How I Picked My Publisher

In 2021, I sat across from two literary agents who had the same reaction before I’d even finished my pitch. People are tired of Facebook, they told me. Nobody wants another book about that place. I remember nodding along, like maybe they had a point, while some other part of me was thinking: my story is much broader than this.

That conversation could have ended things right there. A lot of people would have let it. Instead, it sent me looking for a different way in, and along the way, I learned there isn’t really one path to publishing a book. If you’re talking about a physical book, there are three, and here’s how I understand the main differences:

Traditional publishing means an agent pitches your proposal and sample chapters to publishers. If someone bites, you get an advance and no financial risk up front, plus the marketing muscle of an established house — though that’s even a big maybe; a lot of people I know who went traditional still ended up doing most of their own marketing anyway. The tradeoffs: the publisher owns your work and takes most of the revenue, the turnaround is long — think three to four years — and landing a deal at all is hard.

Hybrid publishing flips that. You pay some of the upfront costs to a firm in exchange for editing, design, and distribution support, and you keep a much larger share of what the book earns. It’s faster than traditional, but it will still test your patience, as you will be on their schedule for the things they’re in charge of. The tradeoff is that you’re the one carrying the financial risk, and “hybrid” covers an enormous range of firms at wildly different price points and levels of actual support.

Self-publishing means you pay all the upfront costs and keep most or all of the revenue — full control, fastest turnaround. But your book likely won’t be in physical bookstores, mostly paperback unless you pay extra for hardcover, and you’re the one running everything: distribution through Amazon KDP or IngramSpark, cover design, editing, marketing, all of it.

But that’s the map for a physical book specifically. I don’t think that’s the whole landscape anymore. More and more, I’m seeing people build their books in public before there’s a book at all — serializing chapters on Substack, going video-forward the way you’d build a show, or working the material out loud through a podcast. None of that requires an agent or a publisher. It’s a fourth path, and depending on what you’re trying to do, it might be the right one before you ever touch the traditional three.

I can’t tell you how long it will take you to write your book. In some respects, it took me years. In another, once I committed myself to a timeline, it was roughly two weeks for a first draft, nearly a year to edit, and five to six months for design, and then ongoing, real work on launch and marketing. But I’ll share more of that process in a future newsletter.

The traditional publishers who did show interest in my book wanted a very specific version of it. Mostly Facebook, mostly Trump, and darker than what I’d actually lived. It wasn’t that they’d have taken the pen out of my hand entirely — but they’d have had a lot more control over what I actually wrote than I was willing to give up. I wasn’t chasing an advance. I was after something else with this book, which I’ll get into in another piece. But I’d spent twenty-five years in those rooms — RNC, NRSC, DCI Group, a decade at Facebook — and I wasn’t going to hand over that kind of control on the one project where I finally got to decide what the story was.

The first thing I did was talk to a bunch of friends who had written books to get their advice. Every one of them told me some version of the same thing: whichever route you pick, expect a lot more work than you think. You may end up hiring your own additional editors or fact-checkers on top of whatever your publisher provides. And no matter what, you’re doing your own marketing — which means having your own platform or audience isn’t optional. It’s the thing that actually sells the book.

Second, I hired a writing coach, Roseanne Cheng, who runs a company called Evergreen Authors, and she did something those agents hadn’t bothered to do. She mapped out the terrain for me — what each route actually costs you and what it actually gives back. She’s the one who helped me build my first real proposal. However, I realized I was going to need a few years to focus on building up my online audience, and so I put the book on the back burner for a few years.

What’s next for paid subscribers is what the process looked like once I settled on a hybrid option path.