If you read my other blogpost this month, you’ll know that I’ve had to reclaim the copyrights to all my titles, labor to remove my former publisher’s editions of those books on Amazon and the distributor Ingram, and then self-publish updated editions with new ISBNs and tweaked covers.

Why didn’t I try to find another traditional publisher, as I did after the tribulations with my first publisher, where my books spent a year in limbo before being republished by the now-defunct SFK Press? Don’t I run a traditional publishing conference twice a year for the Atlanta Writers Club, which promotes the benefits of signing with literary agents or directly with publishers?

I still believe traditional publishing is a worthwhile avenue for authors who are interested in getting a lucrative advance against future royalties, seeing their books in stores across the US and beyond, garnering reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and other famed literary magazines, receiving blurbs from popular authors, and/or benefiting from the publisher’s marketing efforts. Some traditional publishers offer all these benefits; others provide one or two; many don’t do any of that but at least give one the peace of mind knowing that someone else deemed one’s work as worthy and was willing to invest their time and money to publish it.

These are all totally legitimate reasons to seek out an agent in hopes of landing a big publisher or go directly to a smaller publisher. Speed, however, is something traditional publishing can’t offer. And I wanted to get my books back on the market quickly. I’m not getting any younger, and I don’t have the patience I did back when I decided to wait until I could secure a second traditional publishing deal. Another virtue of self-publishing is visibility of sales. I get reports daily from Amazon, Ingram, and ACX (for the audiobook versions) showing me exactly how many editions were purchased and, in the case of the ebooks, how many pages were read (for Kindle Unlimited subscriptions, the author gets paid based on page-reads). I know at any given time whether and how many of my books are selling, which I never knew when I was traditionally published. Before, I could only speculate about whether I made any money on a given day—now I know.

The downside of all this visibility is the urge to do something. I can see which books aren’t selling at any given time, and I want to post ads on Amazon and Facebook, apply for a BookBub Featured Deal, do a BookTok post, offer a Goodreads giveaway to garner some reviews…DO SOMETHING. When I was traditionally published, I could guess how my books were faring based on daily fluctuations in my Amazon sales rankings and dream about what kind of royalty check I’d get in the months to come. Now, I know exactly how flat or robust sales are, so I can’t pretend any longer.

Yes, it’s better to know than be in the dark. However, to paraphrase Spider-Man’s uncle, with great knowledge comes great responsibility. If I don’t do anything to goose sales, it’s my fault when there aren’t any purchases. Before, I could gripe about my publisher’s lack of action, but I no longer have that scapegoat. If book sales flourish, I can claim credit. Equally, if my books fail to sell, that’s solely on me too. I’ve never been so acutely aware of my personal responsibility in this. Of course, I can still create excuses by the score if my book sales are abysmal, but in my heart, I know the fault does not lie within my stars.

This is a humbling aspect of self-publishing that I understood only intellectually before. Now I feel it bone-deep every day. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go DO SOMETHING!