Self-publishing; Fad or Future?

[Toby Frost]

You are not advocating for a system where authors whose work doesn't reach a certain level of quality aren't allowed to self-publish at all?

Gosh no! Sorry if I've got the terminology wrong.

What was meant was this: if anyone can either put anything onto the internet for download, or can pay a printer to make copies, there's no way of determining the quality of something at all unless it's published by a firm and reviewed by people in the know. A lot of stuff will be an unreadable mess. The SFF suggestion was that you could have a review site with effectively two levels of review: a check that the book was of some low basic quality (ie it made sense, held together like a "proper" book of its sort and was essentially not the work of someone obviously mad or illiterate) and then an actual review which would apply fairly reasonable critical standards. Punters would pay varying amounts for each sort of service. In return, they would get an honest answer, which in many cases would involve a straight refusal to grant the basic "certificate of legibility". It would all be entirely optional, of course.

This was all very vague and wishful-thinking-ish, but something like this would be useful in an area where there are very few ways of showing that one self-published book is better than another.

[Daario's*before*Snows]

What is considered "indie" in literature?

Is it only self publishing that is considered indie?

In film and music indie usually means without a major corporate label or studio.

In music there are only 4 major labels which make up 75-80% of the music market. Anything outside of that with smaller labels is considered indie. Films are the same from what I understand.

Is literature like that? Only a few major publishers which make up the bulk of everything?

[Angalin]

There's the "big six" publishers who occupy most of the market, then a bunch of very small independent publishers who get a fraction of the business, I'd say. Publishing used to consist of a lot of different houses (Penguin, Harper, Collins, Random House, Doubleday, etc etc etc), many of which are now arms of the same tentacular conglomerates: for instance, Penguin is now an imprint of Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times and Dorling Kindersley. Random House was bought by Bertelsman, which folds the Doubleday, Knopf, and Crown imprints into the RH organization.

[Seli]

There are plenty of smaller publishers outside of the big six (english language publishers) [or 5 now with the Random Penguin merger].

But the people using the 'Indy' label are mostly self-publishers or self-publishing authors that act as a publisher for a few others as well.

The outside-of-the-big-six publishers are generally known as small press or micro-press. But those might also have contracts with the big publishers for distribution.

[Angalin]

Trying to remember exactly how it works here, but Canadian bookstores get some stock from the big US distributors (forget the names, they might or might not be owned by the big publishers) and some stock directly from Canadian houses such as Random House Canada or HC Canada. Small press stock tends to come through small, independent distributors like the University of Toronto Press or Raincoast Books, which offer their own books as well. Because of the publishing business's structure for returning unsold books, bookstores didn't used not to like ordering directly from a small press; distributors take returns, small presses don't.

There was a radio piece recently on, I think, NPR, where a publisher was extolling ebooks for their adjustable prices; printed books have a static cost while with ebooks it's much easier to put them on sale without incurring the same level of loss. Successful self-published work has a similar benefit for them: the upfront work has been done and the publisher can cash in on a sure thing. This was probably mentioned upthread, but Fifty Shades made so much that it let Random hand out large bonuses to all its employees last year.

[TrackerNeil]

Gosh no! Sorry if I've got the terminology wrong.

What was meant was this: if anyone can either put anything onto the internet for download, or can pay a printer to make copies, there's no way of determining the quality of something at all unless it's published by a firm and reviewed by people in the know. A lot of stuff will be an unreadable mess. The SFF suggestion was that you could have a review site with effectively two levels of review: a check that the book was of some low basic quality (ie it made sense, held together like a "proper" book of its sort and was essentially not the work of someone obviously mad or illiterate) and then an actual review which would apply fairly reasonable critical standards. Punters would pay varying amounts for each sort of service. In return, they would get an honest answer, which in many cases would involve a straight refusal to grant the basic "certificate of legibility". It would all be entirely optional, of course.

This was all very vague and wishful-thinking-ish, but something like this would be useful in an area where there are very few ways of showing that one self-published book is better than another.

I think there is merit in this idea...a sort of indie writers' guild. I imagine something like this may come to pass in time, because it's clear to me that things are moving in favor of indies and not against them. I'd like this kind of thing, because I've read some indie stuff that was...well, I knew from halfway through the first chapter I was in for it. There's got to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.