photo credit: gruntzooki
I’ve been seeing
a lot of conversation going on lately about self-publishing and how it relates to emerging writers. This is a topic that I’m quite interested in, having both considered the possibility of self-publishing and applied the term ‘emerging’ to myself and my writing. So I thought I’d take a moment and explore my own thoughts surrounding the subject and give some advice on how to make the best of the current scene.
Broadly speaking, I’m in favour of self-publishing as a thing. As far as I’m concerned, the more options an artist has to distribute their art, the better. And writers have produced some of my most favouritest art ever. Print-on-demand services are great, in that they are putting the power to publish in the hands of people who have the willingness to do so. Not to mention the fact that they are more environmentally friendly, as there are no pallets full of returns to be pulped. The great advantage of the open-armed nature of the self-publishing market is that anyone with a bit of tech-savvy can release a book. This fact is also cited as its great disadvantage, in that there is no filter of taste to keep the good, solid examples in and let the slush flow through. And those that cite this disadvantage have a point: there is already a lot of slush out in the wild. I’m not going to argue the fact that there is, statistically, more crap writing than good writing in the self-publishing world. It’s self-evident. To prove it to yourself, just spend more than five seconds trawling the Kindle boards or Smashwords. Not only that, but the average self-published book would hardly be called profitable, and more often than not a self-published book does not even come close to earning out the number of loving hours poured into it. So what’s the reason behind this lack of quality? Why don’t good self-published books earn out? And what can emerging writers do to keep from falling into the same traps?
Quality assurance
When looking at the self-publishing industry, analysts often cite other indie industries as examples of how self-propelled creative arts can work. Industries such as the short film or music industries, where a self-funded project can often lead to big deals for indie darlings. But there’s a difference between these industries and self-publishing, and it has to do with skill. Any person with a basic education can successfully perform the physical act of writing. A person with a masters in literature can certainly do it, but primary school kids can too. There is no threshold of time spent practising to complete the physical, pen-to-paper (or fingertip-to-keyboard) act of writing. It’s not like the music industry, where you need to spend a lot of time getting to the point where you can play even one song properly. Or the film industry, where the price of access to quality equipment can mean that only those dedicated to the craft get allocated time to use it. The beauty of writing is that it doesn’t have any of those in-built thresholds. And of course, that’s one of the best things about writing and language; anyone can do it, using just about any material on hand that can make a mark on another. It’s much like the visual fine arts in that regard.
Of course, with fine arts, it’s very easy to identify talent. Often an artist can easily measure themselves against the physical world that they are trying to represent. And with the extremely high standard of visual literacy demanded by our modern world, even the average Jean can tell you whether they like your amateur efforts and how you might improve them. But with writing, it’s quite difficult to get the kind of feedback loop that might enable an emerging writer to grow. After all, how often have you seen writers posting work online with a preamble saying that their friend/family member had said it was really good? The combination of the ease with which writing can be physically performed and a lack of access to honest feedback means that quite often, pieces of writing are self-published without any kind of quality control; the kind of quality control that traditional publishing routes more or less represent. Of course, there is some quality control in self-publishing in the form of the hivemind of readers that rate titles they read (or which their friends tell them to rate), but it’s not exactly as precise as an editor with years of experience.
Earning out
So that’s my intepretation of the ‘why’ behind the lack of quality. The earning out part is a bit less complicated, but interesting to talk about. Intuitively, we all know why a lot of people won’t be making any more money on their self-published book than their day job earns them in an hour, and it’s to do with signal-to-noise ratios. When you release your shiny new e-book , it drops into a huge reserve of similar books that haven’t sold any copies. And trying to lift it out of that reserve is a bloody difficult thing to do. It’s the reason why people hire and pay the wages for marketers and promoters–getting enough signal attached to your book to boost it out of the noise and into the public eye. But in self-publishing market, you haven’t got a salary to give a marketer, you’ve just got yourself. And not everyone can sell themselves. It’s a hard thing to do, both in a technical sense and a personal sense. Technically speaking, a writer has to have the Internet savvy to build a social network without coming off as a spammer. That takes care and patience, but I’d say it’s achievable by most who grew up with the Internet. But on a personal level, you have to have the confidence in your writing ability to see the whole thing through. You have to have faith that your book isn’t like the millions of other slush pile wannabes. Yours is the real deal, and here’s reasons a), b), and c) why the reader should buy it.
