Lana asked Janette Rallison:

Hi! I love your novels; they're so fun and humorous and just great in general. I'm an aspiring author and I'm currently researching self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. Why did you decide to traditionally publish and what are some of the pros and cons of it? Thanks for taking the time to answer this question and for writing such wonderful books!

Janette Rallison I'm doing an entire class on this at Kanaab Writers conference on March 4. It's a long topic. Traditional publishing gives you an advance up front (or it should. Be wary of publishing with small publishers who don't give advances.) You also have an editing team and hopefully some marketing support. Your book has a better chance of being in stores. In many people's eyes, you have more credibility because your book has the stamp of approval of a publisher. Anyone can (and many people do) put up a badly written novel and become an indie (self-published) author.

That said, you'll only get a royalty of between 5-10%. A lot of the contracts are horrible. You're limited to the amount of marketing you can do. (You can't put your book on sale or give away free ebook copies.)

The advantage of indie publishing is that you can do all of that plus you get 70% of your royalties. But you have to pay for editing, a cover, your marketing--you can actually lose money going indie. And it's hard to get noticed in a world of millions of other indie books.

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