The Odds Are Ever In Your Favor

[whipchick]

To self-publish or go the traditional route? In the past five years, self-publishing has become a much more viable and less-expensive option; traditional publishing, meanwhile, is more accessible than ever. How to choose

Comments

[mzrowan]

I love this post (as evidenced by my own encouraging people to read it), but I think to make a truly fair comparison you have to calculate the odds of a manuscript getting selected by an agent AND then a publisher.

[whipchick]

You know, I'd have to do more research to say for sure

[xo_kizzy_xo]

My impression from that is that agents generally don't take books they don't think they can sell, and they tend to make authors do another draft, so the odds are actually quite a bit better on getting published once you land an agent.

That's exactly what happened to us. No agent thought our book would sell because of the subject matter (read niche audience), so we turned to self-publishing. Which reminds me...I never did post the second part of our experience with it (whoops!)

[mzrowan]

The math is done by multiplying the probabilities together. So if your chance of getting picked up by an agent is 0.01, and your chance of then getting published is 0.80, then your overall probability of getting a book out by the traditional route is 0.008 (or 0.8%), or 1 in 125.

[whipchick]

Thank you!!

Question - I don't think it's a one percent chance of getting picked up - I was pointing out that only 1% of manuscripts are good enough and sent to the right place, so in a pile of 2000, an author whose work is good and sent to the right place is only competing with 19 others. Is that the right figure?

[mzrowan]

I thing the issue is figuring out how many of those 1% of manuscripts that are good enough & sent to the appropriate agent net the author a contract -- how many of those 20 get picked, in other words.