I’m sure even most established authors would be intrigued by Sarah Glazer’s essay “How to Be Your Own Publisher” in this morning’s New York Times Book Review. Is this the publishing of the future? Could be. The stigma of the old vanity presses seems to be (slowly) dissolving. Those of us with big egos (who? moi?), used to seeing ourselves reviewed in the NYTBR and elsewhere, may be reluctant to give up the labels of Simon & Schuster et al, but the economics for all but the biggest commercial literary stars may already be at a tipping point. Within a few years, it could be a free-for-all.
I wonder how the bookstores will deal with this? I’ve noticed that the local stores here — Hastings and Borders — don’t carry much from the small presses. Amazon might deal better with the coming changes, but I do enjoy browsing and a cup of coffee.
Interesting–and, I think, apt–analogy to blogs and bloggers in the article.
I foresee the publishing industry following the same path as the music industry. And not just for new published works. The technology is here today that can take any library book (“The Great Gatsby” for example,) mechanically flip through it, “read” every character on every page, and then produce some type of e-book computer file. For newer works, publishing on demand (print or digital, your choice) may take over completely. Say goodbye to remainder tables. Just as with the music industry, the trick then is getting people to pay for it.
This is the same limpwristed survey of the new vanity presses as always, and with that crooked Publishscamaerica thrown into the centerpiece. Nothing will come of this venue ever in my view. I could tell partly, other than my own experiments, from the empty booths at the festival. The readers were with the real books. They’ll stay there.
I too think e-books are the future.
It’s interesting to see how this poster marky48, whom I have seen on other threads espousing the most traditional liberal views, is here the great proponent of the conventional publishing houses – yet another sign of how times have changed.
This raises some serious issues for the chain bookstore: I don’t think they can thrive while selling only a few best-sellers.
I’m a shareholder in both Border and in Barnes & Noble, and I note that based on the article, Borders seems more more open to dealing with this trend than does B&N.
A bit off topic, but still related to the distribution of conversation, here is a review of Tom Friedman’s new book from an open source perspective: The World is Flat. I post it here because I found the venue, Linux Journal, somewhat surprising and because I thought the other reviews, Trabbi’s and Powerline’s in particular, had fun jeering but lacked substance.
Now hold on there, JKR, I don’t think marky48 is saying anything about the publishing houses, just the ebooks. God knows PublishAmerica deserve the ridicule — at least Vantage tells you it’s a vanity press. But eBooks aren’t ready for prime time yet, the viewing technology isn’t ready for handy reading. (Maybe when electronic ink is commercially workable.)
Self publishing does work. These folks have made a go at it.
But it takes work, and a great deal of effort at self-promotion. Ideally, it works best if you can identify a specific community interested in your material, particularly one in which you have a certain reputation already. Of course, this is also true for authors signed to mainstream houses, unless they happen to be among the select few “real” editors and publishers decide to devote a significant amount of promotional effort and ad budget to. Not that that’s a guarantee either (Hey, gang! Remember Bret Easton Ellis?)
Anyhow, print on demand is big enough that even Ingram Distribution wants a piece of it, via Lightning Press …
Self-publishing should be labeled as what it is: self-printing. The trick isn’t to write, edit and print your book, it’s to market the damn thing!
The problem right now is that authors whose books don’t fit within a narrow target market or who don’t have a “platform” (i.e. celebrity status, however minor) have a tough time being heard through all the noise. There were 140,000 books published in the U.S. last year, about half of which were self-published. Care to guess how many of those covered their printing costs?
It’s an interesting problem to solve. The major marketing challenge is dealing with the increasingly diffuse marketing and publicity channels. Unless you have a publisher with significant resources behind you, forget about getting stocked at B&N or Borders. You’ll probably be lucky if Amazon carries more than a couple of copies in their warehouse.
One channel for book marketing that might work out very well is blogs. I suspect that many blogs (this one, sheila o’malley, erin o’connor to name a few) attract people who do far more reading than the average.
Photoncourier ó And blogs, if you have something interesting to say, are a great way of building up awareness of your name. They’re an excellent promotional tool in conjunction with self-publishing. Of course, ya gotta be selective. If you’re writing a manly book about your adventures with the SEALs, becoming a regular poster at Daily KOS won’t be a cunning marketing ploy…
I might actually be in a position to provide information here. Some years ago, as Fossicker Press, I brought out two books — my translations of works by Kir Bulychev — through Xlibris. Sold about 300 copies. Xlibris made money, I didn’t. Xlibris is POD, and they sold me books that cost $4.00 to produce at $16.00.
