E-Pub, Self-Pub, Traditional Pub? It Doesn't Have To Be One Or The Other

Pretty much every day a post floats through my Twitter account about an article someone just posted on this issue. I find that time and time again, these articles are trying to move this issue back into the black and white realm. In other words, authors who choose one option are clearly wrong. Self-published authors bash traditional; traditional bashes on strictly e-pub....the battle goes on and on.

I am one person who does believe that creative writing, in any format, is one of the few hobby/art forms, that is truly accessible to everyone. Anyone can write. Writing is a form of human expression and emotion. Whether it is in the form of a short story, poem or play, each person on this planet has the ability to craft words on a page to express the feelings and thoughts running through their heads.

When it comes to the delivery platform available to authors, this depends entirely on the writer, the needs and desires of the writer and certainly the style of writing. In other words, which option you take to get your words out to your readers cannot be fixed in stone. It all depends.

This last article I saw was questioning whether or not a writer should seek out a publisher or simply self-publish. The question is, why can't the author do both? Maybe one piece of writing is so unique and falls into such a niche market that self-publishing that book is the best option, while at the same time, work on another story that fits more with a traditional approach? At some level, writers have been doing this for some time now through the use of pseudonyms. These authors have found that once voice works for one publisher and another voices works for someone else. So they write under two (or even up to 4 names) for different publishers. These authors didn't have to make a decision of writing only one way and through only one platform. They were able to find a place for all of their writing.

The decision on how to release our stories is not as fixed in stone as many would like to argue. In the end, this is simply a personal choice and maybe one person's choice doesn't work for you. That's fine! And, as we progress through our writing career, we can continue to change if we need to. There may be a time (as we have seen recently) that well established authors are ready to move into another distribution approach. There is nothing wrong with that either. We have to simply remember that each decision is simply on a case by case approach.