Self Publishing and Alternative Media

At last, I’ve reached the end of the Imagi­Con brain­storm. This is the con­clu­sion to my ear­lier arti­cle about pub­lish­ing options.  Typ­ing and shar­ing each of these has been great fun, and hope­fully I will get many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn like crazy and share it with the world.

When­ever I hear some­one is self-published, my mind imme­di­ately cringes.  Van­ity pub­lish­ing is the deroga­tory term to describe small presses that will pub­lish any­thing for a fee.  Pro­fes­sion­als who have a quota of books to be pub­lished as part of their job descrip­tion have been known turn to van­ity presses when tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional and edu­ca­tional pub­lish­ers reject their works.  The van­ity pub­lisher makes money by sell­ing the author the phys­i­cal ver­sion of his own work.  When I was study­ing for my degree, my pro­fes­sors repeat­edly warned us all never to use a van­ity pub­lisher, no mat­ter how tempt­ing it might be just to get pub­lished.   The gen­eral view is that the work isn’t wor­thy enough to be com­mer­cially viable, and it hurts an author’s later chances with a well-respected pub­lisher.  Van­ity pub­lish­ers also have a rep­u­ta­tion for preda­tory con­tracts that strip authors of the rights to their works.

While a van­ity pub­lisher makes their money by sell­ing books to the author, self-publishers now have options to pay very lit­tle to noth­ing up front. Taking on the role of both writer and pub­lisher can be an attrac­tive alter­na­tive that really allows great amount of flex­i­bil­ity and free­dom to the artist. Self-publishers can sim­ply hire a press to print and bind a book, though ide­ally the author can find a team of indi­vid­u­als will­ing to do the work nec­es­sary to edit, pub­lish, and dis­trib­ute the work. PDFs are cheap and easy to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute.  Very lit­tle invest­ment is nec­es­sary beyond the sweat equity of cre­at­ing the fin­ished product. Instead of hav­ing to rely on print copies and book­stores to dis­trib­ute the books, more of the money from a work can go directly to the author and pub­lisher.  A writer who chooses to write and pub­lish on a web­site or sell an ebook or PDF can actu­ally com­pletely cut out the issue of print­ing alto­gether, unless demand for phys­i­cal copies becomes great enough.  If that’s the case, they can find a press to print on demand, and if not, there’s no need to print.  Obvi­ously, there are plenty of pit­falls to avoid.  An author who self-publishes does not have the infra­struc­ture of any pub­lish­ing house back­ing him.  Many self-published works are sim­ply awful due to a lack of even the most basic edit­ing.  The onus is entirely on the author to adver­tise and pro­mote the work. A cer­tain amount of net savvy is nec­es­sary to make elec­tronic media work.   Any­one with some­thing to say can pub­lish it very eas­ily, and there is a whole world of com­pe­ti­tion.  The mar­ket has to glean the wheat from a whole lot of chaff, and peo­ple are nec­es­sar­ily skep­ti­cal about actu­ally pay­ing for any elec­tronic content.

His­tor­i­cally, self-publishing didn’t carry a stigma.  If some­one wanted to get a mes­sage out, they wrote pam­phlets or books up, hired a printer, and dis­trib­uted the work as they could.  The pub­lish­ing busi­ness has become a fil­ter for the pub­lic.  Book­stores tend to only carry books pub­lished by rep­utable pub­lish­ers, because those books have been preap­proved to be worth pub­lish­ing.   Self-publishing has been the norm for poetry and other niche mar­kets, and now the model of a rep­utable pub­lisher being a nec­es­sary part of a work’s suc­cess is becom­ing out­dated.  As the inter­net and other elec­tronic media replace paper, news­pa­pers are los­ing cus­tomers to the pro­fes­sional and ama­teur self-publishers of blog­gers, news aggre­gates, and online mag­a­zines.   In this new, chang­ing mar­ket, many tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tions are sim­ply not keep­ing up with the chang­ing times and going bank­rupt, while oth­ers adapt and thrive.  The same is hap­pen­ing with books.  For exam­ple, most of my book club group is read­ing A Clock­work Orange online right now, rather than vis­it­ing a library or buy­ing the book.  Any online work is self-published.  It might not be return­ing a profit, or even remotely com­mer­cially viable, but any­one read­ing this already reads self-published con­tent.  You may not directly pay to read your favorite web comic or news pun­dit, but we’re all par­tic­i­pat­ing in the shift in how the world gets its writ­ten word.  More and more peo­ple are begin­ning to build com­pa­nies and mak­ing incred­i­ble incomes because self-publishing is reemerg­ing as a use­ful and accept­able means of cre­at­ing income and dis­tri­b­u­tion of work.