Hello and welcome to another article we aim to bring you really important information about publishing how to get your book published promoted and ultimately how to become a successful author today i'm going to talk to you about why authors are rejecting traditional contracts and why i think you should do the same the first reason that i think you should reject a traditional contract as an author is time time is precious we all have very little time and we're all busy why would you want to wait potentially two or even three years to get your book available so people can read it and enjoy it you've spent all this time creating your book so it seems a shame to wait so long to then get the book published on top of that it also may have an impact on the relevancy of your book so if your book or your subject matter is time sensitive in two or three years it might not have the same impact that it would today so that is a huge reason why authors are rejecting traditional contracts and choosing the self-published option for difference.
reason number two the authors are rejecting traditional contracts is control and creativity so if you hand your book over to a publisher it gets placed in the hands of an editor that they select and ultimately they will have a slightly different vision for your book or potentially they will have a very different version and ultimately it will be their choice so they will get to decide so do you want somebody else deciding on the outcome of your book how your book should be edited what the cover should be you know when it should be released who's going to enjoy reading it the answer for most authors is no you want to keep that creative control and that's another reason to self-publish reason number three to self-publish is money so not only by self-publishing and rejecting a traditional contract will you receive a much greater share of the royalties beware of the vanities if you visit our other videos we have a video about vanity traditional and self-publishing we're talking about strict self publishing here and when it comes to that you should have complete control of your royalty so that is something to check when you sign up for a self publisher or use a certain platform you have control and that is a major reason why so many authors reject traditional contracts by rejecting a traditional contract it puts you in control of the finances you can decide where you spend those royalties and on top of that it makes it much easier for you to forecast because you have access to your reporting.
and you can see how many book sales you've made the money that's coming in when you traditionally publish then you won't always get that information and every two three months a check will arrive but you don't know what the royalties are going to be and that is if the check arrives on time at all we hear so many horror stories about authors not getting paid you've slaved away of your book you want to make sure you get paid reason number four is marketing and it is a big factor in why authors reject a traditional contract when i think about marketing and i think about traditionally published authors there is one author that springs to mind his name is john harding so if we roll back quite a few years about seven in fact publishing person we used to focus on marketing now our focus is of course self-publishing and we have take authors from a to b and the reason i raise this example is john came to us many many years ago when he had launched his second book john harding's second book was the girl who couldn't read his first book was florence and giles his first book had done really really well he'd secured a traditional deal and he was really excited about the release of his second book unfortunately his second book hadn't gone as expected there had been a shift at the publisher they'd move people around he had a different marketing team.
and then it even got as bad as a certain stage he wasn't sure how to get in touch with his marketing team he came to us to help him out because of course he was incredibly worried that if he didn't get marketing support from his publisher then he wouldn't potentially be able to secure a deal for a third or fourth book and this is a problem and a downside to working with a traditional publisher because you don't have control over your marketing you don't have control over the team you know people leave teams get moved around and unfortunately you can sometimes be left in the lurch and your book doesn't get the attention that it deserves and because you've handed over that control unfortunately there's not a huge amount you can do to combat that on top of that you may end up using your own money to then support the marketing and your own effort anyway whilst the publisher then reaps the rewards through the royalties does that sound like a fair deal i think most of you would agree it's not control of your channels is also really important when it comes to this reason that authors reject traditional publishing because if for example you leave that publisher or you want to switch or you have something else you want to do in the future if they set up your website your instagram account all these items they might own and control those.
and you might not be able to take them with you so again all that hard work that's gone into building them up you again might not reap the reward in the future reason number five that authors are rejecting traditional publishing deals comes down to a loss of ownership so this means a loss over your intellectual property so for example when you sign with a traditional publisher they then take the ownership and the rights of your you know intellectual property and this can make it really difficult in the future if you want to expand on that or you want to monetize the book in other ways or you simply just want to write more in that series if they own it it can be really really difficult to leverage and use your own intellectual property that you spent time you know think of all those long hours in front of the computer creating your book if they then take the all the benefits of that that's going to be you know pretty painful on top of that if for example a company is interested in producing a film or producing a tv show from what you've written again depending on the deal you've signed you might not reap the rewards you deserve from what you've created that is reason number five why authors are rejecting traditional contracts i hope you've enjoyed this article.
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