The Fastest Route to Authority: 5 Reasons Consultants Should Self-Publish Their Books

If you’re a consultant, you need to publish to establish yourself as a leader in your field. 

 You can’t just put up a website. All of your competitors have websites, too.

 You can’t just rely on being a good presenter, either. There are lots of good presenters out there, and if it comes down to a consultant who is published vs. a consultant who isn’t, who are clients going to hire? That’s right, the one who’s published.  

 The published consultant simply has more authority, and authority sells. 

 So, bottom line, you have to publish. That being said, there are multiple options for getting published today, and not all routes to publication are equal.

 You may have heard that the best thing you can do is to get a book published by a big, traditional, New York City publisher. And yes, there are some definite positives to doing so (if you can pull it off), especially the cachet that often accompanies publishing with a big-name publisher.

 But outside of that cachet, is traditional publishing really any better than self-publishing? No, it’s not.

 In fact, for most consultants looking to build authority through publication, self-publishing is actually the far superior route.

 5 Reasons Self-Publishing Beats Traditional Publishing

The world is changing. Twenty years ago, the big traditional publishers were the only game in town. Well, OK, there were the “vanity “presses” where you could pay out of your own pocket to have a book printed and bound and to have a certain number of copies printed—most of which would sit in your basement after you’d given away as many as you could to family and friends.

 But today, you have multiple options. Sure, the traditional publishers are still around, but the rise of digital publishing and print-on-demand publishing has removed many of the barriers to publication that prospective authors faced in the past. And when you do a side-by-side comparison between the traditional publishing route and the self-publishing route, for most consultants, self-publishing wins hands down.

 Let’s look at five ways self-publishing is better than traditional publishing:

1. No Gatekeepers: With the big traditional publishers, you have to jump through any number of hoops to win a publishing contract, and the percentage of book proposals accepted compared to those submitted is miniscule. You need to be a very good writer or have a very hot topic—preferably both—just to get a foot in the door. Even then, the odds are still against you unless you know someone on the “inside.”

With self-publishing, though, those barriers all disappear. As James Altucher has written, “The Era of Validation is over. Nobody needs to pick you. You pick yourself.” You want to publish? No one can stop you. You can upload your e-book to Kindle Direct Publishing and your paperback to KDP Print, no permission needed. Take that, gatekeepers!

2. Quicker to Market: With a traditional publisher, you write a book proposal and send it in. Then wait. Then, great news! Your proposal has been accepted! But then there are lawyers (wait some more) and meetings (wait some more) and revisions (wait some more) and haggling over packaging (wait some more)…. On and on it goes. If you get a book published by a traditional publisher in less than a year from initial acceptance, you’ve beaten the odds.

But if you self-publish, you can have your book published in as short as 48 hours. This ensures that the trendy topic you’ve written your book about is still trendy at time of publication. And you can move ahead with capitalizing on your new-found author status that much more quickly.

3. More Control Over the Product: A traditional publisher feels like they should have the final say on all decisions concerning your book, both content and design. So, you end up justifying your content decisions to a fresh-faced intern straight out of grad school, Contemporary Lit degree neatly framed on her cubicle wall.

When you self-publish, YOU make all content and design decisions. You have to put your big boy (or girl) pants on when you do this because you will have to live with the results. There’s no one else to blame if things don’t go well.  But if your book is successful, it’s all due to your talent, hard work, and editorial choices. Go, you!

4. No Illusions About Marketing: The biggest lie in the traditional publishing industry is that they will do a lot of marketing for you. This is true only if (1) you are already a big-name author whose books basically sell themselves, or (2) your book, for whatever reason, takes off in the initial weeks it’s on the market. If either of the statements above is true, the publisher will market your book hard because they stand to profit from it.

If, however, you aren’t already a big-name author and your book doesn’t immediately leap up the best-seller charts, you’re going to find that the publisher will do the very minimum amount of marketing and then quickly move on to the next project.

If you self-publish, however, you choose not to live in hope that the publisher will market for you. Instead, you take on the responsibility yourself and get out there and hustle. The truth is, no one wants your book to succeed like you do. So, get out there and make it happen!

5. More Money: Most people who have never published a book have this dream in their heads that, if they get their book published through a traditional publisher, the money will just roll in. Sorry, that’s not how it works. Unless you’re J. K. Rowling or James Patterson, you’re probably not going to make much money on sales of your book.

First of all, advances to authors are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Expect to get your proposal accepted and then spend all the time between getting the proposal accepted and getting the finished book written, designed, and printed without any cash coming in at all.

Second, the standard publishing contract will pay you 10% royalties. Yep, you read that right. You get 10%; the publisher gets 90%. Some part of that 90% is supposed to go toward marketing your book, but…uh, yeah. So, if your book retails for $20 per copy, your take is $2 per sale.

But when you self- publish, you make a much greater percentage of the sales price. Depending on the vehicle you use and the pricing, you will make anywhere from 35% (of an e-book published on Kindle priced above $9.99) to 100% (if you sell your book on your own website).

Sure, money’s not everything, and most consultants understand that book publication really pays off in more speaking and consulting opportunities than in cold cash, but making more cash from book sales as opposed to less is still a good thing.

Publishing a Book Without Writing a Book

Now, I know that I’ve written everything above as if you already have a book in hand, or at least you’re already in the process of writing one.

But some of you reading this are probably thinking, “Yeah, but I haven’t even started writing a book yet.”

And some of you are probably saying to yourself that you’d love to be a published author, and that you agree that publication is a pathway to authority and credibility in your field, but you just don’t have time to write a book.

Or, you’d love to write a book, but writing just isn’t your thing.

If that’s the case, don’t despair. There’s still a way: ghostwriting.

That’s right, if you have good ideas but just struggle to get those ideas down on paper in a coherent fashion, you can hire a ghostwriter and TALK your book to the ghostwriter, who will then organize your ideas, word them well, and dot all the I’s and cross all the t’s. And voila! You end up with a finished manuscript (with YOUR name on it) that you can self-publish.

Sure, it will cost you some money (after all, ghostwriters have to eat, too), but you will be the proud author of a published book, with all the perks that come along with it.

So, what I’m saying is that, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Most of the barriers to becoming an author that used to exist have been knocked down in the age of digital publishing. If you want to be an author, you can be one—even if you don’t want to do the actual writing.

Willy Wood is the owner of the educational marketing and copywriting firm, Ed Consultant Marketing. He specializes in helping independent educational consultants, educational businesses, and education organization become more successful by providing marketing strategy, copywriting, and content writing, including ghostwriting, to his clients. To learn more, visit www.edconsultantmarketing.com.