The premiere POD book company is Wildside Press, which brings out mostly out of copyright titles. Tnhey ahve more than 2000 titles on line, and in aggregate generate considerable income. I am told that some of their living authors make about $500 a month. There are no advances in this business (and no returns.)
I have now hooked up with Capricorn Publishing, which is run by a Bulgarian immigrant who wants to bring out the classics of Russian SF in English, and so far we have brought out 4 books: Bulychev’s _Those Who Survive,_ Lafcadio Hearn’s _In Ghostly Japan,_ Cook and Tinker’s _Select Translations of Old English Poetry_ (for the Tolkien market) and A. Hyatt Verrill’s _Bridge of Light_.(Charles Watts Whistler’s _A Thane of Wessex_ and Erle Cox’s _Out of the Silence_ are in the pipeline.) The purpose of this diversity of titles is to create a market place that people will go to, and find our re-edit of Efremov’s _Andromeda_ and the Strugatsky titles. I will be marketing the books as Fossicker Books on eBay, as well as selling them through Amazon and B&N.com.
Out problem is letting people know the books are out there. You can get a book into the POD system for under $200, with ISBNs and UPCs, but you still need to let the readers know they want to read you. Until we can get copies into B&N and Borders we won’t be able to tap the browser end of the market.
Hmmm.
I’m a very heavy reader. As I work as a computer programmer much of my reading time is spent reading manuals, documentation and computer code. But I also spend a great deal of time reading non-fiction, fiction and science-fiction. Excluding work related reading I think I read about an average of 3-4 hours per day.
I think self-publishing will be the future, and electronic books will be the format.
I belong to Baen’s Webscription program where customers can purchase electronic versions of sci-fi novels. I think I’ve spent about $1000 purchasing around 180 titles. While I very much enjoy reading actual paper books, I very much enjoy the ease of use with electronic books.
Having to dig through endless boxes of books, while trying to find that one specific volume, it just irritating. It’s also very nice being able to carry an entire library around on my laptop. Taking some time out to read a few pages is very much an excellent stress-reliever for me.
That said I think this will have to await the maturation of electronic ink. Once this technology has matured, then we’ll see the death of not just paper books, but newspapers as well.
I believe they’re trying to work out a color version of E-Ink.
Also, as an aside, “Bigger” could you provide a link to these books? I’d be curious to check out Russian sci-fi. No idea how it would translate, but a good story is a good story.
Thanks.
I see we have greenhorns here. Fresh air has it right. e-books except for romantica have been dead for eons. B&N owns a small share of iUniverse and none of these vanity presses are viable without authors buying their own books. Now, that isn’t money flowing in the right direction: to the author. True self-publishing is all on the author’s back with none of the stigma but it’s risky. You can get reviews and shelved, but not with a vanity POD. That’s the deal. Nor are they publishing credits which Roger can attest to. And they won’t ever be.
Bigger ó Get in touch with these people: Dangerous Visions . They run an online SF bookstore with a very good rep and I’m sure they’d be interested in your list.
I self-published my first Autumn Jade children’s mystery novel (http://www.autumnjade.com) in July 1999. Since then I’ve self-published two more in the series with a fourth in the works. I’m more than half-way to a best selling series in Canada: I’ve already reprinted the first book and I will have to reprint the second one this year.
Why? I have a fabulous niche market of other families who have adopted children from China. This is currently the only mystery series in the world with a heroine adopted from China. I’ve produced a product as good as anything you would get from one of the “big boy” publishers and I have a growing audience of young readers and their parents who love my books.
I have complete control, I’m profitable, and I’ve been reviewed in several prominent Canadian newspapers and magazines.
Self-publishing + the Internet = Bypass the Corporate Wall!
Steve
I think that self publishing will expand but wonder whether it will change publishing to the degree blogs are changing journalism. There still needs to be some editorial process for many books to become successful (or just do OK) as many people want to know that someone read this book who knows something of what they are doing. Also marketing is difficult for many authors to handle. It is much easier and quicker to brief sample music you might want to buy than a vast wasteland of books. However, all media are changing and the publishing industry is no exception.
