Self Publishing VS Agent

[Seli]

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!"

....

And the advent of computers is apparently frighteningly recent in the publishing industry. I've read that the way printing worked that even a couple of years ago publishers (or authors for that matter) would not have the final copy of a book in a readily editable format, partly because the final corrections would be done on printer's copies.

It makes some sense according to the people that know how the industry works. However, my own exposure has only been to academic (journal) publishing, which seems to have made the jump to an electronic workflow a lot earlier.

[Zoë Sumra]

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)

We outsource quite a bit of typesetting to India... but we check it afterwards! It's the proofing that bothers me in this case, not the production.

[rsullivan9597]

Hey all, I know I'm really late to this game but as noted earlier I have had experience with all three types of pubishing: Self, small press, and big-six. To be honest I don't think any one is better or worse than the other two - they all have their positive and negative aspects. The trick is aligning your goals with the right one. I do post a lot about topics like this on my blog and will be more than happy to answer any questions.

[PaulineMRoss]

There's some serious hate for self-published works on this thread. Me, I actually like self-pub, partly because they're cheap (the ebooks, anyway) and partly because it's fun starting to read and not having a clue what you're going to find. Since I got my Kindle, almost a year ago, about a third of everything I've read has been self-pub, and I've found it varies from unreadable to excellent, exactly like professionally published books. Of my Goodreads ratings, self-pubs average 3.1 stars, and the overall average is 3.3, so only a marginal difference. But I haven't yet come across a self-pub I consider worthy of 5 stars.

Mind you, I select very carefully. I read all the reviews on Goodreads, Amazon and Amazon.co.uk, ignoring all the 5 star ones. I download the sample and read that. There are two factors that influence me most. One is presentation - I look for professional cover art, a table of contents, conventional formatting and decent editing. If the author can't be bothered with that, I can't be bothered reading it.

The other factor is price. Like most Kindle owners, I hate paying a lot for my reading material (check how many of the Kindle 100 best sellers are dirt cheap). I won't pay more than mass market paperback price for any ebook, and for self-pub my comfort level is about half that. I'm simply not going to pay much for a completely unknown quantity. The cheaper the better, although free is questionable - what sort of author gives away their work for free? Sometimes it's advertising for a long series, though, which is fine.

It's true that there's a lot of self-pubbed crap. There's a lot of professionally published crap as well, of course, although they have at least seen some editing. For both kinds, the free sample makes it easy to weed out the real rubbish. The real problem now is trawling through the deluge of stuff out there to find the hidden gems. I like to feel I'm performing a useful public service by reading and reviewing some of the self-pub works :-)

[Lummel]

I like what you are doing readingwise and really enjoy your reviews on Goodreads. Reading them there doesn't seem to be a big quality difference between the self-published and professionally published. The weak and implausible ideas or characters in some of them don't see any worse than what I see on TV, or in films or in other books.

However I can see what the guys who run reviewing websites mean though. I'd imagine that there are enough fantasy and sci-fi books released by the main stream publishers every year in English alone to allow you to read something new continiously if you wanted. There's zero incentive for them to deviate from the mainstream publishers and risk something self-published.

But I'm sure that because e-books make the self-published material more avaliable that they will feature more in people's reading - it would make sense.

[PaulineMRoss]

However I can see what the guys who run reviewing websites mean though. I'd imagine that there are enough fantasy and sci-fi books released by the main stream publishers every year in English alone to allow you to read something new continiously if you wanted. There's zero incentive for them to deviate from the mainstream publishers and risk something self-published.

Yes, I totally understand why someone who has a reviewing blog and effectively works with the conventional publishing industry would keep away from self-published authors. That's just common sense. What I don't get is the hate directed towards the self-pub authors. Sure, a certain proportion of it is complete dross - badly written, unedited, amateurish presentation - but those are easy to eliminate. Two or three pages of the sample are enough.

The rest is generally no better and no worse than conventionally published stuff. In both cases, I find it just as hard to know what will be an enjoyable story and what will be (to me) completely unreadable. I gave the first Malazan book a good go, but couldn't get into it, and I tried Mieville's Kraken, and just backed away slowly from it, screaming. Just don't have the right receptors in my brain for stuff like that. And when you've paid full price, it's irritating.

