A Case for Self-Publishing
You hold in your hands a completed
manuscript which deserves to connect with its readership. Two divergent paths to
this goal lie before you: the path of traditional publishing and the path of
independent publishing—also known as self-publishing.
The first path promises prestige and, potentially, a cash advance…if you can find an agent who loves your
book, if she can find an editor who
loves your book, and if that editor
can convince others at the publishing house—especially the sales force—that
your book will make money, or that the company can absorb a loss for the sake
of art. This path to publication usually takes years between agent search and
first printed copy arriving in the mail. Meanwhile, the clock ticks and you get
older and older.
The second path lying before you offers a
quick trip: copies of your book will reach readers in a few weeks and you can
move forward with your life. Of course, the trade-off is that in this scenario
you are genuinely independent, in
ways both good and bad. The downside is that you renounce that heady prestige,
as well as the robust distribution and marketing machine of a publishing house,
and you must grapple instead with the lingering stigma that comes with
self-publishing, with going it alone and sending your work out into the world
without the stamp of approval conferred by the legacy publishing industry.
So let’s look at this stigma, element by
element.
1.
It stems in part from the notion that writers
are paying to have their own books printed. This reputation is a hold-over from
the “vanity press” days of yore, the analog days, whereas we now live in the
digital age; therefore—and here I use the example I favor, a platform called
CreateSpace—you pay nothing, either
up front or down the road, as long as you handle the print-ready formatting of
the manuscript yourself and provide your own cover art.
2.
Conservative detractors seem to think that a
gate-keeper must stand between artist and audience, ensuring the worthiness of
the former. Well, hot news flash: artists and writers have been chipping away
at and transcending this middle man for many years now. Think of the music
industry, where bands and solo performers have been successfully shunning and
sidestepping conventional industry labels for more than a decade, releasing
their work directly to their fans by means of “independent labels”—that is,
their own labels. Take the example of
bloggers, too. What are they but self-publishers? Fifteen years ago, those in
the know looked down their noses at these poor creatures who apparently could
not get their work accepted within “legitimate” journalistic venues. But don’t
look now—bloggers virtually rule the world. Those who release their own books
independently are the bloggers of the book-publishing world. And YouTube allows
countless artists, entertainers, and journalists to connect directly with their
various audiences. Commentator Cenk Uygur, for instance, left the world of
corporate news at MSNBC to found his own outlet, The Young Turks, which has now
amassed two and a half billion YouTube views, even as MSNBC continues to
languish in ratings purgatory.
3.
The stigma against independent publishing
suffers from a severe, ahistorical blind spot—or is it a willful forgetting of the past? I recognize that this point will
seem to clash with the above image of the current-day reactionaries having
“fallen behind the curve of history,” but the truth is that both dynamics are
in play: contemporary options are outstripping the corporate modalities of
recent years and our new groundswell
of authorial autonomy resonates with that of a century ago and more. Before the
publishing industry had developed and consolidated power, authors who could
afford to (yes, it cost money back then) often had their own works printed up
and made available to readers—geniuses including Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman,
Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Beatrix
Potter, and a multitude of other enduring literary figures. That is, we are now
circling back to a time when authors felt at liberty to make and distribute
books without stigma.
The only
trouble is that many in the world of traditional publishing (and in the
ancillary ranks of bookstores and reviewers) have fallen behind the curve of
history and still cling to that outmoded and regressive “gate-keeper”
archetype. Why not let art sink or swim thanks to its intrinsic quality rather
than to the imprimatur of a company? When you boil the case down, after all,
what is an editor? An editor is an English major who got a job. And marketers?
They are not even English majors.
Fortunately, today’s dramatic reboot of
Virginia Woolf’s operating system enjoys a fresh digital form, a form far more
nimble and writer-friendly than any that has ever existed before. Here are
three enormous advantages of the system we now find at our easy disposal:
1.
If one wishes to add or subtract material or to
remove typos, one can simply rework and upload the book’s interior file, which
will then go “live” within hours. Compare this to the past; who among us has
not cringed at glaring mistakes in conventionally published books, glitches
that were not and will never be fixed because of the prohibitive
expense of doing so within the old regime?
In short, in the new regime, you retain open-ended control over your work.
2.
Kissing the middle man good-bye gives us royalties
that are much more generous; CreateSpace, for instance, pays the writer an
average 33% of the list price, as opposed to the typical 7.5%-12% still paid by
publishing houses. Over the past two months, my titles have earned me less than
a thousand dollars—a modest amount for sure, but these payments will keep
accruing year after year after year, as will readership.
3.
That’s because such books will never go out of
print. Never. The method used to produce books is called print-on-demand, which
means that copies are printed only as orders come in. No more inventories
backlogged and moldering in warehouses, only to be shredded once the title
falls out of print in order to make room for succeeding crates. Since it costs
today’s digital platforms nothing to keep authors’ files active as ebooks and
ready to be transformed into shiny paperbacks at a moment’s notice, there
exists zero pressure for any book to become unavailable. I remember that when I
published books with Knopf and Random House, in the 1980s and 1990s, their
“shelf life” seemed to last just about as long as my meager advance money.
One important caveat, however. This completed
manuscript you hold in your hands? It better be “completed” indeed, because
before you decide to forge ahead and release it to the world, you are your own
excellent gate-keeper—you and your circle of trusted advisors. Yes, the digital
revolution allows us to fix errors post-publication, but don’t forget that
smart readers will have caught them before you did and will have judged your
writing accordingly. Make sure the book is definitely good enough before
hitting UPLOAD.
A friend of mine worked on a novel for ten
years, until it was more than good
enough; I can attest to that. For the next five years, she endured the endless
rounds of agents who “loved the book” and editors who “loved the book” but were
not quite able to “raise the passion in-house” to put it over the top. Finally, my
friend had to give up on the traditional route.
That was in 2005. I wish I could report
that she then set proudly forth on the route to self-empowerment and that her
beautiful novel has lived and breathed in the world for the past decade.
Instead, held hostage by convention, she kept it in the
dark, where it remains today. Though they will never know it, thousands of
readers are much the poorer for her decision.
