Self Publishing VS Agent

[henderson]

It's not impossible to find good fiction authors only on ebooks now.

JR Rain (obvious pseudonym is obvious) for instance, has very strong urban fantasy books (you'd like them really - especially the elvis one).

I don't think he is self published though.

I believe J.R. Rain does self-publish his novels, or has in the past,including MOONDANCE.

[The Evil Hat]

The fact that it is theoretically POSSIBLE to succeed does not mean that you WILL succeed or even that it's remotely possible to. In the past year, two different trees fell on my grandmother's house in the same spot. The trees were on opposite ends of the property. This does not mean that two trees will routinely fall on people's houses, much as it might be fun to point to it as an example of how trees self publishing is awesome.

[awesome possum]

The fact that it is theoretically POSSIBLE to succeed does not mean that you WILL succeed or even that it's remotely possible to. In the past year, two different trees fell on my grandmother's house in the same spot. The trees were on opposite ends of the property. This does not mean that two trees will routinely fall on people's houses, much as it might be fun to point to it as an example of how trees self publishing is awesome.

I'm not sure anyone is giving an example of how self-publishing is awesome.

If it offends you so much to see a few examples of how self-publishing has been successful for a minuscule minority, maybe you should take a good hard look at your own bias.

[Seli]

I know that both Paul McAuley and Neal Asher have put out self published ebooks, but these are collections of short stories that are out of print. I think this is probably the best thing about self publishing, and hopefully other authors will do something similar if they can.

Tobias Buckell and Jim Hines are two others that self-published short story collections. They have both reported on the sales (Buckell and Hines) and the market for short stories at least seems to be small-ish.

As a reader I have tried some self-published works, and it will be some time before I try that again. At the moment I am still really happy to have publishers as a initial gate-keeper, even if they mess up at times,

I have been following the discussions for some time, and I am interested to see where it is going.

Self-publishing does seem to work perfectly fine for some web-comics I read, but in that case you have more or less seen what you are getting. Comic-publishing in that regard is probably more similar to music than to written works, it is really simple to make a snap-decision to decide whether you like something, while in decently written works the time (and concentration) investment needed to get to that decision is higher.

[Serious Callers Only]

G R Yeates - The Eyes of the Dead

Was this self published too?

It was cool.

[Serious Callers Only]

The fact that it is theoretically POSSIBLE to succeed does not mean that you WILL succeed or even that it's remotely possible to. In the past year, two different trees fell on my grandmother's house in the same spot. The trees were on opposite ends of the property. This does not mean that two trees will routinely fall on people's houses, much as it might be fun to point to it as an example of how trees self publishing is awesome.

Editor detected.

[The Evil Hat]

Editor detected.

Not that I'm aware of.

[SeptemberGirl]

I think self publishing is great if you have a platform from which to sell your book. A company, a previous track record with writing, a huge Twitter following...all the same things that make you attractive to publishers.

I agree that small presses are a good route. I'm not an author dying to get my work out there, though, just a former book editor and a reader. So my perspective is different. I've never read a self published book for pleasure. I did read lots for consideration for my former company, though. My instincts were pretty good, except for the one I turned down which became an Oprah favorite. I still maintain it sucked. :D

I don't read a ton of fantasy, though, and it's not my genre of expertise. Things might be different, and I defer to those who know more about that genre.

[ZombieWife]

I'm not sure anyone is giving an example of how self-publishing is awesome.

If it offends you so much to see a few examples of how self-publishing has been successful for a minuscule minority, maybe you should take a good hard look at your own bias.

I would personally love to read the positive accounts. Though I really cannot go that route myself (I am looking to teach and they require a book-length publication in PRINT and from a reputable publishing house) in order to take you seriously.

But, I'm still very curious about it. I have some nonfiction material that I'm interested in publishing. I feel that maybe ebook format might be an interesting route to take.

I wonder if SEO (search engine optimization) could have any bearing on your success in self/ebook publishing.

[Serious Callers Only]

Reviews have much more of a bearing (which is a problem if the reviewers don't even try your book, either by prejudice or by not getting that free book).

[henderson]

I would personally love to read the positive accounts. Though I really cannot go that route myself (I am looking to teach and they require a book-length publication in PRINT and from a reputable publishing house) in order to take you seriously.

But, I'm still very curious about it. I have some nonfiction material that I'm interested in publishing. I feel that maybe ebook format might be an interesting route to take.

