2. Loss of creative and content control Make no mistake about this: once you take a deal from a publisher, they own the book and all the content in it, so they get to decide everything that goes in the book. They get final say over every word, the book cover, the author bio, everything. I can tell you from my experience, as a group, publishers tend to make terrible aesthetic decisions. This is for many reasons, but the biggest is what I call “adverse selection.” Though some people who work in publishing are deeply skilled and thoughtful editors whose work makes books much better, those people are rare, and tend to only work with the biggest authors. Most of the people working at publishing companies are doing that because they were not good enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t say that as a put-down, I say it simply so you understand that someone who didn’t make good enough decisions on their own about their writing is now in a position to hold final decision-making power over your book. 3. Loss of marketing control (and no support) Publishers do no marketing. I cannot emphasize this enough—pub- lishers expect YOU to do all the work of selling the book for THEM. They don’t have a plan to sell 25k copies of your book. That’s YOUR job. This might be OK for a novelist with a big existing audience, but if you are someone like the authors my company works with, and you want your book to promote you or your business, a traditional publisher greatly restricts your options. For example, if you want to position yourself as an expert in some- thing, what happens if they don’t think your book topic appeals to enough people? They don’t care about your business, they only care about selling copies of books, so they’ll make you go broader with your topic, which means the book won’t be as appealing to the specific audience you are trying to reach. 322 · ThE SCriBE METhOD