As the old adage goes, the only thing constant in life is change. Everything in life changes, and people are always left struggling to catch up. The publishing industry is no exception to this rule.
With the introduction of electronic books and the rise of self publishing via websites like Create Space, LuLu, and Smashwords, the shape of publishing as most writers knew it is morphing into something new and different. It’s becoming more of a “do it yourself” atmosphere, and I’m not sure how much that is affected by the up and coming generations’ sense of entitlement or if it’s just a sign of the times.
Ebooks are attractive because there is very little cost to put out product, which means product costs less, so the consumer buys more. In theory.
The old powerhouses are losing their solid hold. They have somewhat outdated business practices and are struggling to change, but it’s like a turtle with the world on its back – it takes time and huge effort to adjust course. Small presses are springing up everywhere, and because they are small and new, they can jump right into what seems to be working. (more…)
We stand on the edge of uncertainty. Publishing is changing, and for writers, that might as well be the apocalypse. The publishing industry as we know it is dissolving. The big publishers are merging, self-publishing and independent publishing have never had easier means of distribution. The writing world has changed.
We should have known. It was only a matter of time. Publishing hadn’t changed much since the printing press was invented. Editors held the keys to the readers. If they didn’t want you to be read, you weren’t. Kate Chopin wrote the now-canonical novella The Awakening which stirred up such a controversy that she never had anything major published after and died a few years later. James Joyce had to rescue Dubliners from a fire after what seemed like the last interested publisher in Ireland decided to burn it rather than return the manuscript. Of course, both of those books found publishers willing to back them and became incredibly influential.
Perhaps Chopin and Joyce would have turned to self-publishing if they lived in our era. Perhaps not. The path to publishing still isn’t easy, and while self-publishing gets you out there, really only gets you as far as the door, with no guarantee of readership.
Still, it is exciting in many ways. For once, the readers, not the publishers, are the gatekeepers to a writer’s success, and that is an exciting thing for some people. Marxist literary theory believes that literature is a tool of bourgeois hegemonic control, because the bourgeois control the means of literary production, deciding what is read. One of the sparks for revolution, then, is the development of an alternative proletariat-based hegemony. Besides attempting to utilize terminology from my current class, I think it is interesting how the changes in publishing are going to affect everything from reading to writing to the very theories about the relationship between literature and society. Access to literature is no longer controlled solely by management in New York.
The scary part is not knowing where I am going to land in this whole thing. I’ve had friends who self-published and had good experiences, better than some experiences of people who have had actual publishers. Then, there have been other friends who have basically gotten nowhere with it. Obviously, there have been stories of great self-publishing successes.
My plan is to try traditional publishing, but I will probably be writing for the next sixty years or so. The very term “publishing” could mean anything by then. Still, the unknown can be exciting, and for those of us trying to make it as writers, the future of publishing is very unknown.
Everything I have ever written for money has been self-published, one way or another, but then the economics of copywriting-for-hire are not nearly the same as commercial fiction.
The first book I ever wrote was “published” via a photocopier and a stack of three-ring binders [0]. This was back in the early 1990s, when desktop publishing was still in its infancy and producing our graphics was only one step up from Zip-a-tone [1]. After that I spent a couple of years writing responses to Requests for Proposals [2] and we thought a $10,000 color laser printer was the height of affordable sophistication. Proposals were still submitted as bound booklets, and you had to schedule at least one full day for printing, final quality control checks, reprinting, binding, and making a 3:00 Fed-Ex pickup deadline. In its way it was ghastly work, but I cut my anal-retentive copyediting teeth on it [3].
I’ve e-published six YA novels myself so far. I’ve purchased a few printed self-published books and downloaded several e-books. And my thoughts as I read most of the self-published books ran mostly to ‘hasn’t this writer ever heard of editing?’
At the bottom end, many e-books are simply gawdawful (and I’m not talking about 2,000-word wonders uploaded by seventh-graders; I’m talking about novels that never should have been placed where the public can see them!). At the other extreme you can find well-written novels, including those that have been brought back into print by their authors.
I hope that the e-book industry would soon find some kind of filter, other than low or no sales for crap. My guess is that everyone who thinks he’s an author has been glutting Smashwords, Amazon, et al, with “stuff” that no one would otherwise pick up, so that the effective agent filtering-out process of junk has been bypassed. Sooner or later, however, those who cannot spell or punctuate will grow tired of uploading and seeing few, if any downloads after readers reject their offerings, and those of us who do have a command of the English language will be able to “rise above” the current flow of trash so that readers will not have to wade through the glut to make reading choices.
