Saturday Book Discussion: Self-publishing Kool-aid and the $0.99 Kindle book
Sure, let's play this game again.
This is somewhat a reprise of this and this SBD, but hey, it was six months ago and I can't always come up with brand sparkling new ideas. Anyway, since self-publishers engaging in self-promotional marketing disguised as a "manifesto" annoy me, I'm going to revisit this with added bonus "vitriol."
Self-publishing is, depending on your viewpoint, a boom or a bubble right now. I would say boom is more accurate, since self-publishing is not going away, it's always been around, more people will become successful as self-publishers as Amazon and Amanda Hocking are proving that there is a market for very cheap fiction of indifferent quality, and a few outliers will continue to be touted as evidence that you too can become rich in real estate selling Amway on eBay collecting Beanie-babies investing in tulips.
Now, seriously, a "bubble" is when a commodity's price inflates beyond any reasonable limit, and then suddenly crashes, leaving the last wave of suckersinvestors holding an overpriced, empty bag. Self-publishing is more like a gold rush; there really is gold in them thar hills, and a few people will actually find a mother lode and strike it rich, a lot more (but still a small percentage of all the gold-seekers) will make some coin, not enough to become rich but enough to make it worth their while, while most will come up empty-handed and disappointed. And the majority of people actually profiting off the rush will be, not the self-publishers themselves, but the marketers selling books about self-publishing and services to self-publishing authors.
But my self-published Gary Stu fantasy novel is awesome!
Not like all those other ones.
There are plenty of big name authors singing the "Traditional publishing is dead lalalala!" tune. Michael Stackpole infamously referred to authors who continue to publish through major publishers as "house slaves". J.A. Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith are also among the self-publishing cheerleaders. Conveniently, all of them have publishing deals. Tons of aspiring authors flock to their web sites and shout "Huzzah!" every time they post something about how Traditional Publishing is Dead and you "Indie" publishers ('cause "Indie publisher" sounds cooler than "Self-publisher") can compete with books that are professionally written and edited. Don't worry that ten million other people suffer from exactly the same delusion: you are a unique and special snowflake.
Hang out on writing boards where self-published authors talk about how to get noticed: more and more are complaining about their work being drowned in all the "slush" out there. 'Cause, you know, your novel is great and awesome and worth paying money for. All those other self-published books? Slush.
I am really not here to harsh the mellow of everyone who chooses to self-publish. There are good and valid reason to self-publish (see below). But whenever someone like our friend hapax_legoman jumps into a writing board or book comm singing the glories of self-publishing, it is too often with rote buzz phrases memorized from the Self-Publishing Kool-Aid Crowd that's long on pithy quips about how awesome self-publishing is and they're waiting around to piss on the graves of the Big Six, and rather short on facts.
Let's get some terms right
Please note, the following terms sometimes overlap, but they are not interchangeable, even though self-publishers tend to use them as if they are.
Self-publishing: When you do all the work of publishing and marketing your book yourself. This includes electronic self-publishing (like when you upload a book to Amazon or Smashwords, or just sell it directly from your own site), POD (Print On Demand) books (like Lulu.com, which prints a physical copy of your book when someone orders one), as well as the more traditional sort of self-publishing where you pay a printer to print copies of your book, which you then sell yourself. The game-changer in self-publishing is of course the electronic option, since the others are expensive. (A POD book typically costs two or three times what a book of the same size would cost from a trade publisher, and tends to be of much lower quality binding; a printer requires money up front, of course, meaning the author will have to sell an awful lot of books at a fairly high price to break even.)
Vanity-publishing: Not quite the same as self-publishing. Vanity publishers are similar to the printing option, above, but they market themselves a little differently. If you pay a printer to print your book, the printer just owns the presses and you pay for their use. A vanity publisher, on the other hand, puts their imprint on your book so you can claim to be a "published author," even though you still pay them for each copy and most vanity publishers are pretty well known in the industry; no editor or agent will consider a vanity-published book to be a publishing credit, nor do they count for membership in writers' associations like SFWA or RWA. There's nothing inherently unethical about vanity publishing; some vanity presses are very straightforward about the service they offer. However, some, like the notorious Publish America, try to guile writers into believing their manuscripts have been accepted by a traditional publisher.
Epublishing: This is the term self-publishers misuse and abuse the most. Epublishing is not synonymous with self-publishing! Every trade publisher epublishes! An ebook is merely a format, it is not a revolution or a new way of doing business.
Indie publishing: Lots of self-publishers call themselves "indie publishers." They're not. Well, anyone can call themselves an indie publisher, but a real independent publisher is a small press unconnected with any major trade publisher or academic press, but one which still has editors and pays advances and royalties.
