The Ugly and the Uglier in Self-Publishing
Considering self-publishing? You aren’t alone. If you’ve always wanted to be an author but couldn’t “get published” before, you need only plunk down a few dollars in fees to make it happen directly through Amazon or with the help of a number of self-publishing houses. These companies are only too willing to take to market just about anything you’d care to put on the page, in paper or as an e-book. Anyone can be an author now… but that fact is proving frustrating for authors and readers alike, who are adjusting to a rapidly changing market that is now glutted with material that never should have made it onto Amazon.
Only a few years ago, self-publishing printed books through Publish on Demand (POD) outfits was becoming very popular. It represented a big step forward in what was then still known as “vanity press.” Authors who could not or would not secure publishing deals with “real” publishers could instead print their work on their own terms for a fee. Where once vanity publishing meant paying rather large fees for a crate of books you then sold out of your garage or the trunk of your car, the rise of POD technology made self-publishing both more respectable and more cost-effective. For a much smaller fee (compared to printing in quantity) to set up the book (and possibly a hosting fee to keep it live), any author could have a paperback or even a hardcover from whose sales he would derive small royalties. Such authors then sat around at card tables at their local bookstores or public libraries, desperately trying to make eye contact with nonplussed shoppers.
The market continues to evolve. Now that e-books have eclipsed printed books, barriers to entry for new authors are the lowest they’ve ever been. A prospective author no longer needs to set up a printed book with a POD publishing house unless he or she chooses. That author may now go directly to Amazon, reaching the pool of prospective readers the massive online bookseller serves. Amazon’s direct publishing program, wherein the company offers Kindle-platform e-books (and even printed paper books through its company CreateSpace), has proven immensely popular. Self-publishing promises authors more control, faster time to market, global distribution, and higher royalties.
Of course, self-publishing also allows authors who could not otherwise secure a publishing agreement to bring their books to market and put them in front of customers’ faces, which is largely the point of the service. For every successful direct-publishing author formerly championed by the Big Five, there are thousands of aspiring (and often incompetent) would-be writers pumping illiterate swill onto Amazon’s pages. Their e-books, many of which are even offered for free, are the distilled essence of aspiring amateur writers. These are people who just want someone to read their work. They’re happy to give their efforts away (to the tune of a disturbingly high percentage of badly written, free-to-download erotica, for example) as long as they know someone is going to see the writing.
Some of these authors show promise. Some will go on to be successful and commercially published authors. I am one myself; my first published works were dreadful novels that I produced through the very reputable POD publisher Booklocker. But the number of authors who can say they self-published some chaff before actually learning their trade is small compared to the number of would-be writers who are content to keep churning out work that is not edited, that never improves, and that will be read by only a handful of family members and friends. It therefore falls to the customer to wade through the dizzying array of offerings in an effort to dig up a decent read.
There are other issues associated with self-publishing that might not be apparent immediately. One is that authors who publish their own work may be, knowingly or unknowingly, printing plagiarism or libel. The typical self-publisher cannot possibly screen the avalanche of badly written garbage that crosses its virtual desks, so these companies rely on reporting after the fact to alert them of questionable content. They’ll err on the side of caution so as not to become party to any lawsuits that result… but the book, complete with ISBN number, now exists, and will exist forever even if it is not readily available. As the author, you’re on the hook for whatever damage that does and to whomever it offends. That may not sound terribly worrisome until you find yourself on the receiving end of an intellectual property suit (because you had no editor to raise the question in the first place).
According to the Financial Times‘ Henry Mance, some 460,000 titles were self-published globally in 2013, an increase of 500% over five years. “The industry,” he writes, “is ‘evolving from a frantic, wild west-style space to a more serious business,’” according to one research group. …[E]very part of the publishing process can now be replicated by authors themselves… Self-published works account for 50 percent of author royalties generated by ebooks on Amazon… By contrast, the Big Five publishers deliver 35 percent of ebook royalties.” In other words, if you DO have an audience as an established and talented writer, self-publishing may make more money for you, even if it lacks the prestige associated with being a Big Five author.
Mance goes on to quote business competitors who claim Amazon is using its self-publishing platform to “bludgeon” publishers by reducing their profitability. Barnes and Noble, meanwhile — one of the few brick-and-mortar chains still a going concern in today’s challenging publishing landscape — still steadfastly refuses to stock print books published by Amazon. If you’re a self-published author and you publish through Amazon, in other words, you won’t be seeing your work on bookstore shelves any time soon, at least not in a Barnes and Noble. This is less of a problem for obscure, beginning authors than for well-known and established ones, who stand to lose a significant portion of their market if they switch from the Big Five to a self-publishing platform in order to reap more of the profits of their own sales.
Where does this leave authors and their audiences? The answers are unclear as the market continues to change. There are good self-published books. There are also many bad ones. As gate-keepers to the world of publishing continue to evaporate, writers and readers alike will be forced to navigate uncharted waters. Their shared goal — finding something decent to read – is both easier and harder thanks to the evolving technology that makes it possible. The role of the individual authors, the intellectual property owners and developers, in marketing what will become trusted properties, thus becomes that much more important. When it is impossible to find an entertaining book by browsing a bloated market, we will turn to filters to screen potential entrants. The nature of those filters remains to be seen and is evolving even now.