Why "Self-Publishing" Is Meaningless

This was going to be a short post. It's turned into a manifesto of sorts! Ah, well ...

I don't like the term "self-publishing."

Cloud-Publishing

In the emerging world of "cloud-publishing," it's meaningless, and does not reflect what's coming, what we're already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing -- what we're doing at my start-up Book Oven -- is providing a tool set, on the Web, to publish books; a publishing model native to the web, with all the benefits:

• Instantaneous global distribution at near zero cost


• Simple, Web-based collaboration (editing, proofreading, design)


• Networks of creators and collaborators (new and existing)


• Networks of readers (new and existing)

How book creation gets organized in such a model will vary greatly, from the lonely writer, to a small press wishing to focus on content -- not technology -- to collections of colleagues and friends, to professional associations, collections of strangers aligned by topical interest, or financial interest, or just aligned in the interest of making books.

The key here is: cloud-publishing will provide the tools to allow groups of people to easily coalesce around the production, distribution and sale of a particular book or books. How those groups organize themselves will look different from book to book. But Book Oven's tools, and other cloud-publishing sites, will mean that book makers can focus on the important thing, the content, and not worry about the technical hurdles of making, printing, and distributing books.

What's Wrong with the Status Quo?

Others, of course, will prefer the current model, and that is wonderful and excellent and good. I love publishers, and books, and book stores, and libraries, and they have brought me great joy over the years.

But the Web offers new, parallel ways to make books, not necessarily better, but more flexible, more easily global, more connected, and better suited to some kinds of production.

That's the larger movement afoot.

Self-Publishing Doesn't Cut It

So "self-publishing" doesn't cut it as a description of what "independent" book making will look like in the coming years. It's too limiting, and doesn't get anywhere near the exciting vision of a new, parallel, model for publishing as a whole.

As the availability of web-based tools for making books grows, the distinction will be between what you might call "corporate publishing" -- blockbuster, and top-end publishing; commercial textbook production, etc. -- and the rest of us. The rest of us are "independent": the smaller presses, groupings of people who put craft and time into making something with various motivations, and yes, individual writers. That doesn't mean there won't be money on the independent side, but the structures around the businesses will be very different than on the blockbuster side.

We're All Indie Now, or None of Us Is

Though as Richard Nash suggests, we're all indie now (except the big guys), so even the term indie doesn't mean much:

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?--Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that...? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let's use a new authenticity to stop them. [more...]

Bloggers Suck, Right? And Amateur Talkers?

But back to "self-publishing": once upon a time, it conjured in some people's minds a negative slew of adjectives: Bad. Sub-par. Not selected.

Deserved or not, that's how many react to the term.

They said the same thing about blogging in the old days, and yet I can (and do) now find 10 times as much wonderful, thoughtful, well-written content from blogs than I do from professional outlets (though now the distinction is so blurry, and pro outlets are "blogging" as much as anyone). But every time I hear people claim that blogging is "bad" (amazingly, you still hear that), I roll my eyes. As I said to Henry Baum: you might as well complain about bad "talkers." Some talkers are wonderful. Others insufferable. Some of the worst "talkers" are paid lots of money to talk; some of the best are friends of mine and they do it for free. So you would never consider complaining about "talking" as a method of communicating, just because lots of people talk nonsense. You assume that is the case, and seek out the good talkers. So on the web with bloggers, and music, and indeed, books.

Talking is just a means of transmission of words and ideas.

But for whatever reason, it's hard for people to think of distributing text in the same way that they think of distributing verbal words. While talking might be free, distributing text, audio, video has only recently become (effectively) free. And just as the world is getting used to blogging, and maybe podcasting, along comes this idea that books can be distributed essentially for free. Think about what happened with blogging: suddenly, the means of transmission of text -- to a global audience -- became free. When the cost restrictions on producing written text disappeared, so did the power of the established system to decide what was worth printing and what wasn't. And people did what they are wont to do when systems blocking them disappear: they started publishing text like crazy on the web. That made people very uncomfortable. It meant lots of "bad" writers were publishing their text for global consumption. But more importantly, it meant that we saw a beautiful flourishing of great writing that no one had bothered printing before -- the topic was too narrow, the audience too dispersed, the return on investment too low. It turns out that the calculations about what's "worth" publishing is very different when the cost of publishing approaches zero. And that means that now, if you have an internet connection, you can read just about anything produced anywhere in the world. Lutes and Violins? Bespoke tailoring? Goats? You got it.

In the end though, blogging is just a means of transmission of words. And it turns out that there were millions of people willing to write excellent stuff that for whatever reason the traditional media set up did not, or could not publish.

We expect to see something similar with cloud-publishing.

[We've had easy access to the tools of publishing for a while, see for instance Lulu. But the most important shift we're about to see, I think, is the network of readers and writers and book makers. That's for another post].

Good Books vs. Bad Books

Now, I can guarantee something. As the ability to publish books gets easier, we'll have more "bad" books than you can shake a stick at. (In fact, we probably already do, published, unpublished, self-published...).

But the lines of distinction will not be, as they were previously, between traditional publishing and self-publishing, but rather just between good books and bad books (with caveats about eyes of beholders etc).

We'll have corporate publishers making good books, and independents making more good books. And everyone will make lots of bad books too. But how independents organize themselves will change greatly too.

Publishers and the Web

Fact 1: Many corporate publishers are having a hard time coming to terms with the web. It's going to get harder for them -- they already are having trouble sustaining their cost structures, and have off-loaded much of the work around the web to their authors.

Fact 2: The Web has a wonderful ability to allow people to sort through huge piles of information, and seek, rank and share gems.

