Myth 3. Race to an agent! Any agent will do.
Part 3 of my Origin Story: Shifting to the pursuit of traditional publishing…
This myth is a fun one to bust because it contains a couple of sub-myths within it 😊.
Why did I jump from self-publishing to traditional?
As I mentioned in the previous post, this is the chatter online that was playing on repeat in my head while I was nursing my wounded ego about having a self-published book that made a whopping $10 profit within a year….
My mindset at the time was imprinted by these ideas:
Doesn’t tanking at self-publishing hurt your chances with an agent?
Many people also say some variation of this belief that I also felt:
"A book that's not really ready can work against you as a brand and do harm to your career.
“Is that book what you want current readers of this book to find and associate with you now?”
I observed in many cases that being a debut author no one’s ever heard of before, being new, seemed like the biggest selling point for an author because of the promise of what they might be.
Therefore, self-publishing, if it reflects badly on you, can supposedly hurt your reputation. That was my fear, and I didn’t want to look like a bad prospect by self-publishing a book with poor sales and then querying my second book. Why would they believe that the second one would be better if I had a bad track record?
Isn’t traditional publishing better because it = less marketing work?
“Don’t you know that if you get traditionally published, then you don’t have to do any marketing? They’ll upload your book everywhere, distribute it, market it…all you have to do is write it.”
Sure, traditional publishers have a bigger network, but…more on why this might not help you later on in this post.
Based on these ideas, I was racing to an agent for fear that someone else might have already stolen my idea and be out to get to my agent first!
(I don’t know why as new writers, we often feel like we have to do everything as fast as possible or it will never get done, but DAMN, I swear every other new writer I met on the way was in such a hurry to MAKE IT BIG! Including myself 😂)
➡️But there are obviously some flaws in these lines of reasoning.⬅️
Before I dive into my own research and experience on the subject, I must recommend this free podcast episode of Story Magic by
and that brilliantly breaks down a lot of the stigmas around what is “better”… self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. It’s such a great discussion because one author here is self-published and the other is traditionally published, both of them with books published or coming out this year.You can also read the full transcript at their main Tenacious Writers website here.
In this post, I’ll also talk about the mid-list authors’ dilemma, which if you’ve never heard of before, then see Alexa Donne’s explanation here and what it means for your book marketing plans: