With no luck finding an agent, I looked into the possibilities of self publishing. Writer friends have suggested it as a good option. I’ve read a few things saying it was more respectable these days. It wouldn’t hurt to look.
I started with what I thought was a relatively older, well established self publishing service. In the interest of niceness, I won’t mention the name. I went to their website and looked over the options. Some looked suitable for my needs, so I dug further.
Everything on their website required that you give your phone number and have them call you. As a person who actually teaches people to build web applications, that struck me as suspicious. Normally, a business with a web presence will use that technology to facilitate customer interaction. Employees talking on the phone is very expensive but getting the customer’s money upfront through web forms and payment processing is cheap.
This led to more research. I searched for information about the company, particularly complaints about them. There were plenty. Many of the complaints suggested the company would take your money and then not contact you, or would just pass you from employee to employee until you got frustrated. Other complaints said the company stalled your project while pushing you to purchase other, very expensive services from them.
In fairness, there were statements saying they had no trouble with the company. These positive comments were a minority. The impression I got was that the company was more responsive if they thought you could make more money for them. Again, that was just an impression.
A little more looking found even more bad news. People claimed the company was owned by a separate company that is also the owner of many other self publishing avenues. It was stated that even respected traditional publishers would farm out their self publishing branches to this separate company. If the separate company was behind all of them, and they were as bad as the many complaints alluded, self publishing may be more treacherous than I imagined.
For the time being, I will still pursue traditional publishing. I would prefer that route anyway; I don’t have the marketing resources to push my book on my own. My efforts will focus on a more desirable pitch. With any luck, and few thousand more rejections, my novel will be well on its way to the remainders shelf.