Self-Publishing in the Early 21st Century: The Publishing Revolution That Wasn’t
Self-publishing is no new practice, but about a decade ago it looked as if the advent of e-book readers, Print-On-Demand services, online book retail and other technological and commercial developments were laying the groundwork for a revolution in publishing — a radical expansion of the possibilities writers had for reaching readers, without going through a publishing Establishment that has ever more seemed able to say only “No” to anyone approaching it with just a manuscript. Indeed, the press seemed to thrill to a spate of success stories, with young Amanda Hocking’s selling a million copies of her work merely the beginning!
A decade on the excitement is long gone — so long gone, in fact, that it is hard to remember that it was ever there.
What happened? One possibility, of course, is that the revolution did indeed triumph — that this change proceeded so fully and completely that we now take an utterly different world for granted.
However, another possibility is that the revolution was simply snuffed out — and to go by what I see of publishing it is the latter that seems to me to have really happened. Of course, here and there one may find someone who has sold a few 99-cent e-books. But look at the bestseller lists. These are as much as ever dominated by the same old authors publishing the same old material in the same old ways through the same old houses. Look at the high-profile review pages — and you find much the same story. (Indeed, a self-published author is only likely to become a real success when their work catches the eye of a traditional publisher who picks them up — after which they are no longer a self-published author.) Look at such discussion of self-publishing as we can find in the media — and see that it is overwhelmingly a matter of representatives of Big Publishing snarling at those who refused to let the form rejection letter-printing machines of Park Avenue crush their dreams of authorship. Look at the endless promotion of self-publishing services — the ads barraging you online when you look up the subject, the commercials on TV, and even cold calls you may have personally got at home from self-publishing companies if you have ever published a book through this means, all of it testifying to the reality that making money off of people who are self-publishing is a more plausible prospect than making money through self-publishing.
Looking back it seems that any other prospect was extremely improbable, for at least three reasons — beyond, of course, the virulently hate-filled propaganda against the self-published.
1. The Self-Publishing Technological Revolution Was Incomplete.
Services like Amazon’s KDP can fairly be regarded as miraculous. Anyone can come in, upload a book for free, and have both e-book and print versions of that book on sale at innumerable retailers around the whole world within mere days. However, remarkable as this simplification — and cheapening — of the physical production and distribution of books is, the rest of book production remains as laborious as ever. KDP did not diminish the burden of editing, copyediting, physically designing books one iota — all of which has remained extremely time- and skill-intensive craft labor that is best done by a big, established team rather than an impromptu one an amateur had to hire, or a single individual carrying the whole burden themselves. And then, as if all that were not enough, there is the matter of publicizing the book, which gets to be the bane of many a self-published writer’s existence.
The result is that a self-published writer is apt to find themselves more publisher than writer, doing it all alone on the basis of slighter resources. As the self-published book-bashers never cease to remind us this can and does take its toll on the quality of the product. However, even where the quality is all that can be hoped for — and yes, contrary to the propaganda, there are self-published books as good and polished as anything the major houses produce, better even where they offer something trad-publishing does not dare to — it is deeply draining for the author. (If one goes about it at all seriously editing one’s own work is a very different and far more painful thing than editing someone else’s.) Altogether, as is generally the case with small enterprise, they work rather harder, often for rather less, than their trad-published counterparts do. This can mean lower output, in a market in which a high volume of output seems ever more important to commercial viability. It can also mean that more writers who might, with time, have built up a body of work and an audience quit before realizing what potential they may have because the going was so much rougher. All that means that much less success not only for individual writers, but the self-publishing scene as a whole.
2. The Means of Publicity Available to Self-Published Writers Have Become Less Satisfactory Over Time.
Self-published authors have from the start had little access to the conventional means of publicizing books. They had little prospect of appearing on Oprah, or getting written up in the New York Times, for example. They relied instead on humbler means, three in particular — namely book review blogs; sites hosting fiction which allow readers to see some or all of the book for free; and social media. None of these options were ever as strong as advertised, and all have got less satisfactory over time.
No matter what anyone tells you, the blog is in decline as a part of our online life — for many reasons.
The sites hosting fiction, always much more useful for promoting certain kinds of fiction than others (Wattpad, for example, skews young), have become increasingly crowded, and are dominated by non-commercial fan fiction, which has its built-in audience, and which, just as with franchise movies at the box office, leaves much less of an audience for everything else.
And social media, which, again, was never as promising as some made it out to be (even here, nothing ever goes viral), has become increasingly inhospitable to book promotion. While the sites happily take the money of anyone who pays to advertise them and bombard their users with such ads, their algorithms block non-payers from attempting to promote themselves, with all that implies for anyone thinking they can use it to create public awareness of their book on a budget. (Meanwhile, the frequency with which the self-published have tried to publicize their books on social media would seem to have interacted with the stigma against their work to make their attempts notorious-and, to go by casual remarks I have seen, the butt of cruel jokes, with all that implies for the effectiveness of the approach.)
3. People Are Reading Less.
It was a technological revolution that made self-publishing’s prospects look as bright as they did in the late ’00s and early ‘10s — but the same technological revolution had other, less toward consequences. It meant that pretty much the entire potential audience for such work was carrying around at all times and in all places a smart phone giving them access to the entire range of entertainment options round-the-clock — from perusing social media, to streaming video, to playing video games. With all those alternatives — for many, far more enticing alternatives — there was that much less reading going on, with this underlined by what’s on the bestseller lists. Certainly going by the appearances of such books on it in recent years as The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You, The Duke and I, and many, many others, it seems that a bestseller is a book people read after they see the movie or TV adaptation of the story, the flow between media increasingly going only this one way — to the disadvantage of any newcomer to the market.
Moreover, such changes probably had their biggest impact on the young. While all other things being equal they might have been more open to new writers working in new ways than their elders, growing up with smart phones and so much more accessible to audiovisual media than before they have been much less prone to read for entertainment purposes — and certainly less prone to develop the habit of doing so. Indeed, I suspect that this generation’s coming of age has played a significant part in the fact that the writers on the bestseller list are in the main the same people who were already there in the ’90s (Grisham, Patterson, Evanovich, etc.) — the same writers catering to that older readership they picked up then rather than anyone winning over the younger crowd; while the same suspicion would also seem affirmed by the softening of the Young Adult book market, the Young Adults of today just that much less up for books of whatever type (as compared with the kids who read Harry Potter and Twilight, products of a different media world). Simply put, there was much less of an audience for them to chase generally, while the most likely audience was especially uninterested — which may be the most bitterly ironic of all of the aspects of the situation for those who had hoped it would all mean more than it has.
In short, what we had was an extremely incomplete technological revolution that solved only part of the self-published writer’s problem, not all of it; a most dubious set of avenues for publicizing a book that has got only less promising with time; and, as if all that were not enough, an audience likely shrinking, with this especially going for that younger audience that may have been most up for grabs.
Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.
