Trying to decide which way to go?I feel for authors these days.
In days of yore if you wanted your book published, you put together a proposal or sample
manuscript and mailed it to various publishers. It’s true that you then sat by
the front door waiting for the post to come in – in most cases with form-letter
rejections. It’s true that months and even years could pass in the process. But
at least the ground rules were clear: authors submit, and publishers, except in
the rarest of cases, reject.
Things aren’t so clear-cut, today. Courtesy of the digital revolution, print-on-demand
technology, and the seemingly limitless room for books on amazon.com and other
bookstore sites, it’s easier than ever for authors to get their books
published. Authors can visit sites such as Lulu and Author House and opt for
various services that will see their manuscripts take on flesh.
But wait a minute. I should say not that it’s easier to get a book published but that it’s easier to get a book produced. The word “published” implies “announcing” the book to the world. It means promoting the book and selling the book and getting the
book reviewed. Sadly, no matter what the Lulus and Author Houses of this new
age tell you, the books they produce are rarely actually published in that
sense, even if they bear an ISBN and barcode and can be found on amazon.
So here’s a quick categorization of production/publishing options to help you cut through
all the buzz and find the approach that’s right for you.
TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
If you have a story to tell or information to share, and the proper market for you is a
broader public, and you are a very good writer, and having a name-brand
publisher on the spine and on your C.V. is important, and being in the public eye
through bookstores and traditional media interviews, you should go the
traditional route. In large markets such as the US, your first pitch may
actually be to agents not publishers. If you snag an agent, that person will
refine your pitch and get it out to potential publishers. If you submit your
proposal or manuscript on your own, you will want to research which publishers
publish which kind of books and what their submission requirements are. Many
are called, few are chosen. However, you owe it to yourself to try. And try
again.
SELF-PUBLISHING
If your book is very limited in its audience – for instance, your own family, in the case of
a family history – and you have your own means of selling the book, and it
doesn’t matter to your audience or doesn’t hurt the image you’re trying to
project if your book is not up to the best professional standards, then go with
services like Lulu and Author House. They provide a great service for just such
situations. Your book will be produced, and the onus will be on you to publish
it for your audience. This is the least expensive route, which is the deciding
factor for many.
COOPERATIVE PUBLISHING
If you want to submit your manuscript and yourself to the full publishing process, and can
pay for that, and want the book to be promoted and sold through the book trade,
in addition to your own sales, then cooperative publishing is the route for
you.
Full disclosure: My list, BPS Books, is just such an approach.
We do not publish everything that is submitted to us. It must fit our list in terms of
type of book and level of writing. If the idea is good but the writing lacking,
we say so and offer to work with the author until the book is of publishable
quality. We will not publish an inferior book, plain and simple. When we sign
an author to a contract, we do include a list of fees for the services we will
perform. These services go well beyond production. For example:
1. We first of all advise authors on building or strengthening their own promotional
infrastructure so that they have a ready audience once their book is out. We
want them to be good Internet citizens, finding and creating a community –
making connections, meeting new friends, increasing the quality of their online
presence. The book, when it comes along, will be fed into that system of
connections, not simply for the purpose of selling books but also to build
business opportunities, get a message out, make the world a better place. This
is the atmosphere in which books are successfully sold on the Internet.
2. Meanwhile, we discuss the title of the book with our authors, the optimal format and page
count of the book, the cover design and text design, the best price at which to
sell.
3. Then we go through the intensive and very personal process of editing the manuscript,
typesetting, and proofing. Such a process simply cannot be done well as part of
a “customized” package.
4. Then we produce and publish the book. We come back around to the promotional
infrastructure question and help authors to coordinate their websites, blogs,
Facebook accounts, etc., so they can get word out about their book and make it
easy for their audience to purchase it.
DB
Before looking at the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing, let
me first make few distinctions between two types of self-publishing:
Old vs. New Self-Publishing
- Old-style self-publishers create their book by hiring
an editor, designer, and typesetter or they may do all those tasks themselves.
However, they are disconnected from the Internet and the bookstore and library
system. They find their own printer and make their basement or garage into
a distribution centre.
- New-style self-publishers take greater advantage of
Internet-based technologies.
- At one end of the spectrum of this approach, authors
pay a print-on-demand publishing company such as Lulu to take their
word-processing file, create the book pages, and then make the book available –
sometimes just to the author, sometimes more broadly – on
an offset-printing basis or a print-on-demand basis.
- In the middle of the spectrum, authors pay higher fees
to the book-services companies to procure more hands-on attention from editors
and designers and even from marketing people. These authors usually publish
their book on a print-on-demand basis. In some cases, their books are available
through online "e-tail" sites.
- At the other end of the spectrum, authors actually set
up publisher accounts with companies such as Lightning
Source and Book Surge. Some of them remain one-book publishers;
others publish additional books by themselves or others. The books are
available for sale through the major bookstore e-tail sites, such as the amazon sites
in Canada, the U.S., and the UK.
Now, let’s take a look at …
THE ADVANTAGES OF SELF-PUBLISHING
1. Control. Self-publishing authors retain control of their book. They
can stay true to their vision of the book and give it the kind of attention that
a publisher with many books to mind cannot give.
2. Cost and Timing. While self-publishers put their own money into the
production of their book, they can see the results of their efforts much more
quickly than when they go through the traditional book-publishing approach, and
therefore may be able to recoup their costs more quickly.
