self-publishing

Worth The Paper It’s Printed On

July 23, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few weeks back I was looking at several recently published non-fiction titles, and while holding each in turn I kept having the odd feeling that something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I flipped through one of the books and found a multi-page section which had black text against a light-gray background. The contrast between the light-gray page and what should have been jet-black type was so slight as to make the text almost unreadable, even under bright light.

Without thinking I fingered the paper on that page and suddenly the connection was made. What I was holding felt wrong because the paper was feather-light, like bound newsprint. Checking each of the books in turn I realized that without the covers and dust jackets — which felt as if they were half the weight of each book — I’m not sure any of the titles would have weighed more than a comic.

While I understand that price pressures in the publishing industry are crushing, each of these books was selling for upwards of $25 at retail, yet felt insubstantial at best. In comparison, a copy of my self-published short story collection, while shorter by page count, not only felt more substantial, each page felt weightier and had more contrast.

I recognize that much of what is lauded as professional publishing amounts to little more than industry droppings from a hits-driven marketing machine. I also realize that nobody expects most books to last twenty years, let alone a hundred. I cannot help thinking, however, that devaluing the physical properties of your own product might diminish interest in that product over time.

Then again, given the margins and production efficiencies inherent in electronic books, maybe that the industry’s goal.

— Mark Barrett

Self-Publishing is For Closers

April 19, 2013 By Mark 4 Comments

Until recently it was easy for the traditional publishing industry to puff its condescending chest out and hide behind pretense and bluster, but the staunch gatekeeping the industry practiced was always a shell game. Works and authors deemed unprofitable were labeled not good enough, while works and authors that could be packaged, edited or ghostwritten for profit were granted admission into the literary sphere.

As I’ve noted numerous times, the claim that the publishing industry provides cultural stewardship has always been a lie. The very fact that screams are now emanating from corporate publishing offices tells you that self-publishing is not inflicting cultural carnage, but merely decreasing revenue and decentralizing power in the industry. Many of the people who make their living in those offices continue to toe the party line despite the obvious shifting landscape, but at best that has been a delaying tactic and at worse complete delusion.

There will never be any shortage of celebrity-driven bilge in the literary world, but as many celebrities have discovered to their horror, having a bankable name doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want in any business. If you’re a movie star the studios will jump at the chance to produce your next genre blockbuster, but if you’re trying to fund a small-budget art film you’re going to have as much trouble raising studio money as an unknown actor with dream. The only difference is that the studio can slam the door in the unknown’s face, while they have to go out of their way to shower you with sincere and deeply felt sweet nothings. Likewise, if you’re a literary fixture or a rising star the publishing world will be happy to take another volume of whatever you’re famous for, but if you want to wander into the short-fiction weeds or publish an experimental work you’ll probably find few takers. Unless of course you’re willing to give them more of the good stuff in the bargain, in which case they’ll begrudgingly kick your pet project out the door and support it with marketing that meets the bare minimum of their impossible-to-enforce legal commitment. [ Read more ]

The Long View in Context

September 21, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on the previous post, I think it’s worth taking a moment to consider where we are as a culture, and how we might evolve in the future relative to independent authorship and self-publishing.

The current explosion of interest in self-publishing is being driven by a number of factors, not all of them constant. I believe that as long as the internet exists, people will use it to reach out to each other without engaging the services of middlemen and gatekeepers. That goes for everything from private conversations to business — meaning, ultimately, that every attempt to mediate those direct connections will ultimately fail, if only to inevitably be reborn in some slick new guise. Whether we’re talking about sites like Facebook or device manufacturers like Apple, they’re all simply along for the ride, even as they purport to be driving the revolution.

What’s important to remember with regard to self-publishing is that what we are witnessing today is the explosive origin of what will be a future norm. As such there’s a built-in, pent-up demand for this new opportunity that simply won’t exist in the future. It’s not just kids or hipsters who are learning how to use the internet to do things like self-publish books, it’s everybody, all at once. In a generation or two, however, it really will be only the kids who need to be taught. Like young drivers they’ll learn at a developmentally appropriate age how to use the same self-publishing tools their older siblings, parents and grandparents have been using most of their lives.

Today there are clearly a lot of people who have always wanted to self-publish a book or two. Whether those books are collections of family recipes or deranged manifestos, until now these personal works have been financially and technologically beyond the reach of most would-be authors. This pent-up demand, again, crosses all generations, but over time — and perhaps a relatively short amount of time — that demand is going to be flushed out. Yes, there will be people who decide to pursue self-publication either as a hobby or avocation, but most would-be self-publishers will produce the titles they’ve always wanted and then stop. Or they’ll hang out a shingle and try to make a few bucks helping other independent authors realize their own pent-up dreams.