On the other hand, Michael J Sullivan's Riyria series is a great example of self-published fantasy that's a lot of fun and very readable, if not particularly deep (yet). Sue Rule's Shehaios series has some great world-building and a nice magic system - very enjoyable. And they're cheap (well, cheap-ish, in Sullivan's case).

There's good stuff out there - on both sides of the fence, it's just not easy to find. More independent reviews would help everybody.

[pat5150]

I don't read self-published crap the same way I want no part of the East Coast hockey league or the Arena Football League. I want the real shit: the NHL and the NFL, with stars and players who have proven their worth.

Self-publishing is the path of least resistance and anyone can walk down that road without paying their dues.

Any respect I have garnered over the years on the Hotlist would evaporate instantly if I started reviewing self-published stuff. . .

Patrick

[PaulineMRoss]

I don't read self-published crap the same way I want no part of the East Coast hockey league or the Arena Football League. I want the real shit: the NHL and the NFL, with stars and players who have proven their worth.

Not a valid comparison. The hockey leagues are (by definition) sorted by ability and performance. Self-published books fall on a continuum from absolute dross to really good. Professionally published books also fall on a continuum, and although the absolute dross is weeded out, there's still some pretty poor stuff that gets published every year as well as the good. There is absolutely NO justification for a self-pub=bad, professional=good division. In my experience, that just isn't true, there's a lot of overlap.

I totally understand why big-name reviewers choose not to touch self-published, but when you talk about 'self-published crap' you are prejudging a huge amount of writing, not all of which deserves your contempt.

[kcf]

I totally understand why big-name reviewers choose not to touch self-published, but when you talk about 'self-published crap' you are prejudging a huge amount of writing, not all of which deserves your contempt.

The overwhelmng amount of self-published fiction is indeed crap. There is good - but it's the exception. And I certainly don't have the time or inclination to sort through hundreds of poor quality books to find the one or two exceptions. Yes, there is a continuum, but it's not linear. For every diamond in the rough, there are hundreds that justifiably would never have made it past a slush pile at real publishing house.

Publishers do a great service by weeding out the bad and working with their authors to make them even better. They dont' always get it right and what they choose can never meet everyone's taste, but it's a much better way than self-publishing.*

*however, I do think that self publishing has a much bigger role to play in the non-fiction, techncial market where niche books can be published, but that's a very different animal from fiction.

[PaulineMRoss]

The overwhelmng amount of self-published fiction is indeed crap. There is good - but it's the exception. And I certainly don't have the time or inclination to sort through hundreds of poor quality books to find the one or two exceptions.

I would question your numbers. In my experience, there is a fair amount of self-published crap, but it's nothing like 'the overwhelming amount'. It's not hard to eliminate the totally amateur stuff anyway - it takes maybe 30 seconds to detect. The rest is no better and no worse than professionally turned out work. But sure, not everyone wants to invest time and effort into checking them out.

Publishers do a great service by weeding out the bad and working with their authors to make them even better.

Oh, it would be lovely if that were always so. They also weed out a lot of good stuff too, and work with their authors to shoehorn them into whatever template they want to sell, and fail to market them properly, and sit on books for years, and drop authors mid-way through a series. No system is perfect.

Self-publishing, and especially the ebook, is just another alternative, a way of connecting writers and readers in a more timely (and cheaper) fashion. Not everyone who self-publishes is a complete no-hoper. See this blog for some perfectly sensible reasons to self-publish:

http://simonstoneauthor.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-become-independentself-published.html

All I would like to see is, firstly, that no author should be disrespected just because they happen to have taken the self-pub route; and secondly, more independent reviews of self-pub books.

[Zoë Sumra]

All I would like to see is, firstly, that no author should be disrespected just because they happen to have taken the self-pub route;

Not going to happen until self-pub (of fiction) has had enough time to be seen as a legitimate commercial route as opposed to narcissism.

and secondly, more independent reviews of self-pub books.