Opinion 1: People will find more new writing on the web; so "book publishers" must start to be native to the web, and see the web as integral to their task of connecting readers and writers; they cannot continue to see the web as some kind of add-on to their marketing departments.

Opinion 2: Big corporate publishers will have trouble with Opinion 1; so new publishing models need to emerge.

Nothing Is New Under the Sun

We've seen this in music and blogs/newspapers and encyclopedia, where the web, and cheap tools of production have spawned an explosion of creative activity, excellence, choice, and a toiling mass of music and writing of all shapes and sizes (along with lots of dreck, but that's a side effect of all the great stuff).

We think the same is going to happen for books. With a global audience hungry for content, and cheap easy tools for creation and distribution, and a growing network of creators and readers connected on the web and an explosion of devices that allow people to be reading at times and in places they never did before, the distinctions about where or how books were made will fall away.

Do I Want to Read It?

All that will matter are these two questions:

1. Is it any good?

and

2. Do I want to read it?

And so "self-publishing" is a term that should be retired.

Follow Hugh McGuire on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bookoven

Comments

[Michael Pastore]

Self-publishing is not new. In 1855, Walt Whitman set type at his friend's printing company, then paid for the printing of the first edition of his unappreciated masterpiece ==Leaves of Grass==. With the help of his wife, William Blake -- considered by his contemporaries to be a madman, and now regarded as one of the world's great poets -- handcrafted all his books in his own workshop at home. Some other once-ignored now-famous writers who have self-published include Benjamin Franklin; Henry David Thoreau; Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); Carl Sandburg; Rudyard Kipling; William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style); D.H. Lawrence; Gertrude Stein; Beatrix Potter; the Bronte Sisters; John Galsworthy; Edgar Allan Poe; Robert Browning; George Bernard Shaw; Samuel Butler; William E.B. Du Bois; James Joyce (Ulysses); Anais Nin; and Virginia Woolf.

What is new is the possibility of connecting, sharing and helping one another. In this sense, projects such as BookOven are revolutionary.

It will always be difficult to write a good novel; "a fierce psychological battle" the process has been called. But with the Internet, and the good will of strangers, no author (or aspiring author) needs to face this daunting struggle and this Quixotic quest alone.

Michael Pastore, author
50 Benefits of Ebooks

[MyFatCat]

None of these arguments persuade.

Self-publishing is a kinder form for the expression "vanity press," which describes the entire blogosphere. Pretending there's some kind of magic in "groups" that just happen around a title doesn't even begin to address the point. A book's cost is the limiting factor on an author's vanity. If it's cheap, why not just put it out there? It didn't cost anything. But to justify the risk and expense of a book, it had better meet some kind of standard, a brand, a convention of quality adopted and recognized by people who themselves will weigh the quality of the work.

In other words, it's worth what you paid for it.

[Barquentine]

The problem with most efforts like the comment above - not necessarily the one above, but like that - is, most would be authors believe that their work is simply wonderful. They don't believe that it needs independent editing.

I note the person who commented believes that Word can do a good job of making a book. It can not. It does a nearly-OK job. Readers don't want nearly-OK they want a book that is nicely written, edited to be perfect, properly typeset in a good book font, with a professional front and back and spine.
They don't want to end up spending good money on a poorly-set (often in ragged right edge or poorly justified, with white rivers in the text) book in Times New Roman, just about the worst font imaginable for a book,

And that is why bloggers and other reviewers will not review books published by Lulu, iUniverse, and the like. 95% of them are badly written, unedited, full of spelling, grammar, and syntax errors, not properly typeset, and with some God-awful "template" cover.

If you really believe your work is good enough then for heaven's sake join a serious peer-review group, have it properly edited, have the cover properly done, have it properly set using an industry-standard package such as Adobe Indesign. Otherwise you are just wasting your and your reader's time and money.

- Citiria

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Citria, I think -- hope -- that as the integration of the web, and book writing continues that we'll see more kinds of editor-writer relationships evolving.

But there's no doubt there will be bad books out there, certainly.

Still, Lulu published 180,000 books last year, iUniverse published 20,000.

So ... if you're right in your stats, that's 190,000 bad books ... but 5% or 10,000 good ones, far more than I could read in a good number of years.

But really the number doesn't matter - the point is some of them will be good, and the web will, one hopes, make us better at making AND finding the good ones.

[Whitley2009]

I have had nothing but horrible experiences with agents, readers, proof readers, editors, and so-called publishers of books. Most of them are scam artists.

I finally resorted to print on demand. And, my books are on Kindle at Amazon.com. As society becomes more and more familiar with downloading books, my books are starting to sell. Plus, I have learned how to promote my books on the web and with the new social webpages.

I recently read the acknowledgments in a book by a New Your City author. He had over 40 people reviewing and proofing his book. I only have my Word.doc software and its spell and grammar checker. I could write a Don Quijote if I had 40 educated people helping me to write a book. Can he claim his book is original? Such is the BS that comes out of NYC publishing.

My advice for writers is to start studying the Internet and the publishing of your books. The electronic media and the new electronic books show a lot of promise. And, you don't have to give a bloodsucking agent with no qualifications 15% of your income, nor put up with the BS a publisher will require of you.

FYI, I publish and print with lulu.com. My books are also on smashwords.com and amazon.com (Kindle).
On these sites, they can be purchased 6X9 paperback, PDF, Kindle, and four other electronic formats.

Good luck.

[Hugh McGuire - Huffpost Blogger]

I agree that the web offers all sorts of new opportunities for writers to get their work out, but I think there will always be a place for more traditional publishing.

I suspect that what we'll see in the coming years is first time authors publishing themselves for their frist, second books, and then bigger publishing houses picking them up for their next.

Still, there'll be a shakeout in the publishing business no doubt.