Wednesday, November 15
For various reasons, inspired by various posts: a roundup of my views on self-publishing. Non-writer people may quietly sneak out the back door now.
Point the first: writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Writers -- traditionally published or otherwise -- take a while before they start making a living wage off their work, if they ever do. How long a while depends on how good they are, how lucky they are, what their definition of "living wage" is, and, what kind of support they get from their publisher. Since the answer to the fourth question will always be "zero" for self-published writers, "a while" will most likely be longer for them than for others.
If you think writing is a good way to get rich and quit your day job, here's a dollar. Go buy a lottery ticket. The odds are better, and it will spare us all so much time and suffering.
Point the second: self-publishing is not a moral stance.
You are not a bad person if you self-publish. (You are a bad person if you're one of the innumerable scammers who tend to run self-publishing companies, but I digress). You are not necessarily a good person if you traditionally publish. There are some well published, well-documented assholes out there. You are not necessarily stupid, clueless, talentless, and doomed if you self-publish; you may be the first two and end up the fourth if you fail to do thorough research, but then, you won't be spared that seeking publication through traditional means either. Those who don't believe me need to check out Writer Beware.
Those who automatically apply the "bad, stupid, clueless, etc" label to the self-published, or those seeking self-publication, are generally aspiring writers desperate to sound like they know what they're talking about. More rarely, a professional writer will put her foot in her mouth. Industry professionals are a lot more cautious about the whole thing.
Point the third: "self-published" is not a statement of quality.
A self-published book is not automatically a bad book. as arcaedia points out in the post I link above, there are a lot of reasons a good book could not get published: because the subject matter wasn't "timely", because all the slots for the year were already filled, because while the book was good the audience was just too darn small to waste precious slots on it, because the marketing department, in its infinite wisdom, misread the market. These aren't the sob stories I hear from authors: these are the sob stories I hear from agents and editors about the "one that got away", the good, good book that they just couldn't beg, borrow or steal a contract for. It happens, and we all know it. And some of these bad-luck books will end up self-published.
On the flip side of the table, "self-published" is not a statement of quality. It makes no statement about the quality of the book at all.
A book published by a traditional publisher has, by necessity, gained the enthusiastic support of numerous people. The author obviously thinks it's publishable, or he wouldn't have submitted it; the editor thinks it's publishable; the agent thinks it's publishable. Depending on the size of the company, there will be a variable number of other people that the editor has had to convince that the book is publishable. Now, these people are human, and sometimes they make mistakes, but the crux of the matter is: at least one person besides the author, who had no personal connection to the author, looked at the book and went, "yup, this is good. This could sell."
When a book is self-published, the only person who has to think it's publishable is the author.
As jaylake has recently pointed out, the writer is the worst judge of their own work. All the people who submit to the slushpile at a major editor clearly consider themselves publishable too, and yet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Tor says she rejects 6o to 75 percent of the stuff in her slushpile for reasons like "author is functionally illiterate" or "author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs." That's not even a quality issue; it's a readability issue.
But all of those authors think their work is good enough to publish.
All of those authors are self-publishing.
Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. They do not read for charity. They read to be entertained, and they expect what they read to conform to certain basic standards. When 6 out of 10 books they pick up from a specific source are unreadable -- not mediocre, not bad, not even craptastically bad, but unreadable -- they will start to avoid that source.
(Don't believe my stats? Look at POD-dy Mouth's. Ten percent of the books she read were so bad, she couldn't get past the first page. The only traditionally published book that struck me as being that unreadable from page one was Joyce's Ulysses.)
Self-publishing has a major filtering issue. Until it's dealt with, self-pub will be barely a footnote in the marketing world, and it will carry a stigma of the second-rate. It's unfair, but then life is also unfair.
Point the fourth: a publisher does a great deal more than print the book.
An off-the-cuff list of things that, say, Bantam-Spectra will do for books it publishes:
- Edit it.
- Copyedit it. (Yes, there's a difference.)
- Provide it with cover art.
