Nothing to do with self-publishing, but hey, it's the holidays
I’ll be clear up front. I’ve got nothing against self-publishing per se. I’ve seen examples of kick-ass writers who couldn’t break through the traditional gatekeepers, but who built huge audiences online and either then have continued down that route to a new kind of publishing fame and fortune, or who then have signed blockbuster deals with the very houses that could have had them cheap early on. So maybe self-publishing is now a legitimate new entre for those with the skill to pull it off.
I’ve also seen an explosive proliferation of absolute crap, a nauseating cesspool of poor storytelling, badly written and rife with spelling, grammatical and formatting errors, usually offered so cheap as to be practically free. So maybe self-publishing is an exercise in unbridled narcissism through which marginally literate hacks are furthering the reputation of self-publishing as the last refuge of the talentless while simultaneously creating unrealistic pricing expectations, thus twice-poisoning the well for real writers with actual talent.
There’s the good and the bad. Pretty much like anything else. But I won’t be playing.
I’ve got three novels with my agent now, one that’s been shopped a good bit, one just getting shopped now, and one that will be heading out to the usual suspects shortly. Even if my novels don’t sell, though, I won’t be self-publishing, not now and probably not ever. Here’s why.
Read Chuck Wendig’s post today on all the moving parts you’ve got to consider if you want to get serious about the self-publishing business. You’ve got to learn the ins and outs of the various platforms and their comparative benefits. You’ve got to decide whether your soul is worth more than Amazon is offering to pay for it. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to sell your work – and then invest a lot of effort pimping it. You’ve got to track results and tweak your approach to capitalize on what works in a constantly evolving marketplace. You’ve got to up your technical game so that the material you put out has the fit and finish to distinguish it as a professional product in what is often a pretty amateurish crowd.
In other words, you’ve gotta do a lot of fucking work. And that all takes time.
If you’re a full-time penmonkey like Chuck, and you’ve got his energy and enthusiasm for the ins and outs of the business, it makes a lot of sense. It’s another revenue stream to divert into your wallet.
But I’m not one of those. I’ve got a job – a job that eats up fifty hours of my time on a good week. And I don’t have Chuck’s passion for the business side of this. I’ve got time to do three things: My day job; the sundry accumulation of housework, TV watching, drinking and marital goodwill maintenance that comprises most of the rest of my life; and writing.
If having any kind of career as a writer, other than the one the day-job people pay me for, is going to require mastering the vagaries of self-publishing, then I’m not going to have that career. That’s just how it goes.
And it’s too bad, in a way. Because if that’s how it ends up going; if, as an increasing chorus of people claim, traditional publishing is hearing the sound of self-publishing’s winged chariot drawing near and is soon to be crushed beneath its wheels, I fear many good writers will be lost. Because, to succeed, you’ll have to be as much a self-publishing entrepreneur as you are a writer, and the former skill set may end up being more important than the later.
Whine all you want about agents, editors and the rest of the traditional publishing establishment castigated as gatekeepers – and they certainly weren’t and aren’t infallible – but they did keep most of the crap out of the system. Now, anybody with an internet connection and an ego can flood the virtual book market with a shitstorm of, well, shit.
It isn’t just making it more complicated to be a writer; it is making it more complicated to be a reader. Sometimes the universe of choices in the marketplace when I fire up my Kindle drives me to despair. Truth be told, I often default to what’s offered by the traditional publishers anyway – it saves time, and it’s a little like having that UL tag on my Christmas lights. I may not end up loving the book, but I’m pretty sure it won’t burn my house down.
So, self-publishing? I don’t have the time and, truth be told, even if I did, I don’t have the temperament. So I’ll plug along through the traditional channels and I’ll make it or I won’t. The self-publishing craze will just have to carry on without me.
I’m with you. I might self-pub a short story collection if I can’t find an e-publisher who has terms and skills I find satisfactory. I’ve found some excellent self-published work out there, but it is the exception.
I’ve also found some excellent traditionally published work out there, and it is hardly the norm, but the odds are a bit better. A bit.
I find the Hate the Gatekeeper stuff to be jejune and petty, but I do think traditional publishing needs to get out of the 19th century in many ways. I imagine their offices to be like Mad Men, when I read of some of the business practices. Great people, but a model that is far from agile.
But I do snicker every time I hear “gatekeeper,” because any shitty old book will be published if they think it will sell. And Pride & Prejudice fan fiction has its own bookshelf, for fuck’s sake. (I’m just jealous that PD James got her book out before mine became more than a fallback idea).
And Amazon won’t even pay its taxes, so we can’t expect them to behave well toward widdle writers once they’ve used us in their little game.
And bridges I haven’t burned yet?
Yeah, there are the cynical, “but we can sell it” titles — the Snooki crap and what not — but if a traditional publisher comes out with a unknown debut author, it’s a good bet the book is better than 95% of self-published titles, and the 95% is probably low.
Remember THE GREEK SEAMAN? We were such dorks back then.
I agreed completely with you until about a year ago. I had some books I liked on my hard drive, backed up for a variety of reasons. Some were my fault, some weren’t. I reached a point where I’d decided I wasn’t going to make any money, and was pretty sure I didn’t want to have to put up with what I would have to put up with to make much money at it.
