Publishing is changing. It’s no longer profitable to cling to the 19th Century models that have prevailed until digital became universal. Now it seems trad publishing sneers at ebooks, even as it tries hard to exploit them with the same unit-moving logic that drove the 19th Century model. Many writers, even those yet to be published, are learning to scoff and mock self-published ebooks, too. It’s pernicious, and it’s a big mistake.
Savvy writers, and their readers, realized story delivery systems did not matter. Content is what people want. Format is flexible. Further, there need be no middle man. With today’s tools a writer can market work directly to readers. That writer can also take full control of not only producing the content, but packaging it, from copyediting and layout to cover art and interior illustrations. This means, in practical terms, a lot more work, but all the rewards, too. No middle man cuts, no percentages of net or gross, none of the creative book keeping we call Hollywood Bookkeeping but which originated in publishing. In the 19th Century, no one was looking, so keeping double books and off-the-book sales and other cheating moves were standardized. Writers got screwed, always. Now they needn’t, and readers can benefit too from much cheaper prices for access to the stories they want.
The music recording industry parallels this kind of built-in corruption, incidentally, and destroyed itself trying to maintain the unit-shifting mentality.
Enter digital. No more units. No more raw material, production, storage, and shipping problems. No more distribution snags. All the corruption can go away, but now we find some writers sneering at “self-published ebooks” as if this is a synonym for what in the old days were called vanity press editions. Books paid for by their writers, in short. Many are just that. Many are indeed unpublishable by any industry standard, but can now be rushed out to market. Direct-to-reader ebook publishing means no filters.
Such filters can be put into place, however. Recommendations, reviews, and critiques help. Word-of-mouth remains the most effective boost, or block, for any book, regardless of format.
Condemning all ebooks as vanities, or making sweeping statements against self-published versus published by a “publishing house”, is bigotry that alleviates the terrible pressure of having to think from the busy lives of naysayers and embittered failures whose genius has never been recognized.
Facts say otherwise. A sensible analysis of ebooks shows a wide range from unreadable, poorly formatted, and grotesque to truly elevating, wonderful literature. Further, one finds the good writing in every venue, although it remains rare in all venues. A book’s contents being found between hard covers on paper in ink does not grant it any magical status as to quality. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is as brilliant a novel no matter whether it is in a deckled-edged, hubbed-spine, gold-leafed, embossed, hand-tooled, mahogany boards, archival paper, silk marker ribbon edition or downloaded free on Kindle.
Further, were he alive today, Dickens, the epitome of 19 Century publishing, the best-selling and most-cheated of all writers until Stephen King, would certainly embrace self publishing direct-to-reader ebooks. They would grant him at least the chance of gaining a fair profit for his work.
Ebooks are an unbottled genie, yes. They lend themselves to pirating and have ignited a whole new debate about intellectual property. They have even brought into question the very notion of intellectual property; is it a valid term at all? Is there any such thing?
Yes, there is. Each writer produces intellectual property by creating work unique to that author. Those distinctions that make it uniquely Dickens, or Vonnegut, or Pynchon are the very ones that demonstrate the existence of intellectual works being actual property of some sort. In this digital age, then, laws, must catch up to protect the exploitation of such work.
My own writing has been shamelessly pirated countless times. I do not have the corporate bank of lawyers and endless wealth to pursue lawsuits against the pirates who would merely vanish, change names, and resurface anyhow. It’s a hydra. As Corey Doctorow has pointed out, though: You only WISH your work was being pirated, because, if it is, that means there’s a market for it out there. And since only you can produce more of it, and since only you have the legal right to merchandise from it, you can find new ways to reach and sell to your work’s fans.
You can go the trad publishing route. This means a year or more lag between them accepting it, and the finished product appearing. No say in cover art or presentation and do as told when it comes to making line edits.
This also means accepting a small percentage not of the gross profits, but of the net profits: What ever is left after expenses. Funny how expenses eat up gross income and how small net income becomes when it’s time to shave off a percentage for the writer whose work makes it all possible.