Trade publishing: Traditional "gatekeepered" publishing by an advance-and-royalties-paying publisher. This includes both the "Big Six" publishers and smaller presses. Note that vanity and self-publishers tend to use the term "traditional publishing" (implying that they are "non-traditional" and thus edgy and cool) or worse, "legacy publishing" ('cause trade publishers are obsolete).
The Publishing Industry is doomed! Doomed, I say! Dinosaurs on the path to extinction!
Ebooks are not some marvelous new technology that the Internet just discovered and which major publishing houses are still trying to figure out. In fact, ebooks have been around for over twenty years, and the big publishing houses have been heavily involved with them since the beginning.
It was only with the advent of light, cheap ereaders (as well as the ubiquitous penetration of the Internet) that they really took off, though. Before that, books for RocketReaders and Palms and the like were sold, but the market for them was so small as to be practically nonexistent.
Now, with the advent of mass marketed ebooks and Amazon's aggressive marketing of Kindles as loss leaders, there is a common perception that the major publishing houses are going to be killed by epublishing.
Umm, who do you think publishes all those books being read on Kindles?
Every new release from a trade publisher is released as an ebook (with a few exceptions, usually from big-name authors like Thomas Pynchon or J.K. Rowling who have - had, in Rowling's case - an irrational aversion to digital books).
Ebooks aren't going to kill publishing, though obviously prices have yet to reach a stabilization point between "What publishers can make a profit on" and "What people think is a reasonable price to pay." Prices often do seem wacky because of the ongoing gamesmanship between Amazon, Apple, and trade publishers. The oft-cited example of the ebook that is more expensive than the newly released hardcover, however, is not common. Really, it's not. I buy a lot of ebooks. Yes, you can find a few recent releases that are twelve bucks, occasionally as high as fifteen, but the vast majority of ebooks I have bought were eight dollars or less, even when the paperback hasn't been released yet. So please enough with this nonsense about trade publishers vastly humongously overpricing ebooks 'cause they don't understand big words like "digital."
Yes, the publishing industry is in some distress, largely due to the fact that the global economy is in bad shape and thus most industries depending on the disposable income of its customers are going to have a hard time when their customers have a lot less disposable income. In most households, new books are pretty low on the budget. But all publishers have digital publishing strategies. The difficulty is in the delivery; book stores are still having trouble coping with the likes of Amazon. One of the many things that killed Borders was that they were so late to embrace ebooks. In turn, when Amazon becomes the only game in town, it can squeeze publishers.
'Vanity publishing' is just a smarmy term made up by publishers. Who needs gatekeepers?
I only want sparkly vampire romances!
None other shall pass!
No, it's a term made up to describe authors whose manuscripts weren't publishable but were willing to pay someone to print them anyway. I.e., as an exercise in vanity. It goes back to the 19th century. Authors who couldn't get published but had enough money to indulge their vanity would pay a printing house to publish their books, indifferent to how many sold. As today, many had grossly unrealistic notions of their own talent and saleability, a few just wanted the gratification of seeing a book with their name on it.
The purpose of publishing gatekeepers is not keep the hoi polloi out. It's to weed out the unreadable, the unsellable, the incomprehensible. Yeah, it's subjective and it's market-driven because the real goal of publishers is to make money, not create Art, but if you think a million self-publishers uploading self-insert romance novels and space operas and experimenting with "price points" to see what will maximize sales are doing it for the love of their Art, our definitions of Art differ, and certainly our tastes in literature do.
Most people want gatekeepers, because they don't want to be slushpile readers. A book that's been accepted by an agent, then by an editor, then gone through editing and copy editing and proofreading, is much more likely to be one you'll enjoy than one that someone uploaded hot off his Microsoft Word doc yesterday. People want books that have been through "gatekeepers" for the same reason they want carpenters who have been to carpentry school or apprenticed as carpenters, not someone who learned a little carpentry in woodworking class in high school and thinks he can cut a board just as straight as anyone else so what's the big deal?
It's great that anyone can now digitally self-publish without the investment of a vanity publisher, and yes, some of those people really are great writers, and yes, some will actually make money at it. (These two groups are not necessarily the same.) But that's not because of a digital revolution unlocking the talent that's previously been stifled by gatekeepers. It's because in every junkpile, there are a few diamonds.
Look at all these famous authors who got rejected! What do the so-called gatekeepers know, anyway?
