There's an article on cnn.com about how More authors turn to Web and print-on-demand publishing.
The basic idea is if you can't get a traditional publisher to publish your book, pay a company that will publish anything for a fee. These were origially called vanity presses, but now more and more of them are moving away from that name as they get digital presses. Now they're Print-On-Demand. There isn't an upfront investment, unless you want extra services, like layouts, or covers, or maybe some editing/proofreading. This is self-publishing.
It's easy to see that as a way to get published. Famous authors have self-published. In many cases because the traditional publishers didn't exist yet. Most poetry is self-published. If you want to publish a poetry book, you might have to do it yourself. That's different.
But here's why self-publishing is bad, from a novelist's perspective. Anyone can self-publish. Anyone can pay a vanity press to put out a book. It doesn't matter if the book is any good. It doesn't matter if it uses sentences or not. It might be unreadable tripe. The vanity publishers don't care. They get their money from the authors. They don't risk a dime of their own. They aren't invested in the book. They don't lose anything if the book is a dismal flop that readers hurl against the wall screaming.
The traditional publishers, on the other hand, invest fairly big money up front. They have to take a risk with every new title they put out. They aren't going to do that unless they think the book has a decent chance of success. They get huge piles of submissions. They rule out many of them just from the query letter that introduces the book. If you can't get a few paragraphs with proper grammar and spelling, they aren't going to invest time reading even a few sample pages. Some of the ideas will sound interesting. Some of them will be old ideas that have been done to death. Eventually, the publisher will find a few that they'll want to read a few sample chapters of. For the most part, they'll know in a few pages if the author can handle the language or not. Then they'll see if he can tell a story.
It's hard to get published this way. You might have to go through a dozen publishers, or a score. Some of them will tell you why they won't buy your book. Then you know what to work on. But these publishers are professionals. They've got some ideas what the readers they market to will and won't buy. They're looking for the books that will leave readers wanting more books from the same author. I'm sure Ms Rowling had to send her manuscript to quite a few publishers.
"When everyone is special, no one is."--Dash, The Incredibles.
In the academic world, you aren't published unless its a peer-reviewed work. Your peers review it to make sure you've got your facts straight, that what your saying can be backed up. To make sure it's reliable. Anyone can put their article up on a web page. Not the same.
When you buy something published by one of the traditional publishers, you can know that it has been screened, at least to some degree. It has been through some editing. (Some established authors bully their way through that process. You may have read books where the quality goes down as a series goes on. That's why...)
Anyone can put up a web site, or a blog. That isn't publishing. Publishers pay authors. Authors make a product and then sell it. With vanity publishing, you make a product and then pay to distribute it. Would you do that with any other product you make?
When I was in college ('89-93) there weren't a whole lot of people on the internet. It took some figuring out how to do anything there. So the ones that were there were having some pretty intellectual discussions. Logical debates. Thought out posts attempting to make a case or explain things. Then the Web came out, AOL got big. Spewing ideas was easy. Anyone could do it. And they did. The signal-to-noise ratio changed.
Now, I'm not going to say that all self-published books are crap, and that no traditionally published book is crap. There are gems and piles in both categories. Similarly, there are the occasional intelligently written MySpace page.
But then, these days anybody can type up a rant and click "publish" without even going back to re-read it...
Posted by fictionman at April 6, 2009 10:12 AM | TrackBack (0)