You can ask to see the books but standard practice is, you can’t. You will see royalty statements, if you’re lucky. Whether they’re accurate is intensely debatable but you have no recourse to question them and no way of confirming suspicions of inaccuracy.
You will not contractually be permitted to promote the work because, while the content is yours, the product, the physical unit produced by the publisher, is considered publisher property only, and they don’t want their corporate image sullied by quirky promotion ideas. Despite this, the chances of being promoted with print or TV ads, let alone any kind of media junket, are smaller than your cut of the profits. A lot smaller.
You have no say about making corrections after publication nor do have a say about second or subsequent editions.
You take what crumbs drop to you, in other words, because you’ve let your work — the content, the very thing drawing the crowds, or scaring them away — enter the corporate extruded product factory, where it is reshaped, stuffed with fillers, altered chemically to enhance shelf life, gussied up with red dye number four and other carcinogens, and packaged for a shelf life…
…of under two weeks, on average. Less than a tub of yogurt in most cases is how much time a newly-published book is given for an audience to find it. This in the absence of advertising means only browsers who decide to give it a chance upon encountering it blindly and those precious few who somehow found out about it and sought out a copy will buy it. Of those who buy, dozens more view and handle but do not buy. And millions never hear about it at all.
Realistically, this is an optimistic view of what each new book faces. At least it made it through the trad publishing maze and ended up, however briefly, on a rack. Of course, as we all know, there are far fewer racks to land on these days. Brick-and-mortar book stores are going the way of the hand-written letter, sealing wax, and scrolls.
In struts Amazon, the big online retailer. Most books will be sold this way, and this places you back in the quandary of how to reach an audience so they’ll want to buy what you’ve written.
At this point ask yourself: Does it really matter how the content is delivered? Does it matter its source? Does it matter whether a trad publisher or a writer paid to have a printer print and bind a copy? Does it matter whether you buy it from a chain book store or a website? Does it matter if that website is Amazon or someone’s web presence?
Readers buy stories. They read stories in words. The basis of all writing is a voice talking. Which reminds me: Audio books, too, are a route to readers — or listeners in this case. Audio books are another story delivery system and a booming one thanks to commuting and lonely hours between ‘doing’ things.
What distinguishes standard good stuff from standard issue crap is professionalism. If a writer decides to go direct-to-reader by first following professional procedures, the end result will be a professional book regardless of format. What procedures?
They include:
writing and rewriting to make sure the story is truly finished and polished;
running it past first readers who do not have a stake in staying on your good side, informed readers who can tell you the plain facts about whether it sucks or not, and whether it meets at least the basic standards of professional publication;
paying for professional copyediting to comb out all errors, including misspellings, homonyms left by automatic spell checkers, and diacritical marks, punctuation primary among them;
paying a professional commercial artist to produce a cover that meets standards of the industry;
paying an experienced layout designer to make sure your story looks great on paper;
paying a professional printer to make hard copies in case anyone wants them, which includes buying paper, ink, and expertise;
generally becoming writer, editor, production design team, and publisher for your project, your content — your story.
If it’s not important enough for you to do all this, its probably not important enough to compel readers to bother with it much, either.
If you can be discouraged from writing, you should be. The same is true about publishing, only more strongly so.
As AC/DC put it, it’s rough and mean, and a long way to the top. Why put yourself through all that if you don’t have to?
If you find you must, it’s a brave new world to conquer. Already, as digital is blamed for destroying brick book stores, a new model is emerging in which the millions upon millions of digital books are made available at a store location and any of them can be printed for you in hardcopy if you prefer that type of unit in about four minutes. What you are handed in exchange for your money is identical in heft, feel, and quality to a standard trad publisher’s trade paperback. If you wish, you can spring for hardbound, too, although the usual is dombok covers. Costs are equivalent-to-cheaper. Even better, this model provides for local delivery in under four hours.
No online market can match that. In this way it’s superior. All because someone found a way to use the best of digital to combine with the best of local book stores.
How to survive is one thing. How to thrive is so much better.
Soon a writer will figure it out from the writer’s perspective too.
Will it be you?
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