I wonder if SEO (search engine optimization) could have any bearing on your success in self/ebook publishing.

Zombiewife,

I would recommend that you read the Write to Publish blog by Robin Sullivant (http://write2publish.blogspot.com/). She is a unique perspective on traditional publishing, small press publishing, and self (or indie) publishing.

Michael Sullivan, her husband, wrote the six book series Riyria Revelations, which he completed writing before they approached a publisher. AMI, a small press, published the first novel and was to publish the next five books in six month intervals.

One month before the release date of the second novel, AMI went under. So, Robin and Michael decided to self publish and were able to release the second book on time. Robin created Ridan Publishing to publish the rest of the Riyria Revelations series.

With each release of subsequent title in the series, sales increased exponentially for each of the prior released novels. Enough attention that some traditional publishers took notice.

While this was happening, Ridan Publishing started to publish other authors and sales for their books. (Check the Ridan Publishing website if you are interested.)

Forward to Fall 2010, Orbit made a six figure offer to publish Riyria Revelations in three novels to be published in November and December 2011 and January 2012, which will include the sixth novel in the series.

I have listened many of her podcasts and interviews, and I think she is very knowledgeable about the publishing industry.

(Please note: I don't have any affiliation with Robin or Michael Sullivan. I have never met them, but I have read all five of the published novels in the Riyria Revelations.)

[kcf]

John Scalzi is also technically a self-publishing success. He was a free-lance (I belive) industry non-fiction writer who had a pretty popular blog before there were all that many blogs. He self-published a book on the blog (Agent to the Stars) and eventually a major SFF publisher (Tor) took notice and signed him up for a book or two. He's now published quite a number of books - search his blog for his thoughts on self-publishing, they are very interesting and informed as someone who has been on both sides of the fence.

[Zoë Sumra]

Well, self-publishing has just closed in on trad publishing in one respect - physical quality of product. Totally aside from the lack of gatekeeper issue causing quality defects in terms of the content, self published books often looked rather crap - upthread someone mentioned crappy cover art, but I've seen self published books that had quite good cover art, but were printed on the wrong kind of paper (some too flimsy, some too bleached), with poorly chosen fonts and bad typesetting layout.

With the ebook revolution, all of that is forgotten. No one cares about crappy cover art, because with an ebook, you never get to see it. No chance of it printing on the wrong paper or coming up in the wrong font, if it's Kindle format - it'll default to whatever you choose. And as for formatting...

I bought A Traditionally Published Ebook today. I got it about fourteen hours ago. The formatting is, to put it mildly, shit.

The physical version of the book has cute drop capitals at the start of each chapter, to make it look more epic. Unfortunately, whichever douche converted it into an ebook forgot to take out the drop caps first. The result is leading capital letters sitting shy of the line they're meant to be on.

The book was not re-read, not even skimmed, after being converted to Kindle format from its trad-publishing PDF inner art (or whatever. We use PDFs). While it was proofed before conversion, so typing errors mid-sentence are near-nil, not all the paragraph breaks in the original document were entered as carriage returns, with the result that in the ebook version some of the paragraphs run right into each other. This is particularly confusing when two characters are in dialogue and you can't tell which character is saying what. This isn't an uncommon error - it's averaging two or three times per chapter.

I had been waiting for this book for some time, you understand. It's a fairly important book on which I'd have thought a minimal degree of effort would be expended. But I've downloaded free ebooks from Amazon that have better-quality formatting, not just Project Gutenberg classics but the step-below-airport-reading romances.

Now, I realise it's a bit hypocritical of me to say "I could have done better!" in this case, because I work for a publishing company and have been both typesetter and layout proofreader before now. But... I could have done better. For these particular errors, a blind moth could have done better. I won't say it's killing my enjoyment of the book, but it's severely cramping it - I wrote my first letter to a publisher complaining about typos when I was eight or nine; I hate them, because they always throw me right out of a story. It's like there's no point trying to concentrate on what's happening, because I'll be pitched out of it any second.

And if this is the kind of care and attention taken by one of the world's bigger publishing houses on one of the SFF genre's most eagerly-awaited books? The bar on this particular issue has been set very, very low.

(Rant over. I don't want to understate how pissed off I am right now, but I'll go back to slogging my way through a book I should be, ahem, dancing through.)

