The Difference Between Self-Publishing vs Traditional Publishing #shorts

The difference between self-publishing and publishing with a traditional publisher is basically about a 10x difference. Meaning, if you get a book deal with a publisher, you're typically paid approximately a 10% royalty on that, which essentially means you give up 90% ownership of that book. So, call it a 10% royalty with a big publisher or 100% royalty with a self-published book, meaning to make the same amount of money that you would with a book deal, you need to sell 10 times less copies with your self-published book. So, I think that's a helpful way of thinking about it, is realizing that when you sign a book deal, your hurdle rate, the success of the book, needs to be 10 times higher than if you just self-published it, is point A. Point B is when you traditionally publish a book, there are a lot more restrictions on what you can do with the content. The publisher doesn't want you giving that book away for free. The publisher doesn't want you basically reusing a lot of that content in other business models, because they want everyone to buy the book because they own 90% of the book. When you self-publish books like I do with nonfiction, you have so many ways of leveraging that content. You can expand it into digital products, you could give away the ebook for free, you can bundle it inside of other products, etc., which is very advantageous. The third thing is that you have to remember that the only reason that a traditional publisher is going to give you a book deal is because you have an audience. And if you have an audience, you don't need a publisher, because you're the one driving the majority of the sales, so you might as well self-publish it.