08.16.12
Publish it yourself!
All the publish-it-yourself and make-it-on-demand Internet fulfillment houses furnish terrible products which are almost always, by default, overpriced. To keep the prices down you had to select for the cheapest quality materials.
Same goes for book publishing. If you want your book to look respectable, and read respectably (everyone needs a copy editor), the fees at the publish-it-yourself houses begin to stack up. None of them are the deals they are most often made out to be.
There’s another key difference. The editor in charge of your book, and his or her staff, at a traditional publishing house, is likely to actually have an interest in seeing your book is good and does well. The people who do copy-editing and other service packages at publish-on-demand don’t give a shit. Nature of the job.
The New York Times has a swell cover it today:
Not long ago, an aspiring book writer rejected by traditional publishing houses had only one alternative: vanity publishing. For $5,000 or $10,000, or sometimes much more, he could have his manuscript edited and published, provided that he agreed to buy many copies himself, often a few thousand or more. They typically ended up in the garage.
Digital technology has changed all that.
Actually, it would be more precise to say it has changed the terms of the equation, but not the frustration and chance for success, and added the option of having only digital goods.
The article goes on to tell what most know. Traditional book publishers have gone into the business by buying some publish-on-demand sites so they can have a piece of the expanded trash books market as their in-house operation becomes more miserly.
Follow it to a natural conclusion and one can reasonably argue that there is more money to be made in aggregation — publishing all digital or print-on-demand books that sell only a few copies, if any, to friends, than books the in the old fashioned way, except for maintenance of a couple hundred or so print superstars.
But that’s perhaps … too cynical.
However, one of the most important things in selling a book cannot be addressed by publish-on-demand: Publicity.
Without publicity no book stands a chance. And the market of individuals served by publish-on-demand cannot do publicity, or command the respect through reputation of traditional publishing houses.
Consider your list of favorite authors through the years.
Do you really think all of them could have just run out on the Internet, uploaded their books as e-copies to digital stores, e-mailed journalists and celebrities on tv shows to please, please, please read and review them, and still had results that put them where they are in your library?
On-demand and digital publishing has caused an explosion in rubbish, a fact gently acknowledged by the Times, generating a market of place-holder titles, as DD blog described about a month ago, here: Amazon’s numbing list, just for novels on electromagnetic pulse attack on the US.
All these books with titles brainlessly alike, all with virtually identical plots, all very badly written, all published through the same company that acts as a sales platform, Amazon. All worthless. The old slush pile published — and then some.
An eye-watering collection of what can only loosely be called “books” — a digital world’s equivalent of beach sand with Amazon getting a commission on every grain.