Late last year we realized that, through some strange sort of serendipity, all our fiction debuts were slated for publication within just months of one another. Although we are all friends—connected by the various shared histories of our education, employment, and writing lives—our individual experiences getting to this point in our careers were quite different. Alethea’s agent had sold her collection of short stories to a commercial publisher, Céline had signed a contract for a novel with an independent press, and Michelle was launching her own press to self-publish her novel. So we decided to sit down to compare notes on the distinct paths that brought us all to the same place—on the verge of our careers as authors. Here’s what we learned.

Keating: “Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been” goes the Grateful Dead lyric. That’s certainly how I feel about my path to publication. I suspected my novel would be a tough sell to a commercial publisher. Although it has a suspenseful plot,Layla is also a political novel, and politics and commercial publishing often don’t mix. I had secured an agent who loved the book and who wanted to try the mainstream publishers, and I saw no harm in trying, but in my heart of hearts I suspected my book truly belonged with a small press.

Fast forward a couple of years and many “almosts” later: I lost my agent, who decided to get out of the field, and I was confronted with the choice of putting the manuscript in a box under the bed—or in the shredder—or starting to send it on my own to small presses. I didn’t think I had the energy to go through the submission process, but when I saw an ad in this magazine for “issue-based literary” Plain View Press, I changed my mind. The press was also described as a “cooperative of writers,” and that, too, appealed to me. Another advantage of going with a small press is that they typically keep their books in print forever. I wouldn’t have to worry about the publisher remaindering my book if it didn’t do well out of the gate. Susan Bright, the publisher, responded not only with enthusiasm but also with great insight into my thematic intent. I felt my book was being embraced for the reasons that meant the most to me, and so, without even considering another, I decided on Plain View.

Black: Some of the decision of choosing what type of publishing path to follow was taken care of for me: My agent queried several houses, and we went with the one that felt like the best fit. “Best fit,” as you know, doesn’t necessarily mean the most money; in some cases, it’s a matter of wanting to work with a particular editor, and there can also be intangible elements involved. When we left the official meeting at which Broadway Books first made an offer on my book, my agent, Lisa Bankoff, turned to me. “There was a lot of enthusiasm in that room,” she said. “You don’t feel love like that very often.” Lisa has been at ICM [International Creative Management] long enough to have learned a thing or two, and as we crossed West Fifty-Fifth Street, she told me that things usually work out best when you follow the love. So that was it: I decided to sign with Broadway.

Toth: My thought process was so different. While Alethea and Céline were deciding big or small, commercial or niche, I was deciding whether it was worth it to even try to break in to traditional publishing. Calculating the time and focus it would take to query, find an agent, and from there a publisher, and multiplying each step by the probability of success, then comparing it with the appeal of control, speed, and e-book economics for a category like mine—commercial fiction—all led me to self-publish my first novel.

This is not to say I didn’t try the traditional, proven path. I did, sort of. My writer friends scoff when I tell them I amassed only four rejections and three nonresponses to my querying efforts. They report their number of rejections before landing literary agents with a certain survivors’ pride (seeming to average around twenty-five to thirty, except in the case of one outlier who queried only her dream agent, successfully). But for me it was eye opening to see what happened over the period of time that I did query: I got depressed. Really depressed. The world was changing in unbelievably exciting ways that I had been trained for—as an Internet entrepreneur, in business school—and there I was, pursuing the status quo, an approach to producing books that I feared was falling far behind the times.

I absolutely see the benefits and the appeal of having a publishing house behind you. In fact, now that I’ve been at this awhile, I think that in most cases if you can get a publishing deal, you should take it. But if you find the business side of books almost as creative as the writing side, then self-publishing is a viable, exhilarating option—one that successful “crossover” authors such as Boyd Morrison, Brunonia Barry, and Lisa Genova have shown can actually lead to stellar deals with established large publishers.

Black: At the start, I got lucky—my editor, Christine Pride, was a peach. Like the best of editors, she saw both where I was aiming and where I failed and gave me feedback that was sensitive but persuasive. “How tied,” she asked, “are you to the title of your story collection,” which was then “Wise as Serpents, Harmless as Doves”? She was concerned that that title, while interesting, might give the false impression that the book was a religious book. “But,” she said, “some authors are very attached to their titles. Changing it can be as traumatic as changing your name.” Instead she suggested “I Knew You’d Be Lovely,” the title of a story that’s been an audience favorite. I hesitated for a few hours before realizing she was absolutely right.