- Send preview copies (ARCs) to reviewers, booksellers, and others in hopes of getting their attention.
- Send ARCs to other authors on its list in hopes of getting a cover blurb.
- Write ad copy -- back cover, inside flap, teaser page, and what have you.
- Possibly include ads or samples of the book in the backs of other books it publishes.
- Possibly provide promotional materials, like bookmarks, for the book.
- Possibly fund other marketing campaigns -- posters, special bookstore placements, giveaways, contests -- for the book.
- Distribute the book: it will be at least potentially available in major and independent bookstores across the country(s) and on Amazon.com.
- Do a big enough print run of the book that it will be affordable by market standards, and warehouse the extra copies.
Again, there will be mistakes. Budget will be lavished on a real loser of a book, while the year's real find starves to death in a corner. The cover art will suck. The ad copy will suck. The print run will be too small and they'll refuse to do another. The print run will be too big, and there will be too many returns, and the author will quite unfairly see it reflected in her royalty statements. But they will do it all.
Whatever company an author chooses to self-publish with will do none of this. He will have to do it all.
A great many people do not realize this when they choose to self-publish. Of those that do realize it, not all realize just how ineffective their attempts at marketing will be when compared to what the big boys do, or how expensive it will be when they're footing the bill up front. Amazon.com listings are easy enough to come by, but shelf space in major bookstores? Forget it. Most of the chains won't even special order self-pubbed books anymore, having been burned by the "promotional techniques" of certain scam publishers one too many times, and they certainly won't allot precious shelf space to them. The rest -- well, the rest simply costs money and time.
It's not easy being a published author either, and any published author who thinks she can sit back and rake in the cash is in for a nasty surprise. But she will at least have some support. The self-published author is doing it alone.
Point the fifth: writers really don't like hearing this.
Writers are as a collective neurotic, egotistical, insecure, poorly socialized, and insanely desirous of attention. I speak from experience here. They also have serious reality issues. This is perhaps to be expected of people who spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, creating their own worlds, to the point that they, say, nearly walk out of Wal-Mart with a map they are convinced they want before they remember that, no, it was a character who wanted it. (Silly, silly character! There are no Wal-Marts in the desert! ... uh, not that this really happened to me, or anything. *ahem*)
Sit a group of writers down and try to explain the hard facts of publishing and marketing to them, and there will be a lot of out-of-tune humming and absent-minded staring-out-the-window. They can be trained out of this, but the basic desire to deny reality -- or at least warp it to their personal desires -- will remain.
And the thing that writers really, really don't like to hear, the thing that will bring out the humming and the staring and perhaps even the fluffy blanket, is that their book is not good enough.
Good writers learn to deal with this. They learn to take the slam critique, or the rejection letter, or the bad review, and learn what they can from it, and toss the rest over their shoulders. Good writers become better writers.
Bad writers do not learn this. Now, bad writers with enough talent may become successful writers -- yet another sign that I do not run the universe -- but they don't tend to become better writers. And rather than face up to the grain of truth in that critique, rejection, or review, they start doing what they do best: inventing. Inventing reasons for the badness that don't involve their book being bad. My critique group is full of losers! Those critics are just jealous -- someone must be paying them to say bad things about me! Publishing discriminates against men!
The problem with this -- aside from the basic, you know, inability to learn -- is that such people are ripe for a con. There is nothing that draws the sharks like the scent of self-illusions.
Anyone who looks to submit their work to any publisher will have to pick their way through this sea. Scam agents. Scam small presses. Scam editing services. All kinds of people willing to tell you just what you want to hear while they take you for all you've got.
But self-publishing has its own friggin' ocean. The people who turn to self-pub are often those who've been turned down, repeatedly, by larger, more reputable presses. They're rejected. They're humiliated. They're secretly afraid that all those faceless people who told them their book was not good enough may be right. They can feel a dream slipping through their fingers, and they're desperate to keep it.