I’ve actually experienced fair sales of my six novels (well, five out of six – the new High School Series novel was placed on Smashwords and Amazon 1-1-12). My current market strategy is to offer the first title in the series for free and charge minimally for the others. I can’t say that the technique is a raging success, but I can say that downloads of the titles are steady, if slow.
Growing up, the only form of self-publishing I was aware of was vanity publishing and that only because it was the route my great-grandfather had taken. Up until very recently, whenever I thought of self-publishing my immediate thought was, “You mean I have to pay someone to publish my work?”
After all, wasn’t the whole point to being a published author that somebody else paid you to write? Having to self-publish at a vanity press was like admitting that my work wasn’t good enough to be accepted by a real publisher. Maybe that was the case, maybe it wasn’t.
Self-published books weren’t widely available when I was growing up, especially not since I did the majority of my book shopping at a used bookstore and the rest of my reading from a various selection of libraries. My opinion on self-publishing never had the opportunity to change. Even now, I don’t go out of my way to read something self-published. Most of my reading is done off of recommendation or by pulling books off of shelves and oohing over the cover. Well, that and fanatically following authors from one series to the next. (more…)
One little self-published comic book was the beginning of a startling cultural phenomenon.
I have self-published music, comics and my writing. I am not wealthy as a result of it, but I am better for having made the attempts. These attempts were made with the best of intentions but with little heed for what was actually wrong with each of them. We had no producer for the music and I had no editor for the comics or writing. I thought I knew what was wrong at the time with all of it, and I was right. But there was more.
Everyone’s heard the stories of the writer who pens a wildly successful book, the band who’s basement-recorded album hits the top of the charts, the writer and artist whose parody concept spawned a revolution in comics. Amanda Hocking. Collective Soul. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.
These are the exceptions to the rule. These are the inspirations for people like me. (Well not Amanda Hocking in my case, sorry.) These are the cases that cause us to keep at it. If they can do it, so can I.
I’ve been in a professional recording studio and in ones in the homes of other musicians, always looking to make the best product I could. One band was really successful at it though we didn’t do an actual release of the record. We got two songs played on local radio (one seemed to have a regular rotation for a month or so) and had some very, very good shows. Didn’t make a dime off the record, but hey we had the shows and the beer and nice following locally. I’ve documented my comics ‘career’ elsewhere and don’t need to rehash it other than to say that I got some positive reviews and made some great friends. My writing has also been self-published on my blog and via the wonderful folks over at The Penny Dreadful website.
Each of these situations, projects – whatever you want to call them – creative efforts, would have greatly benefitted from a producer or editor to tell us what we weren’t able to discern for ourselves: they weren’t good enough.
Everything that’s independently produced (art, music, writing, whatever) needs to have a professionally-trained, uninvolved set of eyes to give it a lookover. The Beatles had George Martin, early science fiction writers had John W. Campbell, comics have Karen Berger and Axel Alonso. Editors are important, make no mistake. (more…)
Sometimes I call myself an unpublished writer, but that is not technically accurate. I had experienced the thrill of the acceptance letter, the brief realization that my writing was worth something to someone out there. Oh, yes. I was fourteen, and I had considered myself a writer for at least seven years. I kept long, glorious, passionate journals, wrote letters to Jesus, and Anne of Green Gables fan fiction. So the world was obviously ready for my peculiar genius to come into the spotlight. And those good people at poetry.com could see that, too, and they took a chance on me, and published one of my semi-rhymed verses in their venerable anthologies: Gondolas in the Moonlight, I think, or maybe Saltwater and Seaweed.
Now, fourteen year old me was vain, and overwrought, and preachy. But even fourteen year old me was not stupid enough to believe my work was worth my $50, the price of the anthology. So, sadly, none of my family ever saw my immortal words preserved in leather-bound pages alongside two hundred and fifty other promising young poets.
Poetry.com was my first (and, to date, only) experience with self-publishing, although I didn’t see it as such at the time. Later, I was able to laugh about it, only to find that several of my college friends published with that company as well, and some still labored under the hope that they were fine publishers. That experience did make me wary of other self-publishing schemes, however. If I were to venture into more self-publishing, I would want it to be a decidedly anti-capitalist operation, and most of the current platforms appear to be steeped in capitalism. Specifically, they appear to be operations designed to extract labor from writers while providing very few services to them or to the literary community, profiting only the company involved.
