah Bonham-Young, author of Out on a Limb are great examples of this feat. Both were highly successful in their self-published circles, and both were offered contracts with traditional publishers shortly after their success. Now, this isn’t to say that you are guaranteed a shortcut to traditional publishing when you self-publish, but it is encouraging to see that self-publishing can open more doors to traditional publishing.

Conclusion

Self-publishing has been on the rise in the last several years and there are several reasons why. Between the accessibility, affordability, and support that you can gain from joining the self-published community, it seems like self-publishing is not going anywhere. Traditional publishing isn’t going anywhere either – these two avenues in the publishing industry are coexisting together happily, and I hope that’s how they stay.

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