They are fucking ripe to be plucked. And plucked they are, by the thousands, many paying as much as $5000 to get their books published or signing truly terrifying contracts with their "publisher". And the victims now don't just have pride and their writing on the line any more -- there's all that cash they paid out, too, and the humiliating possibility they've been not just rejected but subsequently hookwinked. Their book-peddling takes on an edge of desperation that not only drives away potential readers but gives more savvy self-pubs yet another stereotype to fight.
Conclusion.
Is self-publishing "wrong"? Of course not. It can be the wrong choice, and people have made and will continue to make terrifying messes out of their lives via self-publishing. A far larger number will coast along happily, make the occasional buck, and continue to write bad books secure in the knowledge that they're "good enough" and don't have to learn anything new. And a smaller number than either will make genuinely good writers out of themselves and possibly even achieve financial success. The odds are abysmal, but then, if any of us were good with numbers we wouldn't be chasing wordcount.
Is self-publishing the same as traditional publishing? No. What many self-published writers fail to realize is that the simple act of publishing a book does not get them any respect. It does not make them significantly different than the aspiring writer next door. Self-publishing is hard work, but to the general reading public it says nothing more than I thought my book was good enough to publish!
The general reading public wants a second opinion. In fact, the general reading public wants a third, fourth, fifth, and tenth opinion, which is why big publishers spend all that money putting ARCs out to reviewers. But as a self-pubbed, you're going to have to provide them those extra nine opinions before you get so much as a second glance, and you're going to have to do it by yourself. You're on your own out there.
Traditional publishing is not perfect, but it does have filters built in. What self-published writers have done is essentially move themselves from slushpile to slushpile, in hopes that readers will be less unkind than editors. On the downside, it's a pretty slim hope. On the upside, you only have to feed yourself from the proceeds, so you can be content with a much smaller profit margin than the houses would be.
-----
Hello, you've reached the bottom of Kat's long and involved ranting. If your final conclusion is that Kat is pretty sick of both the whining of the self-published and the unthinking knee-jerk EBIL declarations of the determinedly aspiring... have a cookie. After reading that whole damned thing, you deserve it.
Point the first: writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Writers -- traditionally published or otherwise -- take a while before they start making a living wage off their work, if they ever do. How long a while depends on how good they are, how lucky they are, what their definition of "living wage" is, and, what kind of support they get from their publisher. Since the answer to the fourth question will always be "zero" for self-published writers, "a while" will most likely be longer for them than for others.
If you think writing is a good way to get rich and quit your day job, here's a dollar. Go buy a lottery ticket. The odds are better, and it will spare us all so much time and suffering.
Point the second: self-publishing is not a moral stance.
You are not a bad person if you self-publish. (You are a bad person if you're one of the innumerable scammers who tend to run self-publishing companies, but I digress). You are not necessarily a good person if you traditionally publish. There are some well published, well-documented assholes out there. You are not necessarily stupid, clueless, talentless, and doomed if you self-publish; you may be the first two and end up the fourth if you fail to do thorough research, but then, you won't be spared that seeking publication through traditional means either. Those who don't believe me need to check out Writer Beware.
Those who automatically apply the "bad, stupid, clueless, etc" label to the self-published, or those seeking self-publication, are generally aspiring writers desperate to sound like they know what they're talking about. More rarely, a professional writer will put her foot in her mouth. Industry professionals are a lot more cautious about the whole thing.
Point the third: "self-published" is not a statement of quality.
A self-published book is not automatically a bad book. as arcaedia points out in the post I link above, there are a lot of reasons a good book could not get published: because the subject matter wasn't "timely", because all the slots for the year were already filled, because while the book was good the audience was just too darn small to waste precious slots on it, because the marketing department, in its infinite wisdom, misread the market. These aren't the sob stories I hear from authors: these are the sob stories I hear from agents and editors about the "one that got away", the good, good book that they just couldn't beg, borrow or steal a contract for. It happens, and we all know it. And some of these bad-luck books will end up self-published.
