From The Productive Indie Fiction Writer:

Trad vs Indie in 2026:
The Brutal, Unsentimental Guide

From a 35-Book Trad Author Turned Indie Business Builder

This is a series:

• Part 1: Trad vs Indie in 2026: The Brutal, Unsentimental Guide
• Part 2: Indie Publishing in 2026: Money, Control, AI, and the Business You Actually Run
• Part 3: Trad, “Hybrid,” and Choosing Wisely in 2026: The Reality No One Says Out Loud

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Let’s start with my bias, so nobody faints later.

I spent years in traditional publishing. Thirty-five books’ worth of years. I did the whole dance: agents, contracts, deadlines, covers I didn’t choose, editorial notes that read like fortune cookies, royalty statements that required a forensic accountant, and a constant low-grade feeling that someone else owned my career.

In 2011, I walked away and went 100% indie. I’ve been publishing under multiple pen names ever since, running my own micropress, selling direct, dealing with real numbers instead of dreams, and generally discovering what it means to have an actual business instead of a corporate leash.

So am I biased?

Yes. I’m biased like Amazon’s search results: structurally, predictably, and in ways you can see coming if you know how the system works. But here’s the thing:

• I know what traditional publishing gets right.
• I know where indie publishing falls on its face.
• And I’m still obsessive enough about this industry to dig through court transcripts, sales data, and platform policies before I open my mouth.

What follows is not “trad bad, indie good.” It’s: “Here is how both systems actually function in 2026. Choose your poison wisely.”

The Mindset Divide Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that usually gets left out of polite conversations:

• Trad authors think they have a career. They believe they’re entering “the industry,” joining “the profession,” and stepping into the role of Author/Artist With A Capital “A”.
• Indie authors know they’re running a business. They understand the job is: make books, package books, sell books, analyze numbers, repeat. Artistry, the highly creative writing of stories, takes place in a quiet room, away from the day-to-day business concerns.

This mindset difference determines everything else. In 2026, it’s the single biggest indicator of whether you’ll survive.

The World You’re Publishing Into (Spoiler: It’s on Fire)

Before we get into pros and cons, you need to know the water you’re swimming in:

• AI is vomiting out books by the thousands. Amazon literally had to cap KDP uploads at three per day to stem the spam tide. That’s how much chaff is hitting the marketplace. Indies in KU are competing not just with other authors but with industrial-scale AI garbage.
• Retailers and platforms are deep in enshittification. (Yes, that’s a technical term, courtesy of Cory Doctorow.) Platforms start out good for creators, then get slowly worse as they squeeze users, creators, and advertisers to extract more revenue. Think: Amazon search results, social feeds, ad dashboards.
• Most trad books sell terribly. That infamous “12 copies” remark in the PRH antitrust trial might be fuzzy, but the underlying truth isn’t:
  • a huge percentage of trad frontlist sells under 1,000 copies.
  • Many sell far less.
• Bookstores are shrinking and browsing behaviors have changed. Trad still has a bookstore advantage, but it’s not the world-dominating one it used to be.
• Readers haven’t stopped reading. They’ve just stopped depending on bookstores and publisher catalogs to find their next book. Algorithms, newsletters, TikTok, rec engines, and friend networks are doing the curating now.

In other words: You are trying to make a stable living in an ecosystem that is being AI-polluted, platform-enshittified, and structurally hostile to your stability.

Fun, right?

Welcome to 2026. Let’s get to the choices.

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TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING IN 2026: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE NOT-SAID

Trad isn’t evil. It’s just a humungous corporate business model designed around protecting its revenue, not yours. Sometimes those interests overlap. Often they don’t.

Let’s break it down.

THE REAL ADVANTAGES OF TRAD PUBLISHING

1. You don’t pay production costs.

Covers, editing, layout, printing; all on their dime. If paying upfront feels impossible, this is a real advantage.