That said, I have read some delightful self-published books, some that don’t have a large enough audience to fit into a traditional publishing house focus group. The world of ‘zines is one of empowered self-publishing, intended to affirm one’s worth and communicate ideas directly without an intermediary. These seem to be worthwhile enterprises, new possibilities that the digital age makes possible and cheap. While I don’t anticipate self-publishing my novels in the near future, I think some of the current technologies may make the process less exploitative. I have enjoyed some other authors’ efforts in this vein, and I support those who wish to blaze new pathways of possibility for both authors and readers.
I’ve always thought of self-publication as a fallback option. My own plan has always been to pursue the traditional route of sending queries to agents and publication houses, and to only resort to self-publication as a last resort. As time goes by, however, I’m slowly coming to realize that my plan may be faulty. The problem with my reasoning comes down to answer two questions:
Agents and publishers provide something of value to the author. Are the services they provide worth the price of admission?
Have e-books and the internet changed the answer to the first question?
Rather than answer these yes/no questions directly, I’d like to break them down into their components and discuss them in more detail.
Many roads will get you there, but they're all up hill. Both ways. In the snow. Wear a coat and boots. Also pants.
The publishing landscape has changed. The path to publication isn’t as clear as it used to be. In the past, there were two choices: traditional or vanity.
Traditional publishing is every bit as difficult to break into as it used to be, possibly more so. Vanity publishing isn’t called that anymore, and has taken on a legitimacy that didn’t previously exist.
But wait—a wealth of boutique publishers has cropped up, giving a more accessible option to authors. And e-publishing, whether through a digital publisher or as a DIY offers options that didn’t exist a few years ago.
After a brief, frustrating trip down the agent-querying path, I took matters into my own hands. I submitted my novel to a digital-first publisher. They didn’t require an agent to submit to them. Now, you have to understand, I researched the hell out of them first. Their authors were publicly happy. Their marketing department was top notch, and their editors were highly qualified. They made me an offer, and every step so far has reinforced that I made the correct decision. It doesn’t hurt that Carina Press is an imprint of Harlequin. I got a boutique publisher feel with the backing of a traditional publisher.
But we’re talking about self-publishing, not the other options out there.
A lot of people are making a decent living by cutting out all the middlemen and putting their work out themselves for reasonable prices. A few have made themselves rich. But many more put their work out there and make few, if any, sales.
I’ve read some self-published books. Some were good. Some were so poorly thought out and/or so badly edited that my eyes bled and my Kindle was in mortal danger of hitting the wall across the room.
I think we all know what went wrong with those. I’m not going to lecture on quality here today. Even traditional publishers can put out poor quality from time to time. All I’m going to say is that if you’ve written a novel and you publish it yourself, for the love of the Red Pen of God, please get somebody qualified to at least look over it before you throw it out to the world.
For me, the issue is more than the need to garner the approval of the “gatekeepers.” I am a writer. I want to write. I am not a cover artist. I am not an editor. I am not a marketer. I don’t want to spend time making a crappy cover, formatting my novel for a gazillion different platforms, and I don’t want to spam the entire Internet to get my name out there. While I’m happy to do what I can to market my work, I want a marketing department behind me.
Self-publishing is not a shortcut. In fact, if it’s done properly, it’s more work than going a traditional route. So, no, I can’t bring myself to condemn it outright.
But to the people out there half-assing it as a way to feed their own egos instead of giving people good stories:
Quit trying to cheat the system. You’re making it difficult for the people who are doing it right.
When I began my quest to become a published writer, I set myself the goal to have a novel published, available for purchase, within ten years. I gave myself ten years because I know I will have to work hard, suffer rejection and the inevitable bouts of crippling self doubt, but also because the book market is in flux. It’s changing. Traditional publishing is changing.
People are actually self-publishing now. And actually making some money doing it.
But her story is probably the exception to the rule. I think to actually have success self-publishing, there is a lot more work involved than writing a book and putting it up for sale on Amazon.
The biggest con of self-publishing is probably the lack of a brand. There is a huge stigma attached to those who put books out themselves instead of going through a big publishing house. There’s no guarantee for quality control. I think for self-publishing to be taken seriously, you need a reliable editor.
That was my problem with Ms. Hocking. I read some of her early stuff, and now I am too jaded to read any of her newer stuff. It had potential, but really needed an editor. Her books were born too early, and as writers, it’s difficult to be objective about our own work.
There are definite pros, though: money, of course. No middle man to take a cut. Although in the long run, if you count labor, publicity, and printing/production costs (if you’re not doing ebook), and time is money, you might actually be losing it trying to do it all yourself.
Of course, the biggest pro is you don’t have to be validated by some pretentious publishing house, or wait a year or more for contracts and book covers and all of that to be approved. You can just do it.
So, if I near the end of my 10 years and haven’t had any luck, I will take matters into my own hands and self-publish.
