Since September, the Leicester Review of Books has been conducting an ongoing survey to find out what readers and writers think of self-publishing and self-published books. Among other things, we are asking writers to tell us their experiences of self-publishing. What benefits have they received? What are some of the disadvantages or challenges that they have experienced?
We are also asking writers to talk about the reasons that motivated them to by-pass the literary agent and the mainstream publisher and publish their books themselves. And, which is equally important, we are asking for readers’ experiences of reading self-published books.
How do the books compare with those that have been published by mainstream publishers? Are they just as good or are they inferior? If they are inferior, why is this?
Wikipedia defines self-publishing as “the publishing of books and other media by the authors of those works, rather than by established, third-party publishers.” The encyclopedia goes on to explain that although self-publishing represents a small percentage of the publishing industry in terms of sales, it has been present in one form or another since the beginning of publishing. "Many works now considered classic," it notes, "were originally self-published, including the original writings of William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Morris, and James Joyce.”
Hugh Griffin, who works for the Los Angeles engraving and printing company Stuart F. Cooper, adds that in the United States “self-publishing” refers to the practice of buying one’s own International Standard Book Number (ISBN) to protect publishing rights and having the printing done by one‘s self. “Many authors produce books for low prices and sell them successfully… but almost without exception, they use genuine ‘self-publishing,’” Griffin says.
The question of self-publishing is even more important today because advances in technology have made it easier than ever before for writers to publish their own books and make what they are writing available to a wider audience. As Wikipedia contributors point out, the tools which facilitate self-publishing and which are at writers’ disposal have been made possible by advances in technology associated with xerography, desktop publishing, print on demand technology, the internet and blogging.
From the discussion that is emerging, there are strong concerns that a lot of what is being self-published is of a poor quality. Anna Creech, a librarian and blogger, is strongly opposed to self-published books. “I’ve read only a handful of self-published books, so admittedly my experience with them is limited,” she says. “However, all of those books needed the heavy hand and red pen of an editor before they could be palatable. As a result, I refuse to read any more self-published books.” She advises writers to get an editor who is not related to them before they decide to publish anything.
Article comments
1 - Troped
This is all very helpful information, but I can't help but wonder if it's all quickly becoming moot. It may take a long while but paper is eventually going to go away. After that transition what will be the point of traditional (as in paper) publishing at all? I publish all my fiction on the web and even though I'm not making any money off of it, the project has its own rewards for allowing me to talk to the readers, and constantly update, edit, and change storylines as I see fit. Hopefully someday someone will come along and explain to me how I can make a career of it, but in the meantime doing it for love is worth it. So why publish? Just put it on a blog! Boom! Published.
2 - Julia
You should investigate Publishamerica more before just printing what one of their employee says. If you go to absolutewrite.com you will see the reasons no one should go with Publishamerica.
They are a vanity in reverse. Unlike standard self publishing, the author only gets a small royalty with Publishamerica. The books are overpriced and bookstores will not stock them because of the low discount rate.
Publishamerica is NOT self publishing.
3 - Sarah
The statement about not being able to make much money is not true for all self-publishing Web sites, especially not for Lulu.com (www.lulu.com). By creating content with an ISBN on Lulu.com, your books are automatically available for purchase on their Web site as well as on Amazon. Plus, authors can set their own royalties with a revenue split of 80/20, with 80% going to the authors. Lulu.com doesn't make any money unless the authors do. With their services marketplace, authors are provided with the tools to market and sell their works.
4 - The Editors
Regardless of the quality of the content, self-published books will always have one major impediment: publicity. If the author doesn't have a well-established platform (or isn't staggeringly wealthy) and if the book isn't available in bookstores to snag the browser, how will the average consumer ever hear about the book? The marketing that one person outside the traditional book publishing industry, particularly for fiction, 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 won't have any kind of impact, no matter how much the internet may have helped distribution.
P.S. Publish America blows.
5 - John Kremer
Self-publishing is a long-time and even nobel pursuit. Just see my Self-Publishing Hall of Fame to see what an incredible library you could build just using self-published books.
The librarian who says she won't read self-published books has probably read dozens of well-edited wonderful self-published books without knowint they were self-published. I wonder if she has cooked using The Joy of Cooking. Or read Leaves of Grass? Or enjoyed The Celestine Prophecy? Or watched Oprah's latest show about The Secret?
Publicity for a self-published author is not as impossible as you make it out to be. It takes work. It takes creating relationships with the media, but it can be done. Many self-published authors and smaller publishers have done it.
6 - robin d gill
The word "author-publisher" appears nowhere in your article or others I have seen on "self-publishing." While "self-publishing" is better than "vanity publishing," it still hints of vanity where vanity may have nothing to do with the decision to do it yourself. Yes, I am an author-publisher and see no reason to apologize for the freedom this gives me. With p.o.d. printing so inexpensive today, the only thing standing between good self-published books and and the readership such books deserve is the review establishment.
The advantages of being self-produced in music, where it is now common and accepted by the mass media, are more than matched in publishing. If you are unsure what I mean by that, please look at my books and see what I can get away with(Mixing two and even three-column clusters of poems within a basically single column text, special headers on every page, using “sous rature” (crossed-out words left in place for instructive or entertaining reasons) and odd Japanese fonts here and there for aesthetic effect, and even daring to put a different title on the spine, the cover and the title page, etc...).
"Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!"