Self-publishers are very fond of listing all the big name authors who were rejected multiple times before they became rich and famous. This is supposed to prove that agents and editors have no idea what will sell or what makes a good book, and therefore gatekeepers are useless and unnecessary.
First of all, mistrust those quotes supposedly from some gormless editor declaring that no one would ever read Carrie or that John le Carré is unpublishable. Most of them are taken out of context, and many are made up - you can rarely find an actual source for them. But even the genuine ones don't mean much except that one person called it wrong on one author.
Editors reject manuscripts for all kinds of reasons, and it's not always because in their haughty judgment, the writer is terrible and no one will ever read their book. Many publishers only deal with certain kinds of books, in certain genres, lengths, and for particular audiences. Sometimes it's because that writer's style just didn't appeal; agents and editors prefer to work with books that appeal to their tastes. An agent who's good at representing fast-paced thrillers will probably pass on a languorous, wordy literary novel even if it's excellently written. An editor will only take books that he or she thinks will sell in the current market, for what that publisher sells to, which means a book that might have had a chance last year might get rejected this year. Your odds of selling a vampire romance today, even if it's really well-written, are probably a lot lower than they would have been ten years ago. Try again in a few years.
Nathan Bransford wrote a pretty good column about this. If anyone in publishing was psychic and could spot a bestseller with a high degree of accuracy, that person would be rich. What experienced agents and editors can spot is someone with bestseller potential. And yes, you'd be surprised how many bestsellers were predicted to be bestsellers by everyone who saw the manuscript.
Just like Hollywood, though, there are sleeper hits (books get a lot more time than a movie does to build a following through word of mouth), and there are heavily-marketed intended blockbusters that flop. (The publishing industry actually suffers catastrophic flops like that less often than Hollywood.) Does this mean agents are just throwing darts for all that they can spot a publishable author? No, it means that they can weed out the actively bad, but sometimes miss things that will sell better than predicted. When editors pass on a manuscript, they are not necessarily saying "This is bad and no one will read it" (though that's true of most manuscripts they pass on), but "I don't think this will sell enough to be worth taking one of our limited publishing slots."
Do the editors who passed on Harry Potter or Stephen King manuscripts kick themselves? Probably not, because every editor who's been in business for a while will have rejected some author who went on to be published by someone else and turned out to be a bestseller. If they've been in business for a while and are any good at their jobs, they have plenty of success stories, authors they accepted that someone else rejected.
Look at all these famous authors who self-published!
This is another one of those lists that gets circulated a lot with mostly bogus examples. Here is an example.
I'm going to take a couple off the top:
Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust
Proust paid to have the first volume of his enormous epic printed. He's an example of an author who had enough faith in his work to pay to print it. Once publishers didn't have to decipher his longhand, they decided it was indeed worth publishing. He didn't self-publish the rest of À la recherche du temps perdu, and the editors who rejected his longhand manuscript weren't too stupid to recognize his brilliance, they just weren't willing to buy an almost incomprehensibly huge magnum opus based on a handwritten first volume.
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Ulysses's publication history is complicated because several revised editions were released, not all of which were accepted by the publishers of the previous editions. Note that it was initially serialized in a literary journal. It was also banned in the UK and the US; historically, many authors and publishers have done end runs around bannings by selling their books directly to bookstores and the publishers, and these books are often included (completely incorrectly) on lists of "self-published" books. Beyond its complicated publication history, I'm unclear what the basis of the self-publishing claim for Ulysses is.
The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter was an upper class woman who liked to write and illustrate children's books. She was wealthy enough to have a few copies of her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, privately printed, but the public editions were all printed and sold by a publisher.
I could go on, but jimhines already did.
The point is, be very skeptical of the claims of self-publishers when they dishonestly claim everyone from Proust to Stephen King as being one of their own. Many such claims are outright fabricated. Any author who ever had a single thing printed on their own, or ever sold a single book in person on a street corner or at a book convention, is counted as a "self-published" author, as if the books that actually made them money (and famous) were not 100% trade published.
How can you say that self-published novels are crap when we all know crappy books get published all the time?
It's not like she actually wrote it.
Yes, we've all read books that sucked and made us wonder how the hell it got published. We've all read fan fiction or a self-published novel here or there that we thought was really good.
First, these are what we call "outliers."
Second, bear in mind that even what you subjectively think sucks and is terrible writing is still vastly better than most of what gets submitted to publishers. No, really, it is. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, even Michael Walsh gadhelpme, they can put sentences together in a coherent order that tells a story (maybe with a little help from their editors). Dan Brown's writing is crap from a literary point of view, and his research is awful, but he does tell an entertaining, readable story. (Well, it's entertaining to some people.) Stephanie Meyer... look, I've spilled as much ink as anyone about how much Twilight sucks, but it's a readable book. And these books sell, which means the publishers who published them are doing their jobs.
