Why I don't want to self-publish - that authorised version!

I got into a snit a couple of months ago - and wrote this, hoping the Bookseller might publish it - they didn't, but I think it's a worthwhile statement.

“Have you thought of self-publishing?”

Friends, reading groups, other writers, even the local Society of Authors’ chapter(?) are encouraging me to do this.   I don’t want to.  I’ve investigated it, I’ve been to a conference on digital media for writers, visited the “Writers Lounge” at the London Book Fair and heard from the businesses who are making money from the self-publishing trend.  I have been momentarily enthused – it’s a simple procedure: stick the novel on line, tweet about it, blog about it, tell your Facebook friends to share the links... and hey-presto – after the week of free downloads, and glowing Amazon reviews you’re plucked up in a whirlwind of money, fame and renown.

Like the nurse who attended me in hospital recently, I like good books.   This nurse was a reader, a consumer, she had no connection with the production and distribution side of the industry – her comment on self-published books was:

“Some of them are quite good, and I’ve enjoyed them, but most of them have got so many mistakes in that I just get sick of it and give up.”

This need not worry the author, who presumably has the 99p or whatever s/he’s charging, in their Paypal account.

How many self-published books are honestly of publishable standard?  The work often hasn’t been fully edited (arguably the longer offerings of some very popular writers haven’t been edited either...) and it hasn’t been proof-read.  Jane could have spent several hundred pounds getting professional help with these things, but she hasn’t got the money – and anyway it will eat into the profits she’s longing to make from her book.  She could have taken the advice of friends who suggested politely it needed more work – but she felt happy with it, or perhaps even sick of it, and didn’t see the point in waiting any longer.  None of these are indicators of a book that’s ready for the market.

If I were to put my precious first novel The Romantic Feminist out in the self-published ether, I would be rubbing shoulders with the under-edited (mine is in its 20^th version I think!) and the unproof-read (I know it still has typos) and worst of all, it would simply join a great steaming pile of unpublished books, a million books each year apparently.  Where there’s muck there’s brass, sure – but you have to dig pretty deep in the heap to find anything remotely like brass, let alone gold, so I think, if you know you’re a good writer, why would you want to lose yourself amongst the unpublishables?  Of course, you’d hope that your book would shine out – would be discovered, that there would be a buzz about it – people would start tweeting about you, critical mass would drive you on – to what?  Ah – lots of money, yes, and also – being picked up by a publisher.

This strikes me as a very random and labour-intensive way to find a publisher.  I do not wish to spend all my valuable time blogging and tweeting about my absolutely marvellous books – I don’t want to beg my friends to review me on Amazon, I don’t want to spend time fending off queries from people who want to enhance my ratings for money, or provide professional services of unproven quality.  I understand that there is another way of finding a publisher, and there are people who do that for you called literary agents.  They do not charge upfront fees, it is, in best practice, a co-operative and collaborative relationship – they can help you make your work more marketable, encourage you in the paths of literary righteousness, and guide you through the valley of rejections.   Of course these people are very much in demand, there are not many of them, and they are very over-stretched because they are expected to take a quick look at all the millions of soon to be self-published books landing on their desks.

But why, say the self-publishing fanatics, would I want a wicked, greedy grasping publisher to take all my hard work, put a repellent and inappropriate cover on it, and then give me a pittance for it?   Well, because although Amazon is a very well known brand, it’s a brand that represents efficient on-line selling and delivery.  It isn’t a brand a writer really wants on their work – what we want is a brand like Faber or Penguin or Bloomsbury – so that when someone sees our book – whether it’s our notional reader, or a reviewer, or a browser in a library – they see that it carries a badge of credibility, of quality.   The reader may hate the book, they might think Harper Collins (other publishers are available) had done the world a disservice by allowing one of their imprints to publish it – but at least they are confident that not all HC books will be quite so dreadful, however fashion- driven publishers may be from time to time. 

We need diversity of imprints to give us an idea of the kind of work we are being offered.  Genre is too crude a division: is this horrific crime, literary crime, humorous crime, insightful crime, or just barely cobbled together crime?  Publishers and their imprints provide that branding for a writer.  Amazon cannot – and who knows which reviews are written by the friends and relations of the authors (yes, I’ve done it myself – it was a good book though!) and which are truly objective.

There have been and continue to be great changes but writers and readers still need publishers and agents, and their ability to offer work that stands out from the crowd and implies some guarantee of literary standards.   At the moment if self-published writers had a collective “company” motto it would probably have to be “With no regard for Quality”, and that isn’t something I want to stamp on my books.