On the flip side of the table, "self-published" is not a statement of quality. It makes no statement about the quality of the book at all.
A book published by a traditional publisher has, by necessity, gained the enthusiastic support of numerous people. The author obviously thinks it's publishable, or he wouldn't have submitted it; the editor thinks it's publishable; the agent thinks it's publishable. Depending on the size of the company, there will be a variable number of other people that the editor has had to convince that the book is publishable. Now, these people are human, and sometimes they make mistakes, but the crux of the matter is: at least one person besides the author, who had no personal connection to the author, looked at the book and went, "yup, this is good. This could sell."
When a book is self-published, the only person who has to think it's publishable is the author.
As jaylake has recently pointed out, the writer is the worst judge of their own work. All the people who submit to the slushpile at a major editor clearly consider themselves publishable too, and yet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Tor says she rejects 6o to 75 percent of the stuff in her slushpile for reasons like "author is functionally illiterate" or "author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs." That's not even a quality issue; it's a readability issue.
But all of those authors think their work is good enough to publish.
All of those authors are self-publishing.
Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. They do not read for charity. They read to be entertained, and they expect what they read to conform to certain basic standards. When 6 out of 10 books they pick up from a specific source are unreadable -- not mediocre, not bad, not even craptastically bad, but unreadable -- they will start to avoid that source.
(Don't believe my stats? Look at POD-dy Mouth's. Ten percent of the books she read were so bad, she couldn't get past the first page. The only traditionally published book that struck me as being that unreadable from page one was Joyce's Ulysses.)
Self-publishing has a major filtering issue. Until it's dealt with, self-pub will be barely a footnote in the marketing world, and it will carry a stigma of the second-rate. It's unfair, but then life is also unfair.
Point the fourth: a publisher does a great deal more than print the book.
An off-the-cuff list of things that, say, Bantam-Spectra will do for books it publishes:
- Edit it.
- Copyedit it. (Yes, there's a difference.)
- Provide it with cover art.
- Send preview copies (ARCs) to reviewers, booksellers, and others in hopes of getting their attention.
- Send ARCs to other authors on its list in hopes of getting a cover blurb.
- Write ad copy -- back cover, inside flap, teaser page, and what have you.
- Possibly include ads or samples of the book in the backs of other books it publishes.
- Possibly provide promotional materials, like bookmarks, for the book.
- Possibly fund other marketing campaigns -- posters, special bookstore placements, giveaways, contests -- for the book.
- Distribute the book: it will be at least potentially available in major and independent bookstores across the country(s) and on Amazon.com.
- Do a big enough print run of the book that it will be affordable by market standards, and warehouse the extra copies.
Again, there will be mistakes. Budget will be lavished on a real loser of a book, while the year's real find starves to death in a corner. The cover art will suck. The ad copy will suck. The print run will be too small and they'll refuse to do another. The print run will be too big, and there will be too many returns, and the author will quite unfairly see it reflected in her royalty statements. But they will do it all.
Whatever company an author chooses to self-publish with will do none of this. He will have to do it all.
A great many people do not realize this when they choose to self-publish. Of those that do realize it, not all realize just how ineffective their attempts at marketing will be when compared to what the big boys do, or how expensive it will be when they're footing the bill up front. Amazon.com listings are easy enough to come by, but shelf space in major bookstores? Forget it. Most of the chains won't even special order self-pubbed books anymore, having been burned by the "promotional techniques" of certain scam publishers one too many times, and they certainly won't allot precious shelf space to them. The rest -- well, the rest simply costs money and time.
It's not easy being a published author either, and any published author who thinks she can sit back and rake in the cash is in for a nasty surprise. But she will at least have some support. The self-published author is doing it alone.
Point the fifth: writers really don't like hearing this.