3. Their Only Option. It may seem odd to see this as an advantage, but
it is. If all attempts to secure a publisher have failed, self-publishing may
be the only way authors are going to get their book into the light of day. The
downside is the cost and effort put into this creation of something that
otherwise would not exist. The (admittedly rare) upside is the creation of a
book that becomes a major success.
4. Market. Traditional publishing houses are often not
calibrated finely enough to sell to specific, author-related markets.
A keynote speaker, for example, has access to his other audience in a way that
most book publishers wouldn’t. Most family histories have a very limited
market, and therefore are an obvious example of books that are more suitable
for self-publishing. “There is no more successful publisher than the publisher
of one book,” was the wise statement made by one member of the publishing board
I sat on for many years when we were faced with the opportunity to sign up a
self-published book.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF SELF-PUBLISHING
1. Quality. It is well know that doctors should never operate on members of
their own family, and that a client who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a
client.
In these two cases, the problem is loss of objectivity. In the case of
self-publishing, authors can be so caught up in the writing of their book that
they protect sentences or paragraphs or even whole chapters that an editor
would recommend cutting. The authors are too close to their work. They are
reading it for themselves, whereas the editor is reading it for potential
buyers.
In traditional publishing, the author is the intellectual owner of the
writing and licenses the publisher (if the publisher makes an offer to publish)
to handle all publishing details. The value of this division of labor is
particularly clear when it comes to book covers. I once bowed to an author’s
wish to design the cover of his book. He was a designer himself and made a good
case for doing the work himself. Big mistake. Bad cover. It seems that the use
of the brain and heart to design a book is simply too different from their use
in writing a book.
2. Market. The self-publisher’s marketing capability is often
calibrated too narrowly to reach a book’s ideal market. That is,
self-publishing authors may write on a broad topic worthy of a broad readership
but lack the ability or resources to reach that readership.
3. Buyer beware. This will be the topic of a later blog post, but I find the
description of the services offered by the Lulus and Xlibrises of this world to
be confusing and the results doubtful. Self-publishing authors can end up
paying for services that they are unhappy with.
And another thing: It’s one thing for authors to be ignored by their
traditional publisher, who after all hasn’t required them to put their own
money into the project. It’s quite another for them to be ignored by
individuals taking care of their book at a large Internet book-services firm
when their firms are also sending them invoices for their services at
an alarmingly regular rate.
DB
There's too little room on the "Good Ship Publishing"
THREE ADVANTAGES OF TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
1. QUALITY CONTROL. To be published, manuscripts and
their authors must successfully jump through the hoops of literary
agencies, acquisitions editors, contractual negotiations, editing, production,
and marketing. Books are chosen by editors and marketers who more often than
not know a good book when they see one. Manuscripts that get through a
publisher's rigorous screening process are more likely to emerge as worthwhile,
readable books.
2. FAVORABLE CASH FLOW. Trade publishers (publishers selling to
the book trade, not to schools and universities) in most cases pay authors an
advance against royalties. This advance is the author’s to keep, even if the
book does not sell enough copies to “earn out” the advance. Authors can use the
advance to buy some time from regular work for researching and writing their
book.
3. MAINSTREAM EXPOSURE. It’s true that many an author’s heart is broken
when their shiny new book hits the bookstands and the publisher promotes it
with little enthusiasm. However, authors stand their best chance of getting
public recognition for their work when they and their books are part of the
publishing, library, and bookstore infrastructure set up to garner book
reviews, media interviews, award nominations, award wins, and so on.
THREE DISADVANTAGES OF TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
1. LONG LEAD TIME. It can take an author years before they are
signed up by a publisher and it can take another year or two after that for
their manuscript to work its way through the editing, design, production, and
marketing process. As a result, authors writing about topical events are often
frustrated by the length of time it takes to get to market.
2. LACK OF SUPPORT. Publishers today expect proposals and manuscripts
to be highly developed by the time they hit their desks. Gone are the days when
editors took painstaking efforts developing writers of promise and marketing
people conscripted marketing money for an author’s first book to prepare the
ground for their second and third books.
3. TOO FEW BERTHS ON THE SHIP. Publishers today are spending most of
their energy and cash on “frontlist” books — their new books that stand a
chance of becoming bestsellers. Other types of books, no matter how worthy they
and their authors may be, are finding fewer and fewer berths on the good ship
publishing. These are “midlist” books —information books, how-to books,
cookbooks, regional history books, first novels. Indeed, some publishers are
increasingly ceding this ground to regional publishers, print-on-demand publishers,
and self-publishers.
2. LACK OF SUPPORT. Publishers today expect proposals and manuscripts
to be highly developed by the time they hit their desks. Gone are the days when
editors took painstaking efforts developing writers of promise and marketing
people conscripted marketing money for an author’s first book to prepare the
ground for their second and third books.
3. TOO FEW BERTHS ON THE SHIP. Publishers today are spending most of
their energy and cash on “frontlist” books — their new books that stand a
chance of becoming bestsellers. Other types of books, no matter how worthy they
and their authors may be, are finding fewer and fewer berths on the good ship
publishing. These are “midlist” books —information books, how-to books,
cookbooks, regional history books, first novels. Indeed, some publishers are
increasingly ceding this ground to regional publishers, print-on-demand publishers,
and self-publishers.
DB