Keating: The publisher felt my manuscript needed minimal editing, and I went through the galley-correction stages very smoothly. But the press did not have an in-house proofreader, and in hindsight, I should have hired one rather than rely solely on myself. I had to go through an extra round of corrections because I learned it’s really hard to spot errors in your own work.

Toth: One of the biggest downsides to being a self-published author is not having the rigorous review of an agent and editor who have tied themselves professionally to you and your book. When a literary expert has attached his or her reputation (and paycheck, to some extent) to your work, interests are fully aligned. Without such comrades, I’ve needed to personally ensure that Annie Begins meets expected standards of quality. To do this, I hired a manuscript consultant through Grub Street (which cost, in total, about eight hundred dollars) and relied on the advice of a close friend who is a former literary agent for input. I hired a freelance copyeditor (six hundred dollars) and then, after my mother caught eight typos, learned the difference between a copyeditor and a proofreader. I found one through LinkedIn and hired her (for another six hundred dollars). Coincidentally, she was in Alethea’s network so I was able to check her credentials, and she proved to be superb.

In contrast to Céline’s and Alethea’s relatively smooth sailing on the production front, this is where a self-publisher (especially if she has a perfectionist streak) can get tripped up, or at least get sucked into the black hole that is interior book design. While my avowed strategy was to hire experts wherever possible, in this case I found that I couldn’t find freelancers who could work to my standards, timeline, and budget, so I ended up doing most of the print and e-book design myself. I thought it would be a good learning experience, and it has been. I have learned it is exhausting and unbelievably time consuming. I will hire someone next time around.

Black: When my editor first e-mailed me a PDF of what the cover would look like, I opened it and knew it was right. I wrote her back two words: Love it. I loved the way it felt both classic and modern simultaneously; I loved the black and teal coloring; I loved the uncomplicated lines and elegant font. There was just one thing: What was that white silhouette in the lower left corner? A lion? A sexually aroused poodle? The devil? No—it was a couple embracing, with the woman kicking one leg up behind her. Well, this was not exactly clear, in part because the figure appeared to have only three legs—or, rather, two legs and some sort of tail. So Christine sent it back to the art folks with a request that they articulate the image.

Meanwhile I showed the cover to several colleagues, and everyone loved it—except for that white silhouette. Not only was it somewhat inscrutable, they said, but even if you could scrute it, it was too conventional an image for a book of inventive and unpredictable stories. So when the new art arrived, several weeks later, I asked Christine if we could substitute something else entirely (although to this day I have no idea what that would be—a piece of fruit? a guitar? a blender?). This was when Christine informed me that I was working with a publisher who did hundreds of covers a week, and at this late stage in the game, no, they could not send it back and make it a toothbrush. Later we laughed about it, and she said that cover discussions in particular can border on the absurd; she once had an author ask her if she could move the cloud to the left, which has become my personal catchphrase for asking for something I know is unreasonable but I just can’t help myself. (In an interesting twist, a version of that cover remained in place until just weeks before the publication date, when my publisher, based on some early enthusiastic feedback, decided to go with a simpler, more timeless design.)

Keating: One of the biggest benefits of going the small press route, and something crucial to me, was getting to have a say about the cover and the interior design. Authors with mainstream publishers rarely get cover approval in their contracts, while self-published authors have total control in this area. With Plain View, I felt I had the best of both worlds. I would be able to choose the art that would be the basis for the cover and have a say in the book’s interior appearance. At the same time, I was glad to let the press handle design and production. I knew it would be fun to search for the perfect image to represent my book, and when I saw the photo of a strikingly beautiful desert landscape, evocative of the setting of a pivotal scene in the novel, I knew it was “the one.” It had everything I hadn’t known I was looking for: the hint of a young woman, an ambiguous figure in the distance, a sense of longing. Little did I know that it would take two months, and a turn as a detective, to locate the photographer—in Iran! By that point I was more than happy to shell out five hundred bucks for the permission to use it.

Toth: As Céline points out, I had the joy and pain of total control of producing the cover for Annie Begins. Some self-publishers do their own cover design or rely on the templates provided by the author-services companies. Both can be fine options, but I wanted a truly great cover, not something I could produce on PowerPoint. I discovered the Book Cover Archive and became an instant devotee—poring over page after page of fantastic, inspiring design. I clicked my way to a boutique that would create an original cover costing between twenty-five hundred dollars and thirty-five hundred dollars. Yowza.