2. You get access to bookstore-only readers.

This is trad’s only remaining reach advantage:

• Booksellers’ catalogs
• Sales reps pitch it to stores and libraries.
• Virtually guaranteed library placement
• Physical shelf presence, where casual browsers wander by.

That demographic is shrinking but still real.

An indie can get into bookstores, but not at the same automatic, system-level scale. Trad still owns that channel.

3. Industry recognition & award eligibility.

As a trad author, you:

• Qualify for more awards
• Qualify for grants, residencies, and fellowships
• Get considered for Year’s Best anthologies
• May have your publisher submit your work for you
• Have editors and anthologists come to you — or to your publisher — instead of you begging for consideration.

Indies often can’t even get through the door. Some competitions and anthologies explicitly exclude self-published work. Trad authors don’t even see those fences.

4. Professional editing & institutional support.

A good trad editor is worth their weight in platinum. (There are bad ones too, but that’s another guide.)

A good editor inside a trad house can:

• Elevate your book
• Help shape your career (at least in theory)
• Advocate for you internally

That’s a big, legitimate plus when you get someone who cares and isn’t carrying 40 authors and a nervous breakdown.

5. Advances.

Advances are smaller than they used to be, but they still exist. They’re also often split into three or four payments over 18 months, but again, different rant.

• Even a modest advance is still real money.
• It can fund writing time or help survive a rough patch.

Just don’t confuse “advance” with “career stability.”

6. Someone else makes decisions.

For some personalities, this is a feature, not a bug. If the idea of handling covers, categories, marketing, and strategy gives you hives, trad offers relief.

• You write what they tell you to write.
• On the timeline they set.
• In the genre they think they can sell.

If decision fatigue is your personal hell, having a publisher make the big calls can feel like relief.

BUT…that sense of safety is mostly an illusion. We’ll come back to why that perceived safety is dangerous, but yes, it’s an advantage for some authors.

And enshittification ensures the illusion won’t last. Trad publishers will drop you or ghost you with zero warning, often for reasons unrelated to your skill or effort.

THE REAL DISADVANTAGES OF TRAD PUBLISHING

1. The gatekeeping is savage.

Agents, editors, catalog committees, marketing vetoes… It usually takes years to get a yes. To even get looked at, you typically need:

• A finished manuscript
• A query letter that survives the slush firehose
• An agent who believes in you
• An editor who can get your book through acquisitions
• A marketing team that doesn’t veto it at the last minute

This can take years and dozens or hundreds of rejections. That’s not “paying your dues.” That’s unpaid labor on spec for a system that is not obligated to ever pay you.

2. You lose control.

All of it. Covers, titles, positioning, release dates. Sometimes even content. Signing a trad contract means you’re agreeing that other people get final say over:

• Your cover
• Your title
• Your tagline / positioning
• Your content (sometimes, the last proofing edits are not presented to you for your approval, and proofers can make any changes they want).
• Your release date
• Your discounting and pricing

If their vision of your career doesn’t match yours, guess which one wins.

True story: The cover for the second book in a series I wrote for a trad publisher gave away the major plot twist, if a reader had read the first book. When I tried to politely point this out, I was told that “marketing thinks this cover will sell the book, so we’re keeping it.”

3. Timelines are glacial.

You can publish three indie books in the time it takes a trad house to format your imprint page. From contract to publication, you’re often looking at:

• 12–24 months minimum
• Longer if the house reshuffles lists, merges imprints, or panics about “market conditions.”

In that time, you could have:

• Written and published multiple indie books
• Tested covers and blurbs
• Built a readership
• Pivoted when something wasn’t working

Trad does not pivot. Trad grinds.

4. Reversion clauses are unicorns.

Most modern contracts don’t include them at all. If they do, the criteria are absurd, impossible, or tied to “availability,” which means “never reverting.”

