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 20th 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of unpublished books, a million books each year apparently.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.