[kuenjato]

Wow, Eloisa, that sounds pretty inept. Guessed the rushed the hell out of it, hunh?

[Zoë Sumra]

It's rushed to the extent that nobody thought. I hit the paragraph breaks issue in under half an hour and the drop caps issue in under half a minute. We've got two copies - Kindle version for me, hardback for MCGeek - so I know the production values of the physical hardback are industry standard (I think we'd all have heard the screams if they weren't), so although I appreciate the book was rolled out pretty quickly, it was done slowly enough for basic competence in the physical format.

In addition, the physical books must have gone to print four to six weeks ago. The publisher could have used those weeks to ensure the ebook was up to standard, given that that didn't need printing and distributing.

Maybe it's a sign that ebooks are still the poor relation as seen from the trad publishing industry's perspective, but if so, this is a very short-sighted view. As said up-thread, even if self-publishing or indie publishing isn't the future, ebooks are. There've been rants about ebook overpricing before now - as mentioned up-thread, I am not entirely in accord with these: there are always costs in publishing - but ignoring the nasty boulder rolling towards you won't stop it hitting. (And typesetting it nicely will at least ensure it hits you in a tidy manner.)

[mjgambino]

For a perfect example of traditional publishers messing up ebooks, check out the Nook (B&N) versions of the Death Gate Cycle. Random words are bolded when they shouldn't be, where there should be the word "I" there is "/" instead, names are spelled wrong (Mark instead of Marit), and other misc typos ("Fm" instead of I'm").

It's seriously terrible... pirated, scanned copies on the internet are probably better.

It's rushed to the extent that nobody thought. I hit the paragraph breaks issue in under half an hour and the drop caps issue in under half a minute. We've got two copies - Kindle version for me, hardback for MCGeek - so I know the production values of the physical hardback are industry standard (I think we'd all have heard the screams if they weren't), so although I appreciate the book was rolled out pretty quickly, it was done slowly enough for basic competence in the physical format.

In addition, the physical books must have gone to print four to six weeks ago. The publisher could have used those weeks to ensure the ebook was up to standard, given that that didn't need printing and distributing.

Maybe it's a sign that ebooks are still the poor relation as seen from the trad publishing industry's perspective, but if so, this is a very short-sighted view. As said up-thread, even if self-publishing or indie publishing isn't the future, ebooks are. There've been rants about ebook overpricing before now - as mentioned up-thread, I am not entirely in accord with these: there are always costs in publishing - but ignoring the nasty boulder rolling towards you won't stop it hitting. (And typesetting it nicely will at least ensure it hits you in a tidy manner.)

[kuenjato]

just saw this elsewhere, concerning Stephen R Donaldson:

GAP e-books: an explanation for why they are so shoddy

I've just learned that the production AND PROOFREADING for Bantam/Spectra e-books is done...in India. By people who barely speak English. (Apparently this applies to every e-book published by the conglomerate which includes Bantam.) Maybe it's time we all starting paying attention to who publishes the e-books we want to read. (HUGE sigh)

4/20/11

....outsourcing: cheaper than hiring desperate college students!

[The Evil Hat]

For those in the know: how do spelling errors and the like creep into ebooks? I've never understood that. Why wouldn't they just use the same text that they made the print edition from? Formatting errors like Eloisa was talking about, on the other hand, I get, even if they really should've been caught.

[awesome possum]

About a month ago I read Mistborn, and the second book had the error where apostrophes turn into "& quot ;" or some such when pasted. It was a good book, but what a terrible reading experience.

[bcwoods]

For those in the know: how do spelling errors and the like creep into ebooks? I've never understood that. Why wouldn't they just use the same text that they made the print edition from? Formatting errors like Eloisa was talking about, on the other hand, I get, even if they really should've been caught.

Some books that were written before the advent of computers (for which no electronic file exists) are scanned in as paper copies with a giant machine that "guesses" what the words are and converts them into a text file. That text file is then converted into an ebook with varying levels of copy-editing depending on the publisher. It's usually pretty accurate but if there is a printing error in the scanned text (say that G has a spot missing in the cleff part) you can get characters exclaiming "Oh my Cod!"

With modern books, I think what usually happens is that someone converts an older document without as much editing or, failing that, forgets to press the pilcrow (the backwards P thing up in the toolbar on Word) button to see if there's any lingering meta language in the text they're converting. That's when you get all the scribbly computer vomit in my experience.