One of the workshops I teach is “So You Want to Write a Book.” In it, I strongly urge and implore people not to self-publish, especially a novel, at least until they’ve considered all ramifications so they can go into it knowing the facts.
My reasons are as follows.
1. Distribution
Even if you can get a distributor (and that’s very iffy, for very good reasons), most self-publishers can’t afford to pay 60-70% of what they make to a distributor. The smaller the press run, the higher the costs of the books. The more books you print, the more you’ll have sitting in your garage. If your dream is to be in bookstores, it’s very unlikely that you’ll make it. So what will you do?
2. Promotion
Most self-publishers, esp. those who do it through vanity presses, tend to start thinking about selling the books when they are arriving from the publisher. At that point, it’s about six months too late. You need a plan for selling the books before you send the book to the printer. You also need a promotion budget. If you’re a speaker or someone with connections to organizations that are a good fit, or if you’re innovative and have lots of time to put in, you can sell books. But speaking and getting bulk sales work best for non-fiction. Fiction is a much tougher sell.
3. Branding
What a good royalty publisher offers that a vanity publisher usually doesn’t (and most self-publishers can’t get) is the ability to get a new author’s book into stores or on websites or wherever books go. Well-known publishers have spent time and money developing conduits of good will. Part of that is having a good distributor, but just having a distributor is absolutely no guarantee that the book will ever get into a store or be sold on the internet. What really gets the bookstore to carry the book is having a respected publisher’s name on the book. Not yours, at least not in the beginning, but the publisher’s. The bookstore buyer sees RandomHouse or Dundurn on the cover, and says, “Ah, yes, I can trust them.” And eventually the customer buying the book will say the same thing.
When you publish through a vanity press, their name usually goes on the cover, and the bookbuyer goes, “Hmm. Let me think. Oh yes, tried one of their books, but it was bad. Nope.” They have a brand all right, but the brand is “self-published!” Sometimes you don’t even have to look past the cover. It has the self-published look! There are a number of publishers whose books I won’t even bother to open because of the publisher’s reputation. By the way, Mystery Writers of America has a list of publishers whose books they won’t consider for credit as an author, and most are vanity presses. (And while I’m on this subject, have you ever wondered why vanity publishers seem to be everywhere you look? Can it be that they’re all anxious to help struggling writers get their books in print and fulfill their dreams, or might they be the ones making money at this?)
When you publish independently (my term for when you become the publisher and hire a substantive editor and a copy editor and a proof reader and a graphic artist, and then you get your own ISBN and bar code and CIP info and deal with a printer and hire a publicist – all the things a normal publisher does - you’ll have your own publishing name on the book. And then you have the problem of being an unknown quantity. Personally, I’d rather be unknown that recognized as a vanity press. That way I can create my own brand.Given that all publishing houses have to start from scratch, maybe in 10 years of so, you’ll have built up your publishing house so that you have a recognizable and accepted brand of your own. Yes, you can have some vanity presses use your publishing name on them. And if you make sure all the other things are done well, the book can look good, but if you have to do all that, why do it through them in the first place?
My five cents! (I heard they’re planning to retire the penny. 