It’s also important to note that there’s a perfect convergence right now between the availability of self-publishing and the amount of time people have on their hands. If you crater the economy and drive millions of people into unemployment, they’re going to look around for something to do. If they’ve always wanted to self-publish a book they now have the time, and can probably afford to get it done. They may even have extra motivation to explore self-publishing as a means of making a buck or two when a couple of extra bucks would really be handy.

For these reasons, then, I think the current avalanche of demand for and interest in self-publishing will necessarily decrease — perhaps quite precipitously — as people find more time-consuming and remunerative pursuits, and as pent-up demand becomes satisfied over time. Which means those writers who are determined to take the long view, both in terms of future works and the value or present works, will almost certainly find themselves in a less-crowded market in the future. Which strikes me as a very good place to be.

— Mark Barrett

E-book Price-Fixing Update

September 7, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

A settlement has been approved in the federal government’s suit against Apple and five of the largest publishing companies, all of which were charged with colluding to fix the price of e-books:

For the next two years, the settling publishers may not agree to contracts with e-book retailers that restrict the retailer’s “discretion over e-book pricing,” the court said. For five years, the publishers are not allowed to make contracts with retailers that include a most-favored nation clause. “The time limits on these provisions suggest that they will not unduly dictate the ultimate contours of competition within the e-books industry as it develops over time,” Judge Cote wrote.

It’s not often that such obvious abuses are so quickly corrected by regulators. There is now no floor under the price of e-books, which means publishing will have to adapt and evolve that much faster, as opposed to conspiring against consumers.

To the extent that this seems to empower Amazon as a mass-market e-tailer, Amazon will ultimately face its own price pressures as content inevitably decreases in price. (Which may be why Amazon seems to be relying so heavily on advertising on its Kindle e-readers for revenue.)

Context and previous Ditchwalk commentary here. Additional cranky commentary here.

— Mark Barrett

E-Book Price Fixing

March 8, 2012 By Mark 3 Comments

In March of 2010, in the face of growing downward price pressure from e-books and open competition on pricing from online retailers like Amazon and Apple, the publishing industry took control of the price of its own products. It did so by abruptly and collectively by abandoning the long-time industry-norm of wholesale pricing and adopting instead what is called the agency model, in which retailers get a percentage of any sale rather than being allowed to set the price of goods themselves. (Like real estate agents and stock brokers, retailers who embrace the agency model never own the products they sell, they simply collect a fee for uniting buyer and seller.)

Fully two years later the federal government is signalling that the price-fixing party may be over:

Among the reported gripes the Justice Department has with the way Apple and publishers are doing business is a move toward setting standard prices and giving Apple a 30% cut of revenue for e-books sold on its devices. The business model, which Apple rolled out with the launch of its first iPad tablet in 2010, differs from what publishers offer to traditional bookstores, which is to sell books to retailers for about half of the suggested cover price and let the booksellers charge whatever they’d like.

As e-books have become more popular and brick-and-mortar bookstores have struggled, the industry has moved to the “agency model” Apple dictated with the iPad and, the Justice Department believes, publishers have acted in concert to replicate Apple’s model with Amazon and others. Publishers have denied such collusion, the report said.

So now you know. If you want to openly conspire to set prices in order to protect your market and limit competition at the expense of the consumer you will only be able to get away with doing so for two years, plus however long it takes the government to drag you into court, prove anything, and penalize you with a slap-on-the-wrist settlement in which you ultimately offer consumers a small price break they will almost certainly never take you up on for products they probably don’t want to buy anyway.

Or, you can avoid the icky, scummy feeling of being a money-grubbing liar by self-publishing your own books.

— Mark Barrett

Self-publishing Revolution Update

October 21, 2011 By Mark 16 Comments

No surprises, plenty of confirmation:

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

As regular readers know I’m no fan of Amazon. But if the choice is between a provider who charges up-front fees for a-la-carte services and an industry that demands editorial control while banking unsubstantiated percentages, I’ll have to go with the former.