Again, not likely to happen until that stigma has had a nice long while to wear off.

[Prince Alexander]

I agree Eloisa, I feel like self-pub has a lot of stigma to it. You have tons of people jumping on the bandwagon to the theoretical gold rush after hearing a few super success stories, you have tons of people just playing the number crunch game of writing 50 subpar books/stories and trickling a bit of money from each, you have the outright spammers and scammers blasting with 100 fake titles a day at Amazon...not to mention several ex-traditional authors who failed to make money in the midlist, now building some sort of ponzi scheme of followers by screaming about self publishing from every corner. All of this creates a massive hurricane of cold selling at every bloody joint the authours would touch: twitter, facebook, forums, blogs, blog comments, reviews, etc. It's nasty. I don't even go there anymore. The attitude is typical of the "new shit": produce a lot of crap/average before anyone notices or before technology matures, and hope to get some money out of it.

I do write, and might some day self publish one novel which for certain reasons I don't want to try and sell to a real publisher... but then it would be 100% free. Charging anything more for electronic self published fiction, IMO, is just bad ethics.

[Zoë Sumra]

I do write, and might some day self publish one novel which for certain reasons I don't want to try and sell to a real publisher... but then it would be 100% free. Charging anything more for electronic self published fiction, IMO, is just bad ethics.

Given that professional ebook conversion (including copy protection) can run to £1/page... Releasing in non-protected formats can be free to the publisher, though.

[Prince Alexander]

Well, professionally wrapped crap is still crap.

And personally, I'd learn to do it all myself, just as a hobby type project.

[Seli]

I would question your numbers. In my experience, there is a fair amount of self-published crap, but it's nothing like 'the overwhelming amount'. It's not hard to eliminate the totally amateur stuff anyway - it takes maybe 30 seconds to detect. The rest is no better and no worse than professionally turned out work. But sure, not everyone wants to invest time and effort into checking them out.

...

In the absence of any filtering mechanism, even going by Sturgeon's law this means it will take me an hour of effort to find something that is in a readable shape. At that point the effort needed to find out whether something is actually a proper book, something I am interested in or even something I would like to read increases immensely. I don't read enough books a year to go through all that effort myself. And at this point there is no mechanism in place for self-published works of people I have not read before that I trust enough to pick up any more of them.

For reference here is the filtering mechanism that is in place for published works of a (genre) publisher as written down by Teresa Nielsen Hayden http://nielsenhayden...ves/004641.html, which of course is not perfect and will exclude some good books from being published but will help whittle down the potential of all books to books I might be interested in reading.

Manuscripts are unwieldy, but the real reason for that time ratio is that most of them are a fast reject. Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
   
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
   
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
   
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, dire straights, nearly penultimate, incentiary, reeking havoc, hare’s breath escape, plaintiff melody, viscous/vicious, causal/casual, clamoured to her feet, a shutter went through her body, his body went ridged, empirical storm troopers, ex-patriot Englishmen, et cetera.
   
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
   
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
   
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
   

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

1. It’s nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
   
2. Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
   
3. The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it’s not the author’s, and everybody’s already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.
   

(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)

1. Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us.
   
2. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
   
3. It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle.
   
4. Buy this book.
   

eta: irritating code is irritating

[PaulineMRoss]

In the absence of any filtering mechanism, even going by Sturgeon's law this means it will take me an hour of effort to find something that is in a readable shape.

Well, at my estimate of 30 seconds to eliminate each example of crap, I calculate 5 minutes on average to find one of the 10% that is (perhaps) not crap. Of course, there's then more effort needed to find out whether it's something you would actually enjoy reading, but that's true of the professionally published as well. Just because Joe Blogger gave it a rave review and it's sold squillions of copies doesn't mean that I will like it.

And at this point there is no mechanism in place for self-published works of people I have not read before that I trust enough to pick up any more of them.

Well, this is (partly) my point. For the big name authors there are numerous ways to find out whether it's worth investing the time and money in their books. Even then, it's possible to be seriously disappointed. I've come to the conclusion that the majority of fantasy (however it's published) is fairly middle of the road. It's a wonderful surprise to come across something that is truly original or brilliantly executed. But for self-published fantasy, there is no easy way to find out about a book, apart from trying it.