Then I lucked into finding Tangent Covers, which would allow me to customize from a selection of twenty-one extremely well-designed template covers for much less than a custom option (about three hundred dollars). I thought it over for a day and, as precious as my project is to me, I concluded that Annie Begins is not a baby, it’s a book, and hopefully the first of many, and I needed to start making smart economic decisions with my calculator and not just my heart. I decided to go with Tangent. It’s worth noting that I chose an option that demanded similar constraints to the ones imposed upon Alethea by her in-house designers. However, I don’t think that author in Alethea’s story was wrong to want to move the cloud to the left! I could easily see moving a cloud to the left. Or right. And back again. And I am glad that I retained that option.

I love the cover of Annie Begins for its clean lines and simplicity, but it does lack some of the oomph of the best truly custom designs (and I regret the mostly white cover, which disappeared against the all-white background of Amazon and other online retailers’ sites until a gray line was added). Still, I’m glad I didn’t overinvest, and next time around I might just use crowdsourcing via either crowdSPRING or 99designs. 

Keating: By “cooperative,” Plain View Press didn’t just mean working together in terms of submissions or publicity—it meant taking a financial stake in the book, in the form of pre-buying my first one hundred fifty books. I was uncomfortable with this—it felt a bit like one of those scary vanity presses one hears about. At the same time, I understood the positives: By working in this manner, the press was able to take bigger risks on books that would be shunned by other presses. Royalty and other terms were more than generous. I also liked the fact that the press had been around for more than thirty years and had published award-winning books (including The First Thing and the Last by Allan G. Johnson, which was praised by Publishers Weekly and was chosen as a “Great Read” by O, The Oprah Magazine in April 2010). I was sold when I spoke with another Plain View author, a poet, who had had very positive experiences with the press and had recouped her investment within two months of her book’s publication.

Black: My advance wasn’t life changing (just under twenty-thousand dollars), but it was a good number for a first book of short stories. Of course, if you factor in the cost of building and maintaining an author website and other expenses (this spring I flew to L.A. so I could be at a WordTheatre performance of one of my stories), it’s a little less impressive, but I try to avoid making such calculations. I am fond of saying (and still want to find a T-shirt that says): “Uh, I was told there’d be no math?”

Toth: About Alethea’s advance, I say at least it was a positive number! My expense-laden strategy for self-publishing is to try to replicate everything great about traditional publishing by utilizing top-notch freelancers—manuscript editor, copy-editor, proofreader, book-cover designer, and publicist. (The one thing I cannot realistically replicate is a sales force, so my distribution is almost entirely online.) All of this costs money—lots of it—although plenty of other self-published authors are far more DIY and are producing profitable books for a fraction of what I’ve invested.

Keating: My experience working on marketing and publicity fell somewhere in the middle of the continuum between mainstream publishers, who do most of the heavy lifting, and the self-publishing model. Plain View would be handling distribution and sales, which I absolutely didn’t want to do, as well as presentation of the book at some conventions and book fairs. The press also would prepare a flyer for me and share a mailing list for sending the book out for reviews. But while this was significant support, I knew it was just a fraction of what would be needed to make the book a success.

I contemplated doing the publicity work on my own, but even minimal research—and the advice of my publisher—convinced me that I needed help navigating the thickets of all that should be done in this arena. I’m now aware that I would have been paralyzed by indecision without my publicist, Molly Mikolowski at A Literary Light. Molly, who had headed up marketing for Coffee House Press before setting up her own agency, worked out a plan where I did the easy stuff (such as researching blogs), while she brought her expertise to bear on the more complex aspects of media and bookseller outreach. Expense aside, the actual details of a publicity campaign are probably similar for all three of our publishing models—getting the book into the hands of those who might review it favorably, securing interviews, and setting up readings. These days social media plays a big part, and much of that is up to the author no matter which path to publication is taken. I felt less lonely having someone in my corner day to day.

