Wikipedia contributors suggest that the problem of sub-standard self-published books is in part due to the fact that it is often very difficult to differentiate self-publishing from vanity publishing. “The latter term is a pejorative one, usually referring to situations in which a publisher contracts with authors regardless of the quality and marketability of their work,” the encyclopedia explains. “They [vanity publishers] appeal to the creators' vanity and desire to become a ‘published author’, and make the majority of their money from fees charged to the creators for publishing services, rather than from sales of the published material to retailers or consumers.”
Linda L. Rucker, like a lot of other writers who venture into self-publishing, has had her own brush with a vanity publisher. She has published two novels, What the Heart Wants and Dark Ridge, as well as a collection of short stories, Words out of Time. Her short stories have also been featured in the anthologies, Forget Me Knots, Romancing the Soul, the 2005 Riverdale Short Story Annual and in April Rollins’ Coffee Camp Review Magazine.
She says she was horrified when What the Heart Wants came out. “Like a great many of the un-initiated, I too went with PublishAmerica for my first book. At first, I was elated that a so-called traditional, royalty-paying publisher wanted to publish my book, but when I held the finished product in my hand, I was horrified." As she continues, “No editing, was the worst of what I saw. As a new writer, I had no idea about editing. I figured that if the spelling was correct, then the manuscript was good to go.”
For her second novel, Linda L. Rucker shopped around and managed to secure an agent:
- She was a good agent, but patience has never been one of my virtues, so waiting for her to find a publisher just didn’t work for me. But, more [than] that was the notion that when she did find one, it could be anywhere from eighteen months to three years before my book hit the stores. So, I chose to release my agent from her contract and go with self-publishing. Most folks think that term is a death knell, but is it really?”
Shawn Street, a PublishAmerica public relations officer, disputes Linda L. Rucker’s claims and asserts that the company does edit books for grammar and spelling. “We do not change the content of the book," he declares. "When the Text Production Department edited her book, Ms. Rucker had two opportunities to review the work and approve any changes that were made.”
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!"