You might think you can write better than Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer. I think I can write better than Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd sell better than either of them. (I almost certainly would not.)
Snooki didn't get a book deal because anyone on the planet thought her ghost writershe would turn out to be a brilliant author. She got a deal because a publisher thought people would buy a book with Snooki's name on it. Same deal with Amanda Knox or any other published celebrity.
And while I have not read A Shore Thing and won't be reading Amanda Knox's book, I can still pretty much guarantee that on a basic prose level, they're going to be better written than most self-published books. Because most self-published books are unedited catastrophes written by inexperienced and unrealistic writers, error-ridden and rough at best, unreadable word soup at worst.
Why You Should Self-Publish
Despite everything I have said above, I am not anti-self-publishing. There are cases when self-publishing makes sense. For small niches, especially in non-fiction, you might be writing for an audience that is just too small to make it profitable for a publisher to publish your book. A lot of experts in small fields of high interest to a small number of people worldwide have found that they can make good money self-publishing. (I've bought a few such books. I'd have to add that they're usually pretty poorly written and edited, and I bought them solely for the content.)
If you only want to see your name on a book - i.e., "vanity published" - then go ahead and self-publish. A lot of people seem to get a great thrill of putting their ebook for sale on Amazon and counting their monthly sales, even if they're in the single digits. Congratulations.
There are also those people who just want to "get their work out there" - they don't really care if they make a living as a writer, as long as people read their stories. This is, in a sense, me (which is why I write fan fiction). I have my own novel I am working on like half the online world, and I would like to get it published someday, and honestly? If I try to get published and after what I consider to be a reasonable effort, I fail, I will sadly conclude that I'm not good enough or I'm just not writing what will sell right now, and I may go ahead and digitally self-publish just to see if I get a small audience that will make me happy by reading my book. But I'll do so with no expectation that I'm going to be Amanda Hocking, or a belief that I failed to be published because stoopid editors didn't recognize mah genius and the publishing industry is broken 'cause they'll only publish vampire romances YA dystopias whatever is hot right now.
Be realistic, is what I'm saying.
And if you are really, really planning to self-publish and try to make money at it - real money, not beer money, which is all that 99% of the self-publishers on Amazon earn - then be aware that to have a realistic chance of success, you have to do a lot of self-promotion and marketing (which does not mean "post my anti-publishing industry screed and buy link on bookish), you need to have a freelance editor go over your manuscript for it to not be crap even if you are a pretty good writer and self-editor, and you should really have a professional graphic designer do your cover, not use some crappy Photoshop job you did yourself or fan art someone gave you.
Why you should put that trunk novel back in the trunk
The current boom in self-publishing caters to short-term thinking and disappointment for the vast majority, including those minuscule few who really do have what it takes to be published.
Under the "traditional" publishing model, an aspiring writer would write a manuscript and submit it. And it would be rejected. And he'd submit to someone else, and it would be rejected. With few exceptions, a new author would be rejected a lot and his first manuscript might never even see the light of day.
Here's the thing: that's because most first novels aren't very good. Even second and third. Sure, there are a few writers who could knock it out of the park with their first effort. Most have to work at it for a long time before they are publishable, and even when they are publishable, they are still new authors. Just like any other profession, they are not as good as they will be someday, which is why fans will often say, defensively, of a favorite author's book, "This was one of her earlier works." It's why reviews will rave "This was fantastic for a debut novel."
Your first complete manuscript is probably crap. Your first published novel will probably be crap compared to what you write later in your career.
But instead of enduring the grueling, heartbreaking trial of rejection after rejection, now authors have this thing called "electronic self-publishing." Your manuscript got rejected by every agent you sent it to? No problem, you're sure that those agents are wrong and readers will love it.
Are you sure? Really sure? Really really sure?
So they hit the "Upload" button and squee when they see their book appear on Amazon.com.
And they sell 8 copies over the next two months, and only when it was priced at 99 cents.
Disheartened, most of them will give up or go back to fanfiction.net. Instead of doing like Stephen King and many, many other authors did, and continuing to write and collect rejection slips until they get published.
So, if you are serious about the craft of writing, consider the possibility that if you are rejected, it's because you just aren't good enough. Yet.
More links
17 reasons why manuscripts are rejected.
Slushkiller.
Catherynne Valente on self-publishing.
A poll
'Cause I like my polls.
Poll Self-publishing revisited
Previous Saturday Book Discussions.