Self-publishing outlook (2007)

One of the bloggers whose posts I enjoy is Nathan Bransford, the San Francisco based agent extraordinaire. Recently he ran a kind of special on self-publishing, posting a number of posts about it, and posing the following question:

So what do you think -- will self-publishing make inroads into the territory once reserved for mainstream publishing or will it always be an also-ran for lack of the distribution and big-ness of the mainstream publishers?

I don't think that self-publishing has much of a future as such. The biggest problem with self-publishing is the general lack of quality. Some books rise above that, but not many, and those few that do face an almost insurmountable obstacle of distribution. Distribution. Few mainstream readers know how to find self-published books, and even fewer are willing to look for them. Why should they, it is not as if the mainstream publishers are not publishing anything at all. These two factors cannot really be overcome, and they mean that self-publishing will remain a niche thing. But what about POD?

For the most part, self-published titles lack quality. Many struggle with formatting problems, bad grammar, poor punctuation, and plot concerns that none of the mainstream books suffer from. This is a death knell of the entire enterprise because readers are used to highly polished, professionally edited and designed texts and will hardly give a spare moment to labor through an amateurish self-published book. Of course, as this blog testifies, there are quality self-published books available, but they are few. Mainstream books are also well designed from story standpoint, at least a great majority of them are. Suspense, reversals, tension-all these elements are well designed, in the vast majority of mainstream books that propose to be thrilling. The same is not true of the vast majority of self-published counterparts.

Distribution is another factor working against self-publishing. Few, if any, readers know how to find self-published titles, and even fewer are willing to actively look for these. They have no incentive to do so, either. Mainstream publishers produce an avalanche of books every month, thousands of titles, all of which offer the kind of quality that readers are used to. Self-publishing could work if mainstream channels produced few new books or if such books were ideologically censored, or if they were out of touch with readers, but this is not, by and large, the case. What we have in the mainstream publishing is book inflation-too many books chasing too few readers. You Tube effect? Here's the problem with this theory-while the average You Tube video is a few minutes in length, at most, the average book is not. Perhaps if there were a book crazed mob of intellectuals out there, lusting for the written word the way that the mostly young 20-somethings who visit You Tube lust for the weird and unusual, the freaky and the odd, we could talk about the You Tube effect in publishing, but there aren't and we can't. The sheer word length works against this, the effort required simply to read. Books aren't videos. And what about POD? Surely, some reason, print on demand can put the press in the hands of the masses. But so what? Lulu.com already offers free publishing, had offered this for years, and nothing happened: there was not a single writer whose POD book broke into the NYT bestseller list. Look at Cory Doctorow, arguably the only writer who is positioned to use POD. He has not gone POD, even though he could have because he has the fan base to do so. Perhaps someone reading this blog knows Cory and could ask him why. I think that POD will become part of the mainstream publishing through something like the Espresso machine. Publishers or bookstores will own these and use these kiosks to sell books the way an ATM dispenses money. This will allow two things: publishers will be able to bring back titles that are no longer economical to print in large runs, and bookstores, especially independent bookstores, and perhaps libraries, will be able to offer an unlimited selection of books. Still, publishers will be doing the vetting because they will ultimately have the money to control these kiosks.

Self publishing is a niche thing. If self-published works offer something that is quality and is unique, they can carve out a small niche for themselves in the book ecosystem by finding areas that are not cost efficient for mainstream publishers to deal with. But to successfully do this, a writer would have to have a great deal of knowledge about the market and reader tastes, and, more importantly, would have to be a great writer. By definition, however, this approach is only complimentary and cannot compete with the mainstream. Sure, the publishing business has problems, and it does produce turkeys, but so does Detroit and Silicon Valley, but something tells me that they will endure.