Black: I agonized over whether to hire an outside publicist. I’d been given the names of some terrific ones, including Jocelyn Kelley at Kelley & Hall Book Publicity and Promotion, whom my agent personally recommended to me, saying, “I don’t think she sleeps.” But I just couldn’t decide what to do. It’s difficult to gauge results—since there’s no control group for a book, it’s hard to know to what to attribute success or failure—and publicists can be expensive. The strongest argument in favor of spending the money (which can range from thirty-five hundred dollars to over ten thousand dollars) was that this book was the culmination of fifteen years of work, so why not do everything in my power to help it reach an audience? In fact, I probably would have gone ahead and hired a publicist had my meeting with the Crown publicity team not gone so well. There were six people in the room, all gushing about the book and what they were going to do to help it—one in a British accent, another in an Australian accent—all of them seeming to have read the stories and to genuinely love them. But to be honest, what I discovered is that a short story collection from an unknown author is just not going to be the top priority at a major publishing house. When three months before the pub date I saw that there were no readings booked, and we didn’t yet have a review from Publishers Weekly or Kirkus, I decided to treat publicity for this book as very DIY. I started e-mailing everyone I knew, offering to be an “opening act” for writers who had books coming out around the same time as mine; alerting contacts at writing conferences that I was willing to be a substitute if they had any last-minute cancellations; querying bookstore owners and artistic directors. It’s a delicate business, though, because in my opinion it’s better to do nothing than to annoy people. It’s also a lot of work, and on many days it feels a bit like operating a lemonade stand on the side of an interstate! But it also feels worth it.

Toth: Céline has talked about the lonely parts of being with a small press and I have to concur—the isolation can be even more pronounced when you wear all the hats. This was one of the reasons I decided to hire a publicist. I needed someone officially on my team. I didn’t have the skills or the contacts to do the publicity in the way I envisioned, and many other writers I know have needed to supplement the in-house publicity teams of their publishers, so I thought it wasn’t such a stretch to do it for my indie project. I have now been working with Jocelyn Kelley (coincidentally, the same person recommended so highly to Alethea by her agent) since late last fall, with a brief hiatus when Jocelyn, who is an Oprah Book Club correspondent, traveled to Australia with Oprah. Although a significant financial investment, publicity is something I cannot do for myself.

Keating: Because Plain View is a very small press among small presses, it doesn’t have a sales force, and I didn’t appreciate the significance of that drawback when I made my decision. Getting copies of Layla on bookstore shelves will be difficult—maybe not as difficult as the obstacles that exist for self-published books, as Michelle mentioned, but hard enough. That will be a big consideration for me the next time around.

But the toughest thing for me occurred just before my advance readers’ copies were about to be sent out for review. Susan Bright, my publisher, died unexpectedly. Susan was a special person, the press very much her creation, and her death brought home the reminder that small presses, even one with a thirty-year history, often rest on somewhat precarious foundations. I was extremely lucky that other wonderful and talented people picked up the reins and that my book’s publication was only slightly delayed.

Another surprise for me was how much I enjoyed the collaborative aspects of working with my publicist and also with a web designer, Andrew Beierle. Molly and Andrew made what could have been a very anxious time, before publication, a lot more enjoyable.

Black: A week before Christmas I received my biggest surprise. My editor was taking a job at Hyperion. This was a promotion for Christine, which she was happy about, but she was distressed to have to leave all her authors. Another harsh reality of the publishing industry, as we all know, is that there’s a lot of turnover. Christine was apologetic and kind as ever. But my book, a friend explained to me over the phone, had been orphaned. Fortunately, Lovely didn’t stay orphaned for long. An enthusiastic, equally wise, and equally gorgeous editor (disturbingly, both of my editors have looked like professional models) stepped in. Alexis Washam has been wonderful, and I’m grateful to this day: They say you’ll be lucky to get one good editor, and I was lucky enough to get two.

Toth: I can’t quite wrap my head around how much has happened in self-publishing in the six months I’ve been at it. Barry Eisler recently turned down a half-million-dollar advance in order to self-publish, while indie darling Amanda Hocking is going in the other direction. Everything is shaking out now, and on the eve of my arbitrarily defined self-publication date, I’m pretty happy to be in this position. But talk to me in six months—especially if by then I’ve only sold books to my relatives and Facebook friends.

Keating: Ditto for me!

Black: And me!

Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books this month. A graduate of Harvard University, she lives in Pawling, New York.

Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June. She earned an MA in creative writing from City College in New York and lives in New York City.

Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in April by (sixoneseven) books, an indie  press that she founded in 2010. A graduate of Harvard Business School, she lives in Boston and New York City.