Researching the Self-Published Fiction Market

It is an oft-heard refrain these days that the results yielded by search engines are ever more worthless — that regardless of whether it is Garbage going In, it is pretty much always Garbage that is going Out — and that this is not least because the search engines, because of accidents of ever more complex design, because of the spoken and unspoken agendas of their owners or operators, because of manipulation by the chiseling, show us what someone else wants us to see — not what we are actually looking for, and what perhaps not so long ago they would actually have shown us.

Certainly I have experienced this time and time and time again, with a noteworthy case what happened when I was researching The Secret History of Science Fiction. In planning that book one thing I wanted it to cover was the implications that self-publishing has had for science fiction — and found it exceedingly difficult to find out anything about this.

In fairness the subject is intrinsically difficult to research. The category of self-publishing has its ambiguities. I had in mind specifically commercially-oriented self-publishing by people who are not established as professional writers, but this is, of course, not the whole of that market. (There is much non-commercial self-publishing, while there are also a good many professional writers who find it convenient or attractive to put some of their work out this way.) There is, too, the sheer number of producers, many of whom do not necessarily identify themselves as self-publishers — putting their work out under imprints of their own that at a glance may look no different from any other publisher’s — while compared with the pros any organization is at best nascent, and so far as I can tell, no one taking much trouble to keep track of their doings.

However, my difficulties were also a matter of the search engines tending to, for all the reasons mentioned above, shove us toward someone who wants to sell us something, and toward “authoritative” sources over others — and how this interacts with what at least some people have to say about self-publishing, with the result that looking into the matter one encounters exactly two things:

1. People selling services to those who are interested in self-publishing.

2. People from the publishing Establishment, or who are at least representative of its interests (and so have access to “authoritative” media platforms), who see self-publishing as illegitimate, and relentlessly attack it as such.

So basically people who, assuming we are looking to self-publish, want to sell us something; and people who want us to believe that self-publishers are sinning in bucking Big Publishing. Both predictably strike a tone exemplified by how the author of one of the items I encountered gleefully titled his piece “Crushing Your Dreams.” The people selling the service snarl that if we do not buy their whole $10,000 package we are just wasting our time for no one will read the unpromoted piece of crap we will otherwise simply dump on the market. Meanwhile the Establishment types snarl, in unbelievable bad faith given the lousiness of the professional product they extoll as so untouchable, and the complete lack of any way in for the vast, vast majority of would-be authors, no matter how competent, that the self-published are filth for not walking the “right path” of traditional publication. (They insist that any really worthy book will one way or another make it through the labyrinth — an absolutely unprovable proposition, presented on the basis of no facts or reasoning whatsoever, and completely at odds with the hard reality of how closed a world publishing has become to the unconnected outsider, but which flatters them as the deserving rather than the merely privileged they usually were, and conveniently lets them dismiss anyone who disagrees with them. “How dare you refuse to do an apprenticeship!” they yell — never mind whether apprenticeship opportunities actually exist.)

To face it, especially as a self-published author who knows that THEY MEAN YOU, is to be hit with a torrent of bullying, fear-mongering, insult and general abuse — and one can dig through all the words with which it is communicated for a very, very long time without finding so much as a single piece of real information about the matter. But then the paucity of information — the fact that we have such a hard time finding anything else — can itself be taken for an indication of the state of things. Had self-publishing emerged as a greater force in the publishing scene the champions of self-publishing — of the writers, and not the people who are so eager to make a dollar off of them — would at least be able to get a word in every now and then.

Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.