Achieving both of those things without skittering to the wayside is hard, and some players start with an advantage. In an interview talking about his successful experiment with self-publishing, Lee Goldberg (author of the Mr. Monk series of books) talks about a ‘gold rush mentality’ regarding e-books at the moment. The seductive narratives of the few fortunate people who have been able to make a living selling e-books have lead to ‘…thousands of authors who will be lucky if they can give away ten books-a-month at 99 cents each’. That’s because they don’t have the networking skills (read: publicist) or the core fan-base that an already-established author has. Getting those famed 1,000 true fans is an uphill battle, and it’s certainly not guaranteed. Garnering enough momentum and five-star reviews is very often a game of chance, and the conditions that a self-published writer needs to fulfil on any given day to become an Internet phenomenon are as difficult to predict as the Melbourne weather. But there are a few things that I believe are essential to giving at least a bit of weight to the die.
Emergent behaviour
So what can emerging writers do to avoid falling into a sea of anonymity? There have been quite a few articles discussing this lately, the reading of which prompted me to write this post. First up was Benjamin Solah’s post mourning a lack of sales of his self-published e-book, Sanity Juxtaposed. There were a few choice quotes from the comments, but the one that was picked up by Alan Baxter in his constructive post and which I think represents the first point that I want to make is this one made by Jason Fischer:
My two cents is this: trunk stories belong in your trunk. You either take them apart and make them good enough to sell, or you leave them there.
The problem with Ben’s e-book was that it was, as stated in its description, not his best work. It was bits and pieces that he had written but not polished, pieces that were unpublished and languishing on his hard-drive before they were put in the collection. The temptation for emerging writers to have something with their name on it out there for people to buy and read is one that is rooted in the issues of validation and insecurity (which I’ve covered in a previous post). But that yearning for validation sometimes ends up rushing the writer into releasing work that isn’t exemplary of their best ability. As Lee Goldberg puts it, just because you can publish for free with a mouse-click doesn’t mean that you should. There’s another angle to this argument, in that sometimes writers will reserve their best writing for querying traditional publishing avenues, and use the electronic route to release the stuff they aren’t as proud of. This is based on the misguided preconception that e-books and self-published works are inherently worth less than getting print on paper through a traditional publisher*. All of which brings me to my first recommendation for emerging writers looking to self-publish: if you are going to self-publish, make it your best work. This is also known in the programming community as ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If you release a piece of writing that isn’t up to standard, don’t be surprised when no-one wants to buy it. The definition of ‘up to standard’ may vary between groups, but I’d recommend at least a few redrafts and an edit by someone whose writing you respect.
So that’s the first thing, only release good writing. Not exactly rocket surgery. The second bit of advice comes from the desk of a guy named Chuck Wendig, whose to-the-point missive entitled ‘Why Your Self-Published Book May Suck A Bag Of Dicks‘ (and its follow-up) cuts very close to the bone. In it, he extols the virtues of good book cover design, well written book descriptions and synopses, getting someone (anyone) to edit your book, and making sure your sample excerpt gives the best possible hook to potential readers. In other words, professionalism in the presentation of your product to customers. That’s right, your piece of finely-wrought prose is a product. I’m going to say it again, in bold, just to be sure. Your writing is a product. If you are taking the self-publishing route, you absolutely cannot afford to kid yourself about this. There is no reason why your writing, no matter how amazing it is, should rise to the top of the slush pile. There is no buoyancy ascribed to it based on its artistic merit. A lamentable fact, but a fact nonetheless. So it makes sense to polish the presentation of your product as much, if not more, than the polishing of your writing. Anything less is shooting yourself in the foot before trying to run a marathon. Publishers know this, that’s why they spend millions of dollars on expensive ad campaigns to get booksellers on board with their latest best seller. It’s why they’ve started investing in book trailers, and why they invite managers of book stores to expensive, canapé-fuelled slide shows of their latest catalogues. So find yourself a designer who can create an eye-catching cover, a PR person who can find the best combination of wow-words to convince a stranger to click through to the sample, and polish that excerpt until it can’t stand its own glow. And if you can’t find family or friends who can fill those roles for a carton, be prepared to spend some money. People can, will, and do judge books by their cover.
Exception handling
Of course, there are exceptions to these bits of advice, just like there are exceptions to any rule. If you’re writing something because it’s fun and ridiculous and you just want a few of your friends to be amused by it, hell, don’t let me stop you throwing it out on the Interwoobles. That kind of writing can be awesome and light and breezy and completely separate from the writing you look to publish. Just take a peek at my ‘Unpublications‘ page. Seriously, go look at it, I finally figured out how to put up a recording there. Those are examples of passion projects. They were fun little pieces that I enjoyed writing, but would never, ever find a place in the current Australian journal landscape**. Alternatively, if you’re writing a cookbook for members of your family as a novel (hah) Christmas present, you probably don’t give a shit about sales ranks.
