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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3479
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3479
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think you're going to need to figure out which is more important to you - getting traditionally published, or keeping dgital rights. Not that you can't necessarily manage both, but it'll be a long shot at best. A couple of considerations I can offer:

- **Contracts are negotiable.** You can shop around your book, and see if you can negotiate a contract where you keep digital rights. If that's important to you, you might be willing to give up other reimbursement to keep the digital rights, or to get more of a share of e-book profits.
- **First publication rights are important.** If you e-publish on your own, you'll never be able to meet a contract that demands those rights.
- **Your leverage in negotiations is correlated to the quality and projected success of your book.** Which goes in several directions:
  - If your book is exceptional, you might be able to get a non-standard contract right from the start.
  - If your book does exceptionally well as an e-book, that gives you leverage to negotiate a non-standard contract. 
  - If your book doesn't do very well as an e-book, then you'll be _missing_ the leverage to negotiate for the rights you've already made impossible to offer.
- **Is a children's e-book a viable product?** I don't know the field here very well, but it's crucial that you check this out before committing. I don't know many parents happy to let their 4-year olds play with their iPad. Childrens' books sound like tougher sells as an eBook than other work. Or, maybe they can have animations or voice narration that make them great for kids (and that you'll want to be sure to include!) Be sure you take this into consideration, particularly if you're counting on the eBook's success for further development. 
- **Digital rights can be re-negotiated.** You've made the unwarranted assumption that a publisher interested based on e-book sales won't try to negotiate for the digital rights. That's really not necessarily the case - they could negotiate for those as part of the contract.

My concern about your proposed strategy is that it really only works if both **(A) your book and marketing are great enough to be a persuasive e-publishing success,** and also **(B) your book is not attractive enough for a publisher to relinquish digital rights to begin with.** Now, there's definitely some territory there, but IMHO that's an awfully narrow target to be aiming for. Recall also that a publisher's primary function is just publicizing and distributing your book - so e-sales with a publisher and a commercially-sold real-world book might be a lot higher than if you're publicizing just the e-book all on your own.

My inclination would be to shop around the manuscript now to agents and publishers, and see what you can get for it. If you get an offer that satisfies you, then great. If not, the self-publishing avenue is wide open. And _if_ you do wonderfully there, you can always go back to the publishers for a second round with more leverage.

Original score: 6