Writers are as a collective neurotic, egotistical, insecure, poorly socialized, and insanely desirous of attention. I speak from experience here. They also have serious reality issues. This is perhaps to be expected of people who spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, creating their own worlds, to the point that they, say, nearly walk out of Wal-Mart with a map they are convinced they want before they remember that, no, it was a character who wanted it. (Silly, silly character! There are no Wal-Marts in the desert! ... uh, not that this really happened to me, or anything. *ahem*)
Sit a group of writers down and try to explain the hard facts of publishing and marketing to them, and there will be a lot of out-of-tune humming and absent-minded staring-out-the-window. They can be trained out of this, but the basic desire to deny reality -- or at least warp it to their personal desires -- will remain.
And the thing that writers really, really don't like to hear, the thing that will bring out the humming and the staring and perhaps even the fluffy blanket, is that their book is not good enough.
Good writers learn to deal with this. They learn to take the slam critique, or the rejection letter, or the bad review, and learn what they can from it, and toss the rest over their shoulders. Good writers become better writers.
Bad writers do not learn this. Now, bad writers with enough talent may become successful writers -- yet another sign that I do not run the universe -- but they don't tend to become better writers. And rather than face up to the grain of truth in that critique, rejection, or review, they start doing what they do best: inventing. Inventing reasons for the badness that don't involve their book being bad. My critique group is full of losers! Those critics are just jealous -- someone must be paying them to say bad things about me! Publishing discriminates against men!
The problem with this -- aside from the basic, you know, inability to learn -- is that such people are ripe for a con. There is nothing that draws the sharks like the scent of self-illusions.
Anyone who looks to submit their work to any publisher will have to pick their way through this sea. Scam agents. Scam small presses. Scam editing services. All kinds of people willing to tell you just what you want to hear while they take you for all you've got.
But self-publishing has its own friggin' ocean. The people who turn to self-pub are often those who've been turned down, repeatedly, by larger, more reputable presses. They're rejected. They're humiliated. They're secretly afraid that all those faceless people who told them their book was not good enough may be right. They can feel a dream slipping through their fingers, and they're desperate to keep it.
They are fucking ripe to be plucked. And plucked they are, by the thousands, many paying as much as $5000 to get their books published or signing truly terrifying contracts with their "publisher". And the victims now don't just have pride and their writing on the line any more -- there's all that cash they paid out, too, and the humiliating possibility they've been not just rejected but subsequently hookwinked. Their book-peddling takes on an edge of desperation that not only drives away potential readers but gives more savvy self-pubs yet another stereotype to fight.
Conclusion.
Is self-publishing "wrong"? Of course not. It can be the wrong choice, and people have made and will continue to make terrifying messes out of their lives via self-publishing. A far larger number will coast along happily, make the occasional buck, and continue to write bad books secure in the knowledge that they're "good enough" and don't have to learn anything new. And a smaller number than either will make genuinely good writers out of themselves and possibly even achieve financial success. The odds are abysmal, but then, if any of us were good with numbers we wouldn't be chasing wordcount.
Is self-publishing the same as traditional publishing? No. What many self-published writers fail to realize is that the simple act of publishing a book does not get them any respect. It does not make them significantly different than the aspiring writer next door. Self-publishing is hard work, but to the general reading public it says nothing more than I thought my book was good enough to publish!
The general reading public wants a second opinion. In fact, the general reading public wants a third, fourth, fifth, and tenth opinion, which is why big publishers spend all that money putting ARCs out to reviewers. But as a self-pubbed, you're going to have to provide them those extra nine opinions before you get so much as a second glance, and you're going to have to do it by yourself. You're on your own out there.
Traditional publishing is not perfect, but it does have filters built in. What self-published writers have done is essentially move themselves from slushpile to slushpile, in hopes that readers will be less unkind than editors. On the downside, it's a pretty slim hope. On the upside, you only have to feed yourself from the proceeds, so you can be content with a much smaller profit margin than the houses would be.
-----
Hello, you've reached the bottom of Kat's long and involved ranting. If your final conclusion is that Kat is pretty sick of both the whining of the self-published and the unthinking knee-jerk EBIL declarations of the determinedly aspiring... have a cookie. After reading that whole damned thing, you deserve it.
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