I am trying to publish my book via the academic press route (could be helpful since I am a new assistant professor at a university). However, if that doesn’t go well, I’ll head to self publishing if need be, cuz this sucka is gonna get out there one way or another (too much toil to simply let it fade away).
Bigger ó BTW, some of those XLibris numbers look off to me. You can get an entire book of ISBN numbers from Bowker for $300. And for the kind of money Xlibris was charging you, doing short print runs yourself might actually make more sense. I can provide you with the names of a couple of decent printers if you like.
One other thought…to the extent that people are going to publish their own books without editorial work, they need to be very familiar with copyright law, especially fair-use doctrine (I’m thinking mainly non-fiction here)
Ed,
Click on my name. I have pages up for each of our authors.
Richard,
Yes, you’re right, I investigated the details at the time, but had no idea how to make the text Lighting Press ready (I more or less do now), or how to do the cover, and I did not want to buy whole sets of ISNNs anmd the UPCs at once, since I expected to bring out one book a year. With Capricorn Press I’m bring out, hopefully, ten or twenty titles this year that I’ve scanned from very old, out of copyright titles (although _Out of the Silence_ will be the first complete edition and will have a new copyright in the author’s grandson’s name, and the estate will get the bulk of the revenues.) The covers are very attractive (the publisher’s wife is an art historian), but again we will be excluded from the browser market until we can get into Borders and B&N.
You won’t get either one with a vanity press POD. The books are only printed once sold and aren’t returnable. And that isn’t self-publishinf either. It’s vanity publishing.
bigger ó I really recommend you contact Dangerous Visions about carrying your stuff. Also, are you planning to hook up with Amazon.com?
marky48 ‚Äî You’re wrong, and you don’t seem to be listening about WHY you’re wrong. A vanity press publisher makes its nut selling an author a pressing of his own work. They frankly don’t care if there’s a market or not and do nothing to create one.
In print on demand, the books are printed once a market is demonstrated BY PEOPLE BUYING THE BOOKS and only then. That’s not a vanity press, that’s the market in action.
As for vanity, the only thing vain here is an author’s conviction that people will want to read his or her books… and if you didn’t have that, you wouldn’t be writing in the first place.
If I were printing either of my own unpublishable novels either under my name or a pseudonym, that would be vanity publishing. I have already told my publisher that we will not be doing them. Other than the Russian translations (I am ever so slowly completing the Genri Lion Oldi _The Way of the Sword_, about the moral dilema the intelligent swords and other edged wepons face once they discover to their horror that their ‘Bearers’ are sentient beings)all of our books are either out of print classics or were major bestsellers way back when. I will shortly be approaching a number of SFWA members about bringing out collections of their uncollected short stories. We can’t offer advances, but we can offer royalties (we’ll be advertsing in Locus, review copies to Analog etc.,) The Cook and Tinker volume has evidently already stated selling on Amazon(the books for libraries edition being quite rare now, and our version being a cheap paperback.)
Now, the local Borders carries occasional local books that are PODed, one of which was considerably less professional than anything Capricorn has done. They also carry small press SF (the recent versions of E. E. Smith’s Lensman and Skylark novels.)
And I’ll certainly look into Dangerous Visions or any other possible market.
You flat-out don’t know what you’re talking about with this fallacious concoction.
“A vanity press publisher makes its nut selling an author a pressing of his own work.”
And charging fees or jacking up the price of the book and short discounting sales to stores. POD books are nonreturnable.
Yeah they all do that and every POD publisher depends on this tactic. Market? There is no market for POD books. Period. They’re never on shelves unless the author buys first and begs store managers. They’re not reviewed. They’re not legitimate save for a minority of specialized topics always in nonfiction.
No buddy you just don’t get it or will it seems. That’s what ideological dogma does for people. Have a nice day in loopy land. Reality’s a bit different.
Marky48 ó Either you’re wrong or I and the people I work/worked with are wrong… and they have the sales statements to show for their efforts. Pick one.
Sales receipts from what? Vanity press POD only books? Pushaw.
Marky, if you would only tell us more about your non-ideological undogmatic not-loopy four books, civil-service career, and multiple degrees in science and journalism, then maybe you wouldn’t have to try so hard to sell reality (or whatever it is you’re selling).
It’s a click away “Buddy.”
Thanks, “Marky”.