A final disclaimer, now that I’m done. I’ve never self-published anything of mine. But what I have done is watched a lot of people make the attempt, some successfully and some not successfully. And I think I’ve learned enough to be able to make a decent attempt if I ever decided to. I guess that means you should take everything I’ve said with a hearty pinch of salt, but it’s the Internet and you really should have been doing that anyway.
Anyway, that’s enough from me. If you have any comments or thoughts about stuff I’ve missed, please feel free to comment. I’d particularly like to hear the perspectives of people who have gone through with the whole thing and can tell me how applicable (or not) my advice is.
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*This is nonsense, you and I know that. Words are worth exactly how much they are worth, regardless of the medium they are presented through.
**The tragedy of which is a topic for another post, perhaps.
Very excellent thought articulation here.
I wrote a novel mansucript in 08/09 and then spent much of either 2010 repressing it or trying to edit it and fix it. I ended up deciding it was okay, people that had read it more or less liked it, but I didn’t really believe in it any more. From like a grand over-arching concept point of view, or like at a mechanical/structural level, or a general expression/language level.
I spent the last few weeks messing around with making ebooks, and just because I suddenly had the technical knowledge I was thinking maybe I should release free of charge the manuscript that I wouldn’t even want publishers to read. Which is just idiotic the moment you actually think it through, which, see Phill’s post for how it went for me. It became clear within a few days of thinking about it properly that I would be endlessly embarrassed and disappointed approx. a year later to realise people had read something that I personally now disliked, thought was immature, etc.
Interesting. There’s a lot to digest here, but it all tastes… right.
I have no qualms with self-publishers. I can even swallow vanity publishing, having spent time working on the other side of that (in a very NON-scammy company, I might add, which explained the meager sales outlook to each client, and long before they purchased.)
But crappy work is crappy work. You’ve got to call that like you see it, and if you release a sub-par manuscript out into the world, you’d better believe people are going to see it. And man, are they going to call you on it.
Very articulate post, as someone else said, and worth the read.
@JoJo: The act of falling out of favour with a piece of writing is a really complicated topic, and one that I might tackle in the future. When you’ve worked for so long on a manuscript, it’s inevitable that you will have changed in the intervening time; you’ve read some books that made you change your way of thinking about prose, or you’ve written some shorter stuff yourself that might have altered your style.
It’s a tricky thing. Still, it’s good to hear that you resisted the release of something that you didn’t think was representative of your writing. It’s like when we hear about a musician who didn’t let a big corporate firm use their latest single for an ad campaign. Makes me cheer a little inside. :)
@Tracy: Thanks for stopping by, appreciate it. There is definitely a point at which you have to tell folks if their writing sucks. And I think if they are gearing up to release a book, self-published or otherwise, that’s the time to do it. Better a friend does it than the hivemind–they ain’t gentle! :P
I admit to trying to change my writing life around comparing me as a writer to some of my friends in bands, which in part was due to desire to get something out there, so yes impatience, I guess and that issue of validation. I agree with that.
I have kind of found another outlet now with spoken word poetry but even there the comparison doesn’t quite work, but it’s passable.
I’m curious about your ‘unpublications’ page too.
@Ben: I think the peer pressure is always there, especially for emerging writers such as you and I who see these established authors doing these cool experiments and releasing stuff online. I guess it’s recognising that a lot more hard work goes into that sort of thing than is immediately obvious–they didn’t get into that position of having the luxury of experimenting with self-publishing without putting in a lot of hard yards before hand.
As far as the unpubs go, it’s like it says on the page: they’re little bits and pieces that I know for sure will not get published. However, I am fairly certain that they are good, solid pieces of work. So they’ll be slowly going up there as I find them time to record each of them. I have no expectation of them even being read, let alone picked up by a random passing editor, but I think some people might get a kick out of reading them.
Nice article Phil. But I would add….
Much of the crap out there, I think, is the product of economic desperation. I think many indie publishers would produce far better work if they could afford to, and yet they are not letting their financial short comings hold them back. Crap is the result. It’s the DIY ethic biting itself in the butt, over and over and over again.
Also. Venturing into Indie works often takes people outside of their normal reading habits and into realms which might as well be foreign lands. Just because it doesn’t match up to my criteria of goodness doesn’t make it necessarily bad. I mean, look at Twilight. I couldn’t get past the first five pages of it, but as Stephen Colbert would say, “the marketplace has spoken, it must be good.” When you start writing for something other than a classroom of like-minded people, you really have to wonder about the thoroughly subjective nature of literature.
