Self-Publishing?

This is a transcript from my YouTube video.


This week I wanted to get everyone's opinions on self-publishing. For a year now I've been trying the traditional publishing route. I just really wanted to stay away from self-publishing. It kind of freaked me out and it wasn't really something I was interested in. I'd heard a lot of stories about how it's not really the best road to take. But lately I've been thinking about it and I realized all of these stories I hear that it's not the best way to go have all been the people who've done traditional publishing. Whether they be authors who have done it this way or they are the agents and the editors and the publishers themselves.

So, it kind of got me thinking... is this really a bad chose to take? I thought, Maybe I'll just publish my novella that I wrote. Then I thought, Well, maybe I should publish my novel. I've been trying to get it published for so long. I know some people say, "Well, if the agents and the publishers are all saying no then its probably no good and you should scrap it and start over again."

I've scraped a lot of books. I've started some and realized these are no good and I have finished some and realized these are really no good. But this [novel] I feel like is GOOD! Its different and maybe that's why a lot of the agents are thinking, Thanks but, no thanks. But, I think its different in a good way. There's no apocalypses, there's no war.... Not really. There's still war; it's the bad guy and the good guy and they're fighting to try to get their way, but that's just the typical antagonist/protagonist fighting. So, there's no actual, physical war. Its not dystopian (I already said that) and it's not a paradise. Its set in... today. I would say its a contemporary fantasy (like a world within world type of thing) and I LOVE stuff like that!

People just don't seem to understand, or don't seem to want to understand, or they just don't care. I've been thinking about it and I don't want to scrap it. I want to publish it, but it's been a year now and no ones wanted it. So... I'm thinking maybe I should self-publish.

Would this be a good idea? Has anyone else self-published? What are your thoughts on that? If you have traditionally published how did you go about doing that? How long did it take you?

I'm considering self-publishing my book. I'm nervous about it, but, sometimes you gotta get out of your comfort zone. You just gotta go for it, right? You gotta do what scares you and hopefully it works out. You gotta always hope for the best. You've gotta exhaust every single possibility and then exhaust every other possibility after that. Just keep exhausting all the possibilities because you should never give up. You should never give up on your dreams. I'm definitely not going to.

I hope that other people can give me some advice. I hope maybe I helped you to not give up and to always push forward.