Interview Tucker Max dishes on the state of publishing

Interview Tucker Max dishes on the state of publishing "How I made Simon Schuster give me my own publishing company:" An Interview with Tucker Max As you probably know if you’re a frequent reader of this blog, there are now many ways to bring a book to market. Whether it’s in print or digital, self-published or through a publisher, with or without an agent, the choices available to a new author is almost mind-boggling. Tucker Max is different. As the author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, he ignored all the options available to writers and made publishers do what they’d never done before - give an author their own publishing company.In these times of great change, it's possible for authors to forge their own path - as Tucker did by picking and choosing the elements of self-publishing and traditional publishing that make the most sense for his book.Watch our interview with Tucker - or read the transcript below - for some inspiration! How publishing worked 15 years agoHi Tucker, it’s great to have you with us today. Let’s start from the beginning - can you tell us from the early days when you started to write and wanted to get your stories out into books?Tucker: Yeah, I started in writing in a totally different era (2001). I used to send emails to my friends, and they thought they were really funny. They kept telling me, †you need to publish this. This needs to be a book." Question 3: Why is that audience going to care? What are you going to say that's interesting and valuable to them?If you cannot answer those three questions clearly, then don't write a book.Now let's say you can answer those three questions. I would say that for almost all non-fiction, the best bet is to self-publish. That way you get to control the rights to the book, and you can use it to promote whatever it is you're trying to promote. As soon as you go traditional, you have now sold the rights and royalties to that book to someone else. So you can't give copies away. If you're trying to do speaking gigs with the book, you've got to buy the book at price from your publisher.If you want to do excerpts, if you want to use the content other places, you don't own the content anymore, the publisher does. And they don't care about your business at all. They care about selling actual copies of the book. So for most non-fiction authors, their goals are not aligned with a publisher’ s goals. So that's why going self-publishing is the better route, for almost all non-fiction authors.Photo credit:  Mac Danzig.If you're a non-fiction author, do you agree with Tucker's take on publishing? What has been your experience of working with a traditional publisher, if any? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.