It’s also worth noting, again, how intimately related the industry’s gatekeeping practices and economic stability were. Controlling access to publication and stigmatizing self-published writers created an industry that could dictate terms like a price-fixing cartel. At least until the entire question of self-publishing was revealed to be an industry-perpetuated fraud. [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale

April 30, 2011 By Mark 18 Comments

Independent authors believe every self-publisher is a revolutionary. Gatekeepers in traditional publishing think self-publishers are losers, at least until those same losers use their self-publishing success to humbly petition for a book deal. Vanity publishers insist all self-publishers are overlooked geniuses, and happily back up that assertion with high-priced services and promises they never intend to keep.

All of these definitions are unhelpful at best, self-serving at worst. In order to talk about self-publishing with any legitimacy we need a way to differentiate among self-publishers that is meaningful and objective. For that reason I created the Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale, which uses rising levels of production complexity to categorize self-published authors. [ Read more ]

Independent Authors and the Bookware Biz

December 23, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In a recent post I rejected the idea that self-published authors always need to own their own ISBN’s. My rationale was primarily financial, but it was also influenced by my belief that independent authors should not try to mimic the publishing industry’s traditional business model:

Still, as a self-publishing author I think it’s important to remember that what I’m doing is not what most people in the greater publishing industry are doing.

I may be looking to use the same sales channels that everybody else is using, and I may be packaging my content in the same delivery vehicle (a book), but in terms of scale there are significant difference that shouldn’t be ignored.

It’s understandable that independent authors would look to the book industry for a template upon which to base their own self-publishing efforts. It’s understandable, but it’s also a mistake. To see why, imagine for a moment that you’re a potter. Your goal is to make your own pottery in your own studio, and to sell that pottery in a small shop. Would it make sense to base your manufacturing and sales decisions on the business models used by Corningware or Dansk? Or might you find more practical utility in mimicking the business models of other local artisans, even if they produced paintings and jewelry?

[ Read more ]

Cover Design Week

September 20, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

In a recent post about choosing a print-on-demand (POD) provider, I said I was going to look into the viability of having someone else handle the cover art for a POD version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. For the past week or so I’ve been doing exactly that, and I think the issues I’ve been wrestling with are ones that many (if not most) independent authors will necessarily confront.

Having asked for and received recommendations and responses from a number of independent authors, the most interesting thing I can report is that the exploding self-publishing marketplace currently provides cover-design services to independent authors at almost any imaginable price point. It’s almost absurdly easy to find people doing this kind of work across a wide range of fees.

While questions of artistic merit and marketing effectiveness are central to the importance of a book cover, and the professional standing of many cover-design providers is all over the map, I’m going to deal with those issues (and more) in subsequent posts. I’ll also try to detail the logical process I follow in coming to my own decision about whether or not to employ someone else’s talents — a decision I took as a foregone conclusion last week, but one I’m a bit surprised to be revisiting again.

As I said in another recent post:

Just because someone hangs out a shingle it doesn’t mean you’re going to be fairly charged, or that the work will be done to your standards. In fact, you could get gouged for slip-shod work that you would then have to pay someone else to fix, leaving you out more money and more time than you would have forfeited if you had done the work yourself.

The point here is that what looks like a simple question — paying others to do work for you — can quickly explode into more complex and problematic questions, all of which also involve time as a component.

More soon.

— Mark Barrett

TYOTE

April 9, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

The title of this post is the working-title acronym for my collection of short stories. I’m 99% sure the title is the one I’ll be going with, but until I’m 100% sure this is what I’m calling it.

It’s been interesting getting the stories in shape. I’ve pushed myself to make the stories good, and been pushed to do more by the finality of the act of publication — even if I’m only self-publishing them in digital form. Nobody wants to make an idiot out of themselves.

I’m pretty close to being able to put the stories up on Smashwords. I’ve worked through the formatting style guide, and I have a working comp for the cover art. I just need to do a final version of everything and a final read-through of the text and I think that’s it. (I’ll have more to say about the various steps in the process when I’m reasonably confident I didn’t mess things up.)

What I can say so far is that the impending act of publication has helped improve my work. Because I’m taking it seriously, that seriousness is producing benefits I hadn’t imagined. I’m not new to turning in final drafts of fictional copy, or scripts that will be produced by others, but this is a more solitary process, and I’m glad to find that it is not without rewards.

Even as I am starting to see the larger self-publishing movement as a fad or balloon that will inevitably go bust, I’m also utterly convinced that the internet as a distribution and publication platform is for real. I can put these stories where others can find them, and I don’t have to ask permission to do that.

As small as the collection is, and as limited as the economic upside might be, it feels like a big deal. Regardless of the outcome, I’m glad I’m doing this.

— Mark Barrett