Self publishing

[essayel]

Anyone else seen this post on Warren Ellis's blog about how to sell one's 'e' stuff without having to go through iAnything?

I admire the self assurance of the suggestion while wondering how successful it would be. I'm assuming that quite a lot of the ebook/comic reading public, like me, equate 'selfpublished' with 'too crappy to get accepted by a legitimate epublisher'. Of course there are huge exceptions to this rule - Stephen King, for a start - and I have read some excellent self published books and follow some amazing online comics. But - all the same - there's a stigma attached to self publishing just as there used to be to ebooks.

This has broken down amongst lots of the younger or more tech savvy people I know but most of my contempories and elders still sneer a bit when I mention my ereader and how much I'm enjoying it. "Oh I couldn't give up 'proper' books" they say, as though ebooks are written in crayon on very wide lined paper.>:(

I don't see why I shouldn't have both - fiction on my ereader and nice solid hardback works of reference with wide margins to make notes in and pages that I can fill with multicoloured post-it notes.

Anyhow, that's not the point. Self-published works, of whatever quality, still need to be marketed and I think that's where the success or lack of it would lie. Ellis suggests that someone needs to try it for six months and prove it's feasible. Volunteers? How about Stephen King?

Comments

[wulfila.livejournal.com]

The stigma attached to self-publishing is not all that unwarranted. The first draft of a published book and the manuscript that ends up self-published can definitely be equally crappy in the first place (and it is not necessarily quality that gets a book selected for publication), but in the case of the published book, you can at least be certain that several professionals have seen the manuscript after the author and have tried to eliminate the worst mistakes. Of course, there are some writers/artists who can still produce brilliant work without that sort of help, but it is usually less easy to catch your own typos/overused turns of phrase/silliness than other people's.

Even if you are able to get your text into shape on your own, the marketing problem remains, and not only because all the professional marketing a publishing house provides is unavailable to you. You also have to convince your readers that whatever they are supposed to buy is better than all the free stuff they can find online nowadays (there are very decent webcomics and stories out there, after all).

It might work for some niche interests, but on the whole, it is not an adventure I would like to embark on.

[yakalskovich]

Some rather unspeakable crap does get published as well. And not everything that gets printed sees a professional editors. Beta readers are often just as good or even better at catching mistakes and providing constructive criticism.

Also, all publishing industries except the English speaking one are struck by the curse of badly translated, hardly edited 'best-sellers' from abroad. They get away with it, so why change? Publishing is an industry that wants to make money, and they do it with the least cost and widest profit margin they can get away with on the market. And they're very keen on the market of professional ebooks because that will completely cut the printing cost. You basically make a low-res copy of the final pre-print PDF, spice it up with a few gimmicks (internal and, if applicable, external links, footnotes popping up) and then sell it for almost as much as the printed, physical book.

As a self-publisher, you will just have to bring your project to a presentable PDF stage, then branch off for a) on-demand printing (with listing on Amazon) and b) eBook publication, if at all possible including Amazon and the Kindle so you become available through the Kindle apps on iPhone/IPad as well, and then all that is left really is the marketing.

But if you got that far, you're tech-savvy and in some way networked on the internet. You market your project to the community you are part of anyway, and it won't come over as 'advertising' as you write stuff these people want to read anyway, and from there, word can spread.

You can even do that with a magazine. I have a project with two RL friends which is in the first tentative planning stages, and which we might do that way, looking if there is a market for six months or a year, with the option of discontinuing it without too much of a loss, or on the other hand selling out to a publisher who might be interested in the project.

That's another thing -- small self-published projects of any kind can always be picked up commercially later on. There even are authors who get published by small local publishers first, then land a commercial success and have their entire backlist gleefully picked up by a big mainstream publisher.

Everything can get bigger if there is an audience; but self-published ebooks or epapers are a good way to start, in this day and age.-

[wulfila.livejournal.com]

Also, all publishing industries except the English speaking one are struck by the curse of badly translated, hardly edited 'best-sellers' from abroad.

Some translations are bad, some are good, some are better than a badly edited original (because the translator might correct mistakes they come across in the process). At least, many of us try to do as decent a job as possible with whatever ends up on our desks.

[yakalskovich]

I know; I have done translations as well, albeit not fiction but scientific articles for a bunch of historians I know who need to publish internationally. You do your best as a translator, always, of course.

But some publishers pay so badly, high-quality translators won't work for them (not when technical and academic translations pay three times as much as fictional and general subjects), and those who do work for them will still do their best, but labour under impossible deadlines and awfully low pay. Not all translated foreign bestsellers are translated badly, but there is a certain brand of badly translated hardly edited stuff that was in some way good or successful in the original and that does get printed and thrown on the market by large publishing houses in large numbers.

That is a very feasible business model for a publishing company: get something that is tried and good elsewhere, localise with a minimum of cost and sell with a maximum of profit. Quality suffers, but people still buy it, so what?

And it's not just thrillers, whodunnits, and cheap flimsy self-help drivel*. You should see the German edition of 'Watership Down', for example. Or rather, you definitely shouldn't. My, my, my...


*Again, not all self-help books are cheap flimsy drivel. But quite a number are, and people still buy them. So.-

[wulfila.livejournal.com]

You should see the German edition of 'Watership Down', for example.

I've only read Watership Down in English, but I believe you, and as I said above, I know quality isn't necessarily what gets a book published.

[yakalskovich]

I read the German edition to the little son of my neighbour, a few years ago. I kept correcting the text as I went along; the syntax grated all the time, and there were some larger misconceptions that needed to be corrected all along, on the fly, as I read out loud.

I read everything that's originally English in the original, of course. But not everybody can, and translation are a very big business. And people will apparently put up with very inferior quality, so why should publishing companies bother to make sure it improves?

[charss.livejournal.com]

My dad certainly self-published his third book, if not all three of his books, because it gave him complete control over the project. Because it's his hobby, not his job, and he's not in a position always to work to deadlines.

There are a few mistakes in his book, mostly there on purpose to catch plaigerisers.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, that's a very valid reason for doing it. Why share the profits with a middleman? I'm not saying that all self-published works are bad at all. There are some fabulous ones out there. But the general reading public have preconceptions that will affect how willing they are to fork out the cash.

For instance we have a local bloke who set up his own publishing house because he managed to get the rights to some international best sellers that had gone out of print. With his name established as a publisher of quality works he used the company to publish his own far inferior books and has now published a book of his wife's poems that are just excruciating to read.

He's what I think of first when I think of self publishing - books about hill walking where if you follow the routes you'll end up very lost or in far more difficult places than the description implies and books of history where whole bunches of research are copied with minor alterations to avoid accusation of plagiarism. It's a pity.