But, I had these book written, and was in the middle of another. And I’d heard encouraging things about them.
So I self-published. One went out in September; another will available in March. Last I looked, I’d made $53.30, but I have received glowing reviews from several writers I consider my betters. That’s enough for me. I’m careful about my proofing and formatting, and the books look good, about as good as what I’ve seen from publishers who are supposed to know what they’re doing. It’s fun for me, and the idea that others will be able to read my books if they choose keeps me from feeling too masturbatory about the time I spend doing it.
I also have a day job, so anything I’d make from writing would be found money. I’m also aware I may be cluttering the landscape for those who do hope to make a living at it, I’m sorry about that–I am–but I’m doing my best to clutter the landscape with a quality product. As soon as people I respect stop being enthusiastic about what I write, I’ll stop.
We Lewis, Dan. I agree with you. I’d rather spend my time working at what I’m good at, and hope to get better at – writing. I’m just not a mini publishing company. Book promotion is not my passion, and if you don’t have passion for it, why do it? I love my day job, which is a luxury I know. And my writing time is precious to me. I already spend way too much of it on promotion and managing my writerly profile in the world.
You put it very well, Dan.
Thanks for the well reasoned and thought out post. I have been lucky that self publishing is in place, it has allowed books that otherwise would have cluttered up my hard drive to find an audience. Would I like a great agent and pub deal to come my way? Absa-fucking-lutely. Will I keep writing and putting out books regardless? Yep. I would love to work with top flight editors and come in from the cold, but the deal didn’t break that way yet. My real hope is that word of mouth will ultimately become the true gate keeper. I hope for more places like, or stronger presence of Goodreads where readers can share reviews and new books with each other. I’d love to see the readers choose what makes it and what fails. They are after all why we do this, or should be.
It makes me so tired. Thanks for this, Dan.
I’m with you.
I’ve also grown to dislike the write it today, e-publisher X releases it tomorrow jive that has been getting a lot of puffed up praise here and there. There’s really no substantial difference between those outfits and self-publishing.
Very interesting, sir.
I hear you loud and clear. I just have two points:
1) of course a great deal of crap has been published by the “gatekeepers” over the years. Not that that’s either here or there.
2) what gets me and gives me concern is the notion that the traditional publisher who eventually picks you up will do marketing and promotion for you when they bring out your book. Increasingly, exceedingly, this is both untrue and something they do not do well when they try. Given how many books they put out and what goes into the typical (read: 80% of) marketing for a first-time author’s novel, the marketing and promo either happens by the author, or doesn’t at all.
So… well, this is the way I see it. Not a great thing to realize, but having seen where and how the sausage is made from the inside once or twice and talking to the folks who do said-sausage making and who’ve had many more books published (sausages made) than I… this is where I sit and how I see it.
Not necessarily for the betterment of any of us, but perhaps the way it is.
Yours in pencils and pens,
SH
Seth –
I agree on most points — yeah, even traditional publishers aren’t doing much of a job of marketing, especially for new authors. But they will get real books out to real bookstores, where the majority of folk still are buying their reading material. And yeah, they do publish their share of crap, too, but I think they usually know when it’s crap (when they publish Glenn Beck or Snooki, they know they are putting out shit, but they are putting out shit with a built-in readership that will be getting exactly what it deserves. When they publish a new, first-time author, I trust that writer to have some chops far more than a trust some first-time self-pubbing wannabe.)
So whether they publish crap or not is irrelevant. The point here is marketing and actually selling books, as well as the shelf-life of a slaved-over title.
Without a doubt, getting books into stores will get them in front of people who will never see them otherwise. AND lend an air or credibility that is mostly not up for grabbing anywhere else.
I’ve just lost faith in the financial gamble (even if it’s not my money) of a publisher spending a lot of money on a lot of books to try to push them out to stores. Given the history of return policies in publishing (good for stores and bad for publishers) and the shrinking time-span of shelf time given to new titles (down to 6-8 weeks these days instead of what was once 10-12 weeks) between in-store and returns… plus the fact that B&N, who now buys a majority of a print’s initial run rarely gets more than 50% of that print buy out of their warehouse and even into stores… well, it’s a set of cards stacked big-time against traditional publishers.
All I’m saying.
On the other hand, the ole question becomes: do you want to write to get readers or to make money. One upside of self-publishing is that it lets you find readers on your own and hear from them… and get your work read.
For what that’s worth.
I’m not sure why I write, to tell the truth. I like telling the stories, so I guess it’s readers. I wouldn’t object to the money, but that’s got a lightning-striking randomness to it that I’m certainly not counting on. It’s just, even to get the readers and to do so in anything other than an embarassingly amateurish fashion would take far more time and effort on the self-pubbing front than I can or am willing to put in. Should have got off my ass twenty years ago when legacy publishers were the only option — then I wouldn’t have had to worry about it.
[...] and whatnot. But I’m not much of an essayist and when I saw this post by Chuck Wending and this post by Dan O’Shea, I thought, “Shit, they said it better than I ever [...]