The contract for one of my traditionally published books had a reversion clause that said if the book was available anywhere, it was still in print. So the publisher put the book up “for sale” on their website (which doesn’t have a formal storefront. You can email them to arrange payment and postage.). The book can’t be bought anywhere but their site, if you can find it there, but it’s still technically “available”, nearly 25 years later. I will never get the rights back for that book.

5. Rights get swallowed whole. Forever.

Most trad publishers’ boilerplate contracts take all world rights for everything. That includes:

• Foreign rights
• Audio rights
• Film/TV rights
• Special edition rights
• Merch rights

…and they keep 100% of the money from selling them.

I once had a trad publisher sell German rights to my book without telling me. The German publisher contacted me, thrilled about my new cover. My US publisher said they were “not contractually obligated” to inform me about the sale.

I swallowed the lesson.

Modern contracts are written to keep rights with the publisher for as long as legally possible. Unless you (or your agent) know how to negotiate:

• Specific sales thresholds, and/or
• Clear time-based reversion triggers, and/or
• Format and territory carve-outs,

…assume you’re giving those rights away for the effective lifetime of the work.

6. Royalty statements are hot garbage.

Semiannual. Incomprehensible. Completely useless for marketing decisions.

You get twice-yearly royalty reports in formats that look like they were designed by a committee of auditors who hate you. There is rarely any granular breakdown by channel, campaign, or day. That means you cannot tie your own marketing efforts to results. Nor can you see what’s working, what isn’t, or where the leaks are.

Compare that to indie, where you can run an ad on Tuesday, see if it moved the needle by Thursday, and kill or scale on Friday.

Trad authors are driving blind.

7. “Marketing budget” usually means “your cover is in our catalog.”

Contracts sometimes promise, “Publisher will spend $X on marketing and promotion.” In practice, that often means:

• A catalog listing (which is also the sales tool for booksellers)
• Very limited ad spend
• Maybe a NetGalley listing
• A generic social media mention.

And that’s it. The dollar figure in the contract is fictional math attached to things they were going to do anyway.

The myth that publishers will market your book refuses to die, despite plenty of traditional authors also making it clear that this just isn’t the case. Yes, Brandon Sanderson gets marketing, because they know they’ll get their money back and then some.

John Scalzi gets marketing (of a sort; his publisher sends him around the country for 90 days at a time, and it’s up to him to sell the books from the podium, after that).

New authors, or those new to traditional publishing do not get marketing dollars beyond the most basic I mentioned above. You are expected to do the marketing heavy-lifting. In fact, they would prefer that you already have an extended author platform from which you can sell your book for them.

Some contracts even dictate how many followers you must maintain on each social media platform.

8. Trad authors think they have a career, but they don’t.

You can be ghosted or dropped at any time. If your numbers don’t meet expectations, or the house changes direction, or your editor leaves, or they simply need to clean the list, you can find yourself:

• Quietly not optioned
• Books allowed to go out of print or fall off the radar
• Emails answered slower and slower until they’re not

Your career is not yours. It’s a line item in someone else’s spreadsheet.

My editor died at one traditional publisher I was with. I never sold another book to them. I never heard from them again, unless I tried to make contact, and I never spoke to the same person twice.

9. Average trad sales are shockingly low.

Even if that “12 copies” quote was sloppy, the outcome remains: Most trad books sell poorly, many sell unbelievably poorly, and the outliers that sell hundreds of thousands mask the system’s real performance.

10. Enshittification hits trad authors hardest.

Because they can’t pivot, they can’t change covers, they can’t relaunch, they can’t adjust pricing, they can’t diversify (non-compete clauses are common) and they can’t go direct.

They are stuck inside whatever platform decay their publisher decides to tolerate.

11. The illusion of safety. This is the big one.

Authors often choose trad because it feels safer:

• Someone else is “in charge.”
• Someone else handles business.
• Someone else is driving.

Except:

• That “someone else” is not responsible for paying your mortgage.
• They answer to shareholders, not to you.
• You cannot force them to care more.

