Benefits of Self-Publishing for Romantasy Author Carissa Broadbent

If you love vampires or enemies-to-lovers romance, you’re probably familiar with Carissa Broadbent.

The bestselling author is best known for her romantasy series “Crowns of Nyaxia,” which features a dark world of vampires, warring houses, and romantic angst.

Broadbent originally self-published the first installment of the series, “The Serpent and the Wings of Night,” in August 2022. After she signed a deal with Bramble in June 2023, the publisher rereleased it in December 2023, and it immediately hit The New York Times bestseller list. Broadbent’s career has been skyrocketing ever since.

Now, Broadbent is revisiting one of her earliest novels with Bramble at her side. Broadbent self-published “Daughter of No Worlds” — the first installment of her “War of Lost Hearts” series — in 2020, but it’s getting a splashy new cover and release on October 14.

Speaking to Business Insider ahead of the release, Broadbent reflected on her publishing journey. While she loves working with a traditional publisher, Broadbent said there were big benefits to the self-publishing model.

More money

Broadbent works with Bramble in a hybrid model, retaining some self-publishing rights for her e-books even as the publisher releases her novels.

“Sometimes people take me now being hybrid as some kind of a message that traditional publishing is ‘better’ than self-publishing, and I do not find that to be the case,” Broadbent told Business Insider. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with my partnership with my publisher because that was very specifically the right move for me. But as a net, I do not think that one is better. There are pluses and minuses to both routes.”

Broadbent said she initially self-published “Daughter of No Worlds” because it made her goal of writing full-time “more attainable.”

“I went into self-publishing with the goal of one day becoming a full-time author,” she told Business Insider. “From the research that I had done at the time, I had felt like that was a much more attainable goal through self-publishing than it was through traditional publishing because there’s so much more control.”

Likewise, Broadbent was attracted to self-publishing because it can be lucrative quickly, which is a bonus if you don’t have a book deal or advance to offer financial support as you write. Some authors even make more money self-publishing than they would through a traditionally published book.

“You keep a much bigger piece of the pie,” Broadbent said. “There are a lot of authors self-publishing who are not household names by any means but who are making very comfortable middle-class livings doing this. So that was the route I took because I really thought I was never going to be a New York Times bestselling author anyway.”

In the early days of her career, Broadbent’s novels were primarily e-books, and she said she started making money from them fairly quickly because she wasn’t sharing that profit with a publisher.

“E-books are very, very, very lucrative when you are self-published,” she said. “You keep everything essentially.”

“Your overhead is so low,” she said, adding that her books being available through the Kindle Unlimited program helped. “Those royalty structures for most traditional deals are not super advantageous to authors.”

Working two jobs

Self-publishing also suited Broadbent early in her career because she still worked a day job in marketing. She had to figure out how to fit writing into her life, and because she wasn’t on a publisher’s deadline, she could do it in the way that made sense for her.

For Broadbent, that meant writing early in the morning.

“I realized I was never going to write after work,” she said. “I had a really stressful day job, and I worked with a lot of people on the West Coast, so my days tended to bleed late.”

Broadbent would get up around 4:30 a.m. to write before work.

Now, Broadbent writes full-time, so she doesn’t have to start as early, but that flexibility in the early years of her writing career made a huge difference for her.

Quick turnaround

Since she didn’t have a book deal when she was exclusively self-publishing, Broadbent had an incentive to get her books up quickly so she could start making money. She said it was much simpler to actually publish when she was indie, even though she was still hiring editors to review her work.

“Indie authors sometimes have a bad reputation for not editing,” she said. “My books went through a lot of editing when I was indie, just as much as they go through now, honestly. But the difference is that I am the puppet master.”

Broadbent said she could give editors with whom she had working relationships chunks of her books at a time, so she could continue drafting as they were being edited.

“You can do things in parallel,” she said. “You have a lot of flexibility to do that kind of stuff.”

“In traditional publishing, we are mobilizing a giant machine of thousands of people, so that is not happening,” she said. “There are much harder starts and stops to things.”

The next book in the “Crowns of Nyaxia” series, “The Lion and the Deathless Dark,” is scheduled for publication in August 2026, and Broadbent said she had to submit a complete first draft of the novel to her editor about a year before that. She couldn’t revise it until her editor had time with the book, so the process moved more slowly.

Likewise, Broadbent said that you have to consider the physical process of printing books that comes with traditional publishing.

“It takes like over seven months just to physically produce the book,” she said. “You’re printing hundreds of thousands of copies.”

With her self-published e-books, the process was almost instantaneous for Broadbent.

“You basically press a button, and 48 hours later, there’s the book,” she said. “It’s out.”

Writing what she wants

Broadbent’s works fall into the “romantasy” category, blending high fantasy with deeply moving (and steamy) romance. Her description of herself on her Instagram bio sums it up well: “#1 NYT bestselling author of books with magic & kissing.”

However, when Broadbent was first writing “Daughter of No Worlds” in 2018 and 2019, romantasy wasn’t as big a deal in the publishing industry. Series like “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros’ “Fourth Wing” hadn’t gone viral yet, and often, young adult titles reigned supreme on the bestseller list.

Broadbent said that the gap in the industry for adult romantic fantasy was part of what pushed her toward self-publishing “Daughter of No Worlds.”

“With ‘Daughter of No Worlds,’ I did actually consider querying it to be traditionally published,” she said. “In traditional publishing in particular, what we now call romantasy, many of those books were shelved young adult.”

The characters in “Daughter of No Worlds” are in their 20s, not their teens. Broadbent — who said she “was also terrified of querying” — didn’t want her book to get picked up if it meant she had to age down her characters.

“I really believed that if I had tried to query this, that traditional publishing would have wanted me to make all of the characters three years younger and put it in upper young adult,” she said. “I felt really strongly that I did not want to do that.”

Because she self-published the novel, Broadbent ensured “Daughter of No Worlds” stayed true to her vision. By the time Bramble picked up the “Crowns of Nyaxia” series, both Broadbent and romantasy were established enough that she could continue writing romantic fantasy with adult characters.