If you self publish a book on Amazon can you later on publish the same book from a real publishing company?

[Guest]

Also, is publishing on Amazon faster than a publishing company?

[Lisa]

Publishers want first rights. So they usually won’t pick up anything that was previously published by you or anyone else. They may make an exception if your self published book sold something like 10K copies.

[Jeff]

Can you? Yes. Will a publisher want anything to do with it? Almost certainly, no.

Assuming you have the money to get everything you want done with your book, self-publishing is significantly faster.

[Kessily]

Lisa gave you a great answer, so I'll just add the answer to your last question. Self-publishing can be infinitely faster than publishing through a publisher. Since you are your only client you can move as quickly as you want to.

It only takes 10 minutes to set up the listing and upload, so the before work is what will hold you back. How fast is your editor? beta readers? How quickly are you going to get the cover and formatting done. For experienced authors with teams in place it's not uncommon to be able to get a book out, or at least up for pre-order in a couple of weeks.

[Heather]

Yes, and yes. If you need any help, I've been doing it since 2007.

[Eirini]

Possible, but unlikely. Publishing yourself is way faster, but it's basically like running your own business.

[Debbie]

Publishing yourself on Amazon is years faster than traditional publishing. But unless you are selling in the 10s of thousands, a trad publisher is extremely unlikely to take on an already-self-published book.

[Mischa]

Is it legal? Yes, absolutely. When you publish on Amazon, you still hold all of the rights, although you do grant Amazon non-exclusive distribution rights. Even if you use Amazon's ISBN (though you can't use that ISBN anywhere else, you CAN publish the same book somewhere else with a different ISBN)

Is it probable? Not at all. Most publishers want first rights, which, if you publish at Amazon, you have awarded those first rights to yourself. Most publishers also want exclusive rights, which means you'd have to take it down everywhere you've self-published. Sometimes taking a book down is problematic.

[Steven]

First question: in theory, yes, in practice probably not. Publishers generally won't consider a book that's been previously self-published, unless it sold very well. They think that low sales mean the book doesn't have a big enough audience to justify the time and money they'd have to spend to bring it to market. How well is very well? It varies, but you're probably talking, "If I could sell that many copies without a publisher, why would I want a publisher?"

Second question: yes. With Amazon, the time between pressing the "publish" button and the book being on sale is usually less than 24 hours for an eBook and a few days for a paperback. With a publisher, the time between signing the contract and having the book on sale can be as long as two years. It's not an entirely fair comparison, because the publisher does a lot of things after signing the contract that you need to do before pressing "publish" on Amazon (editing, cover design, layout, marketing...), but all of that can happen much faster than a publisher does it.