So yes, choose trad if you want someone to hold your hand and tell you what to do. Just don’t mistake the hand-holding for an actual safety net.

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INDIE PUBLISHING IN 2026: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BRUTAL HONESTY

What You Gain — and What You Have to Shoulder

Here’s the other side. This is the path I’m biased toward, with its own very real headaches.

THE REAL ADVANTAGES OF INDIE

1. Total control.

Covers, titles, editors, metadata, release schedule. You own it all. You can do whatever you want to do. Write whatever you want. Sell it how you want. Create your cover out of jigsaw pieces and scotch tape, if you want. (Depending upon the story or non-fiction concept, that might actually be an eye-catching cover, done right!)

There is no committee between you and your readers unless you hire one.

2. Books never go out of print.

This is enormous. A huge structural advantage. Your backlist becomes:

• A consistent revenue engine (ads to Book 1 can feed a 10-book backlist for years),
• A bingeable ecosystem, and
• A long-term asset that grows over time. Income compounds. Your backlist is your pension.

Trad authors can only dream of this stability:

• If you don’t perform quickly, your book will vanish.
• The sequel you desperately want to write may never get greenlit.
• You simply don’t have a backlist, unless you’re very, very (ad infinitum) lucky with sales.

Backlist is where the serious money lives. Indie lets you build it on purpose.

3. You can learn the skills.

Most working indies know basic publishing skills. They can format books, manage metadata, build newsletters, and understand reader funnels. I outsource covers and editing now, but I know how to do both because I’ve done both.

All the skills you need to self-publish are learnable. But because you have total control over your business, you can also out-source all of it, if you want.

4. Indie doesn’t have to cost money.

You can bring a book to market for almost nothing if you’ve built skills. And in many countries (hello, Canada, UK, Australia), ISBNs are free, which wipes out a huge US-only indie expense.

5. Real-time dashboards.

You get daily sales, and real-time data, which provides immediate feedback loops, telling you what’s working and what isn’t. No crystal balls. No calcified royalty statements in Sanskrit.

6. Royalties up to ~98%.

Direct digital sales through your own storefront are obscene in their profitability. But even if you’re only using retail storefronts for distribution, then typical indie numbers are:

• eBook: 35–70%
• POD print: ~40–60% depending on platform and trim
• Direct digital: up to ~98% after payment processing and platform fees, depending on your setup

Translate that:

• A book that earns you $1 in trad can easily earn $3–$6 indie.
• Multiply that across a large backlist and the math gets loud.

7. Direct sales + live markets (“faux storefronts”).

You’re not limited to retailers. You can:

• Run your own online store
• Sell signed books, bundles, and extras
• Use pop-ups, conventions, markets, and fairs as in-person storefronts
• Build a reader community that deals directly with you, not an algorithm.

Direct sales are where:

• Profit margin is highest,
• Relationships are strongest, and
• Algorithms hurt you least

In an age of enshittified platforms, this matters.

8. Indie-first licensing is powerful.

This is not a hybrid model. This is advanced indie business. You can license:

• Foreign rights
• Audio
• Special editions
• Merchandise

…on your terms, while keeping world English ebook + print. (In otherwords, you keep control of your book.)

9. Speed and agility.

From finished draft to live book:

• Ebooks: days
• POD print: a couple of weeks
• Audio: as long as your narrator/production queue

You can:

• Rapid-release if you want
• Pause when life falls apart
• Relaunch with new covers or blurbs
• React to trends without begging for a meeting

You’re not waiting two years for the machine to spool up.

10. You can pivot when platforms enshittify.

Indies can go wide, go direct and change directions rapidly. Trad authors sit and wait for their publisher to maybe react.

