The Wall Street Journal has a fairly lengthy article looking at the current state of self-publishing (both print and digital) and the threat it may or may not pose to traditional publishing. It covers both Amazon, with its recent royalty increases for self-publishing writers and its new Amazon Encore publishing service, and other publishers such as Smashwords and Cursor—though the focus seems to be largely on Amazon.
Though most of the article was things I had already heard before, the Journal does a great job of pulling them all together to paint a pretty good picture of the current state of the industry. Not only new authors, but established authors such as F. Paul Wilson and Joe Konrath are turning to self-publishing to merchandise both old titles and new.
It’s funny how far self-publishing has come over the last twenty years. When I was in high school, I remember a guest speaker coming in to lecture us for an hour about publishing books, and warning us that self-publishing via “vanity presses” was a great big rip-off—just another way to throw money down the drain. (I remember a chapter of a Donald E. Westlake book, God Save the Mark, also being devoted to getting that same lesson across.)
And now there are still “vanity presses” out there—publishers who will do everything in their power to fleece the unwary—but there are also legitimate self-publishers who provide a genuine service. Among those publishers is Amazon.
But on the other hand, there are still people who won’t read self-published books—I have a friend who says he won’t look even at ones friends recommend to him simply because he knows there are already more books that passed by a professional publishing gatekeeper than he could ever read and sees no reason to look outside those lines at something that may be awful. And it’s not clear yet whether a replacement gatekeeper will be found.
Still, in a poll posted with the article, almost half of the 500 or so people who have responded so far see digital self-publishing as a “big threat” to the traditional publishing industry. So who knows, there might be something there after all.
A replacement gatekeeper?
Amazon thinks crowd-sourcing does the trick just fine. And they’re putting their money behind it.
That’s the idea for Encore; they datamine their own catalog to pick up gems. The example from the WSJ article even got optioned by Hollywood so *somebody* is taking note of the self-published books that the snobs ignore.
What we’re seeing is the beginnings of a true marketplace of ideas where books are bought and sold on merit; on their intrinsic merit and appeal, not on what some manhattan literati or powerbroker likes.
The power is moving away from the gatekeepers of the past and towards influencers/recommenders/critics.
Which reminds me, didn’t Roger Ebert recently say we are heading into a golden age of movie reviews on the web? I suspect the same may be true of book reviews.
We see a lot of ebook search engines out there but I think there is likely room for a master book review sight or ten out there. I know some exist; I expect they’ll become majorly important real soon.
“So who knows, there might be something there after all.”
It’s as if you read the article but didn’t take in what it said. Did you read the part of the article about Karen McQuestion’s success or is she too ungatekept to even read about much less read?
“there are also legitimate self-publishers who provide a genuine service.”
Not to be picky, but a self-publisher is an author who publishes his own work, not a service that helps an author self-publish.
The difference is important, because the writing articles I read back in the 1970s always made a very strong distinction between self-publishing and vanity publishing. The former was considered respectable by the publishing world; the latter wasn’t.
These days, the distinction is increasingly blurry, with companies like Lulu offering both self-publishing services and vanity-press services, and with Smashwords continuing to hedge its bets over whether it’s a distributor or a publisher. I think the growing distinction is becoming “a publisher is the person who owns the ISBN for the work.” But even that distinction may disappear as time goes on, what with so many self-publishing services giving away free ISBNs.
“And it’s not clear yet whether a replacement gatekeeper will be found.”
Depends on what genre you’re writing in. Readers of some genres depend heavily on social networking and word-of-mouth to learn about new books, in which case the gatekeeping system is already in place: online recommendations and reviews.
As far as self-publishing/vanity publishing goes, it’s not the method of publication, but the many “services” out there that misrepresent the likelihood of success for writers, particularly of fiction, and use these misrepresentations to mislead authors into paying for overpriced publishing and marketing services for books that often just aren’t ready for prime time.
Felix said: We see a lot of ebook search engines out there but I think there is likely room for a master book review sight or ten out there. I know some exist; I expect they’ll become majorly important real soon.
But how is this different from having the gatekeeper be an editor at a publishing company? Gatekeeping is gatekeeping. I say that as someone who has a blog that includes book reviews in a particular niche. It’s one person’s opinion. I don’t see why random bloggers (speaking as a random blogger) are to be considered more trustworthy than an experienced editor at a publishing company.
Ellen: one success does not a trend make. It’s an interesting story, and she went in with her eyes open to the possibility of failure as well as success, which really is the important takeaway from that story IMO.
Children books should include a seal similar to video games http://www.pegi.info (Europe) to verify if it was edited by known professional or alike and get age approval.