[Seli]

Well, at my estimate of 30 seconds to eliminate each example of crap, I calculate 5 minutes on average to find one of the 10% that is (perhaps) not crap. Of course, there's then more effort needed to find out whether it's something you would actually enjoy reading, but that's true of the professionally published as well. Just because Joe Blogger gave it a rave review and it's sold squillions of copies doesn't mean that I will like it.

I assumed a first level of selection to get rid of the obvious crap and a second to get to something worth reading. So I would need to check out 100 books to get to one readable one.

Well, this is (partly) my point. For the big name authors there are numerous ways to find out whether it's worth investing the time and money in their books. Even then, it's possible to be seriously disappointed. I've come to the conclusion that the majority of fantasy (however it's published) is fairly middle of the road. It's a wonderful surprise to come across something that is truly original or brilliantly executed. But for self-published fantasy, there is no easy way to find out about a book, apart from trying it.

Agree, although you still need to know the reviewers -or check their opinions to a couple of known books- to be able to find out if a book might be worth reading.

[PaulineMRoss]

I assumed a first level of selection to get rid of the obvious crap and a second to get to something worth reading. So I would need to check out 100 books to get to one readable one.

Oh, true enough, but I find that the second part of the process is exactly the same with professionally published books. The only difference is that a publisher has already weeded out the obvious crap. After that, you still have to trawl through the reviews, eliminating the unnaturally glowing ones - the friends of the author, sockpuppets and professional reviewers - and download the sample. But yes, an hour's work to find one book you might want to read is not a bad estimate.

[...] you still need to know the reviewers -or check their opinions to a couple of known books- to be able to find out if a book might be worth reading.

True. But a decent review will give enough information to make a preliminary judgment.

[Serious Callers Only]

Not reviewing self published books that are said to be good by a lot of people is just asshole-ish.

Read them and make up your damn mind. It's your job anyway.

[Arthmail]

You'll never see self-published books get any respect because of the same old bullshit about crap and blah, fucking, blah. The system is set in place. Publishers don't want the boat rocked because they might have to admit that they fuck up at least half of the time with books that get published. They try to jump onto the next band wagon, while excellent authors like Paul Kearney, and his series the Monarchies of God, are dropped because they weren't considered the next big thing, were not properly marketed, and no one heard about them.

The proliferation of review sites has changed this somewhat, but the review sites are still part of the problem. They're encouraged to have things continue as is. Free books to review, access to authors...etc. They drive up the number of people on their sites by having well known authors do interviews, which in turn gets them more money for the banners that they have drapped across the sides, which only gets them more free books. Its a business for them, after all, not matter how much they say otherwise. And i don't blame them for that, business is business. I'd think more of their responses to this thread if they simply said: i've got too many books coming in from established publishing houses, i simply don't have the time to review other works. Oh, and also admit there is some actual return for their time. Far better to simply state the truth than drone on about how unpublished works are all crap.

I think the market will trend away from traditional publishing houses just as bookstores are themselves having difficulties. There is a new way of reaching the market now. Instead of having to fight your way into the 1%, you can find other means of getting your work out there. And this notion of paying your dues is fucking bullshit. Just as musicians are able to use social media to get their music out to a wider audience, so too can authors. The notion of paying your dues implies that they have not done any work to achieve whatever level of skill that they do have. Its tired and untrue. Sure, there many that plain fucking suck. Just as there are coffee shop crooners and painters that have little to no discernible talent. Trying to fight your way into a dying 1% presents tremendously ridiculous odds. I wonder how many good to midling authors, or better, never submit out of fear of rejection - something that is pretty much a guarantee. It sometimes takes authors years to get published, and so many stop, and potentially great works sit in some desk drawer.

I'd rather wade through piles of shit to find a few good stories, than rely on publishing houses and review sites to maintain this strangle hold that they have, convincing everyone that what they are producing or reviewing is the best that there is to be had.