You’re still affected by AI spam flooding retailers, algorithms deprioritizing your books, and ads getting more expensive and less effective, but you can:

• Go wide across multiple retailers
• Shift from KU to wide or wide to direct
• Build your own site, list, and reader funnel
• Lean into what AI can’t steal: your voice, your weirdness, your specific obsessions

Trad authors are tied to one publisher and a handful of giant retailers. Indies can route around damage.

THE REAL DISADVANTAGES OF INDIE

Let’s not pretend this is all espresso and freedom.

1. You are the entire business.

Author, publisher, CMO, data analyst, production manager. All you.

You don’t need to adore every role, but you will:

• Make marketing decisions
• Track basic numbers
• Think about reader funnels and release strategy

You must make all the decisions. Even the tricky ones. And despite the tsunami of books, courses and gurus out there, along with supportive indie author groups, no one knows anything about what really works, because the answer is different for every single indie author.

If that sort of doubt and uncertainty would shred your nerves, perhaps trad publishing is for you. If the thought of making any business decision yourself fills you with horror, indie will feel like a hostile planet.

Even if you hate numbers, you must at least look at them. You don’t need to be a pivot-table pervert, just competent.

2. You pay the bills up front.

Even if you DIY heavily, you’ll still invest in things like editing (in some form), cover design (even premades cost money), ISBNs if you want your own, and tools: email service, website, ad spend.

Some guides quote $2,000–$4,000 as the average cost to self-publish a book at “professional” quality, but these assume you are outsourcing everything. Career indies often bring that cost way down by:

• Learning to format their own books,
• Using premade covers or long-term designers, and negotiating terms,
• Working with trusted editors on efficient processes.

But either way, you are the investor.

3. Some prestige doors are closed.

Contests, awards, and anthologies still slam the door on indies. As an indie, you will:

• Be ineligible for certain awards, grants, residencies, and contests,
• Be ignored by some best-of anthologies and prestige outlets,
• Be occasionally sniffed at by people who still think “self-published = amateur”

Does that matter to income? Not particularly. But if literary prestige is a core life goal, it’s a real limitation.

4. Discoverability is your responsibility.

You are responsible for:

• Finding the readers who actually want what you write
• Positioning your books so those readers recognize them as “for me”
• Building systems that don’t collapse when a social platform sneezes

That doesn’t mean writing to trend or treating readers like data points. It does mean you can’t upload and pray.

The reality, though, is that this is also a drawback of traditional publishing. No one gets to just write, any more.

5. Burnout is real.

Indie absolutely encourages:

• Overwork,
• Hyper-productivity, and
• Chasing every new tactic while your nervous system smokes in the corner.

Without boundaries and systems, you will try to do everything yourself until your body or brain quits on you.

Ask me how I know.

6. AI nuked the “write to market” strategy.

You cannot compete with machines on tropes, templates, or trend-chasing and you have zero hope of matching them for speed.

Your advantage is voice, originality, humanity, specificity, and resonance. Indies who cling to old KU-rapid-release tactics are drowning.

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SO WHICH IS BETTER? (WE’RE NOT DECIDING TODAY)

I’m not going to dump a full decision matrix here. That’s what Parts 2 and 3 are for:

1. Part 2 dives into the indie model in depth.
2. Part 3 dismantles the myths around trad and exposes the reality of hybrid (including why balanced hybrid is, bluntly, a trap).

Here’s the 2026 reality in one pass:

Choose traditional if:

• You want access to bookstores and the prestige ecosystem they live in.
• You’re genuinely okay with giving up control of your book and your career.
• You don’t need fast timelines or granular data.
• You’re emotionally fine with being a single product line in someone else’s catalog.

Choose indie if:

• You want ownership and control.
• You’re willing to be a business owner as well as a writer.
• You’d rather build a long-term, backlist-driven income than gamble on one big launch.
• You’re ready to differentiate yourself from AI and trend-chasing through voice, quality, and reader relationships.

But don’t kid yourself. One of these paths is a business. The other is a lottery with nice stationary.

Neither come with guarantees.

Stay tuned.