And never underestimate the terrible weight of baggage carried by the phrase “self-published.” I’m often surprised by how people will dive right into an online journal or blog entry and yet curdle at the idea of reading someone’s self-published anything. I just don’t use that phrase anymore.
Oh yeah, and you’re in Australia. Doesn’t your government subsidize your publishing efforts? I seem to remember reading something about that, as an answer as to why it seems that Australian lit journals never take submissions from off the island. It seems like this should make it easier for you to go through the channels of traditional publishing.
@Jerry: Thanks for stopping by, man.
Yeah, the indie publishing scene does tend to operate on the braided remains of shoestrings they’ve found in gutters. It’s difficult to say how much that contributes to the crap that’s out there, though. DIY can be charming and well-executed, even when it’s printed on leftover napkins and bound together with toothpicks. It’s just a matter of presentation. But to get that presentation, you have to have some idea about design. And I think a lot of folks who go about publishing their own stuff do so with only a minimal knowledge of how to align WordArt in Office2000.
It’s also true that the genres that exist in indie publishing are much like the genres that exist in music journalism. ‘Acid-thriller fusion sci-fi crunk-romance D’n'B’. It’s that gold-rush mentality again: the wild fields of self-publishing are out there, and we need to stake our claim on the genres that we think are going to reach a big audience at some point. Everyone wants to be the first to grab some label that they can be the name for. But the example you cited, Twilight’s vampire romance, wasn’t the first of its genre. It wasn’t even the first massive success of its genre. I find it a bit confusing as to why writers are feeling the need to go to these lengths to distinguish themselves. Probably that validation and identity thing again.
I’m not sure about subsidising, but a lot of the magazines here have gone through the process of applying for arts grants. Those are in no way guaranteed, but they do help with publishing costs. And yes, I do think that some magazines have a certain quota of Australian features that need to be filled as a result. But there’s no shortage of Internationals being published.
Great comments, thanks again for dropping in! :)
Very well researched as always Phill.
I’m not for or against self publishing – the end product seems as fickle as any other form of publishing. I’m sure there are many great books rejected by publishers, and just as many shit ones accepted.
But I wonder why there’s so much focus on the product over the process. Seems like we’re falling over ourselves to get people to buy and read our words – and not as much concerned with whether what we are writing is actually contributing to some creative discussion. There seems so many echoes of the same impulse.
I’m not saying that I’m any better (we’re all chasing similar comets), or that there is a role for some benevolent dictator, but we seem practically obsessed with the economics of our art, which seems strange considering that the quality of our art is the least determined by finance (ie you don’t need a big budget to write a big book).
Perhaps the cheap manufacturing process encourages mass production and a race to the end product. There are so many blog posts about how to market your book, how to find a publisher, how to build an author platform – not many at all about assessing your work and determining whether it’s an echo or an argument.
I get that markets open up opportunities for arts, but we’re not really concerning ourselves with improving the market – just getting our product out there. Seems there is a balance there, one that’s not really talked about so much.
I think you’re right to some extent Mark. In my case, I’ve decided to focus more on improving my writing than getting older work out there. I want to get some gate-keeper, at least in the first instance, to say that I have the skills.
But I’m not sure I’d agree that “you don’t need a big budget to write a big book.” The thing you do need a budget for is time, and it’s pretty scarce for a lot of writers. We don’t earn enough from our craft to do it alone so often waste a heap of our time earning enough money to pay rent and live. I think that kind of situation can cause a lot of the impatience writers feel.
@Mark: What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on holiday! Geez, talk about a ‘net addict. ;P
“Seems like we’re falling over ourselves to get people to buy and read our words – and not as much concerned with whether what we are writing is actually contributing to some creative discussion. There seems so many echoes of the same impulse. ”
An interesting point. I see that idea as being much more a part of the process of writing itself, i.e. it’s something that should mainly be considered while producing a manuscript. I — and I know you also do this with your writing — tend towards trying to write things that are relevant to my perception of the world, and new in terms of their perspective and thrust. But not everyone is out to revolutionise the world of literature and contribute to the global creative discourse. There is a benefit in being able to write a solid fantasy trilogy, and that benefit is financial. Although at this point, I think we’re straying dangerously close to the behemoth that is the ‘literature versus entertainment’ debate.
Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is this advice was intended to give those writers who had a finished manuscript — no matter what the content or intended impact they had in mind — some advice on what to do with it, and whether self-publishing was something that they should even do. I’ll definitely be picking your brain on all these topics over the next few weeks though. (:
@Ben: The time budget is one that a lot of people look over, that’s for sure. Looking at it from a purely capitalist point-of-view, every hour that you spend writing a novel, say, is time that isn’t being used to earn definite income. But then, hopefully writing is its own reward for a lot of folks.
Also, I should add, based on your recent tweets, that I never intended for you to be used as an example of foolhardiness. Personally, I think you’ve got a good grasp of what it takes to be a successful writer. So yeah, I really hope you haven’t taken me using your experience the wrong way. :/
At this time your assessment seems right. I wonder what the book market and publishing world will look like and how I will think about self publishing in a year or so, when I have tried to find a publisher and possibly experienced many rejections.
I am thinking of self pubishing a well written fictional work which is currently at a professional editor.
You make good points. Thanks
Johanna
@Ben
I wasn’t going to reply to your comment because I sorta feared that it might be a bit negative; a bit ‘if you can’t say anything nice then say nothing at all’ type of malarkey, but then I thought again that people here might either a) know me (or be able to google me and thus ‘know’ me) and realise that i’m not a troll, or b) be able to deal with it. I gotta disagree with the points you make about writers not having enough time/money to dedicate to their ‘craft’; the reason I am making this comment is because I think someone has to put up the opposite view, a view I believe in. The view? That if you want to do something properly, if you really want to, you’ll do it, rain, hail, shine, and money/time or not. There are places in this world (and in Australia) whereby you can live for almost no money. You can eat for cents. You can write a novel using tools that cost less than a handful of shrapnel. And time is everywhere. Time is personal; it’s subjective; it’s more available than a sad unthinking girl on that just-gone gawdawful day of St Valentine. I really don’t want to be that person who says, “you know guyzzzzz, blogging and rss feed reading and commenting and youtubing and everything isn’t really necessary”, but to some extent, it really isn’t. Ben, I know so much of this discussion has been based upon your experiences already, and only because you are open enough to say, ‘this is how i did/do things. Discuss’ but I gotta say, I see you all over the internet – you are everywhere dude, sometimes saying really good things, etc, but sometimes just always there, ready with that tweet or comment reply or reactionary (in a good way) blog post. And i’m sure it’s been rewarding in qualitative and quantitative ways, in immeasurable/unmeasurable (?) ways, but still, that’s a whole lot of jumping around on your e-surfboard (are we still surfing the net, dudes?), dropping in on people’s waves (forgive me for sticking with this metaphor), taking breaks on the sand, paddling in still water out the back, etc, time that could’ve been used (could’ve could’ve could’ve blah blah blah) on novel-length projects, etc. But I will stop now, as there are so many great tangential arguments you could make against everything I’ve said. Like, how come a lot of our most revered dead and alive writers are allowed to write about writing or about television or about that time in 1963 they lived in Paris for three months and wow it was good but also something wasn’t so good, meh. I just know that I’ve tried to use the excuse of ‘not enough time/money’ in the past and it never works; you only ever end up blaming yourself, and self-directed hate rarely churns milk into butter.
I hope everyone here is as successful as they hope to be; it won’t happen; it’s impossible; but I hope it.
(Way to end your comment on a sickeningly emo note, Sam. Fuck.)
Sam, you make fair enough points and to some extent you’re right that me and a whole heap of others could find more time to write if we didn’t spend so much time blogging and tweeting etc.
But in my defence, I do most of that at work anyway. I work full-time to pay rent, bills, gadgets and nice things to keep me sane but have a bit of free time there to do whatever. It’s not ideal for writing fiction or poetry though. I write some stuff at work, like poems in spreadsheets about how I wish I wasn’t here, but generally you can’t get ‘in the zone’ as much as you could if I could just sit at home all day and write (where I might still blog and tweet too much, to be fair).
I’m looking at ways out of this, did a blog series last year and how writers live, earn cash and find time to write, but yeah, still looking for a source of money where I don’t have to do anything but write
Hey man, offer still up for you to peruse and note what you dis/like on my stuff before I self pub? I think I’m 2 edits away on both projects, might be time for some outside eyes. This should be the year I sink some money into binding them up. Email me.
@K: Sure man, I’ve sent you an email.
damn bro, despite having an ages old article on DA (through Suture) on self-pubbing, and sending you my own self-pub result, I warrant no mention. Even as an example of what not to do, which is about what I’d expect. Breaks my heart Phill. Breaks my goddamn bambi innocent virgin optimistic heart.