The Current State of “Hybrid” Publishing

CHIRP IS EVIL, in a good way Update: Still moving along

The Current State of “Hybrid” Publishing

An interesting post over at Jane Friedman’s blog: The Current State of Hybrid Publishing: Q&A with David Wilk

I find Wilk an honest broker; while he runs a hybrid publishing company, he’s not proactively trying to persuade anyone on the merits of that particular path. He serves on the board of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and offers consulting to all sorts of people who need expert publishing guidance. What I appreciated most about our conversation was his perspective as someone who’s been in the business for decades, plus he offers context and nuance around what can be a divisive issue: paying to publish.

Hybrid publishing refers to real, non-scammer options for publishing that are not do-it-all-yourself but also not aimed at getting an agent and a Big Five contract. These options generally involve paying a fee for real services of some sort, meaning not crazy fees to obvious scammers, but significant fees for real services. There are lots of options, the field is changing all the time, and Jane Friedman obviously tries to keep an eye on what is going on in this area. Thus, this interview.

Let me pull out some bits that seem interesting or useful. I’ll italicize everything from the linked post, as usual. Anything not italicized is from me. Also as usual, but I wanted to be specific about it because I pulled whole paragraphs from this post. Everything from Jane Friedman herself is in bold italics. Everything from the person she’s interviewing is regular italics.

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Okay, here’s something. I bet “stratification” here means “layers of pricing to fit every budget.”

Stratification in the hybrid publishing business reflects the stratification in the client base. Just because a publisher charges $100,000 for a book project doesn’t mean they’re predatory—because the people who will pay that kind of fee can afford it. On the other hand, it would be unethical if a publisher allowed someone to pay $100,000 knowing that the client was taking out a mortgage on their home to cover it, thinking that somehow their book would be a bestseller, which we all know is wishful thinking. To me, that is an ethical breach. In a sense that is a financial crime. And I’m sure it’s happened; there are unethical companies out there. But those that are aboveboard are selling a service and pricing it to the market they serve.

This is interesting to me. I don’t think it’s really possible for a publisher to ethically charge $100,000 for any book project, actually. I don’t think it matters whether the client can afford that. I don’t think it’s conceivable that the publisher can provide anything that is worth that much. Except ghostwriting services, possibly, in which case … fine, I guess … but the client should be up front about the fact that they are buying a ghostwriter’s services and the publishing company should acknowledge that this is what they are providing, among whatever much less valuable services they are also providing.

Here’s a comment Jane Friedman makes:

I find it really difficult to talk about hybrid publishing without making some group of people upset. If I talk about it as a legitimate option, I hear from self-publishing authors saying these companies are scams, or I hear from authors who feel they overpaid for what they received. Or if I talk critically, I hear from the hybrid publishers and hybrid published authors who say that I just don’t get it.

I can understand this. Wilk responds, and I think his response is reasonable. He uses the analogy of hiring someone to build a garage. I agree. I think, personally, that it’s fine to pay someone a lot of money to do something for you because you don’t want to do it yourself or you can’t do it yourself. The analogy I have used is this: You can hire someone to build a fence around a parcel of land, build raised beds, till up the soil, add plenty of topsoil, plant roses, and install a watering system. That will cost quite a lot, after which you will have this nice rose garden, which is what you paid for, and you did not do any of the work for it. You can then hire a gardener if you want to, and sit back and enjoy the roses without ever doing any work at all. And this is perfectly fine.

In the same exact way, you can decide you have plenty of money, so you can hire one of these hybrid publishing services to do everything. Including, maybe, write the book. But if not that, then serve as your book coach, provide every layer of editing, design the cover, do the formatting, publish the book, and do the marketing. And if you have the money to do that and want to do it, why not? Except for the ghostwriting part, which I will NEVER UNDERSTAND, at least not for fiction. For memoir, sure, why not? It’s understandable to work with a ghostwriter for memoir. But for fiction, no, I don’t understand that at all.

Then you’re going to have people who self-publish and take it seriously, and all those people are going to look blankly at the client who paid for all that and say, “But you could have done so much of that yourself! It’s not hard!”

To which the appropriate answer would be — it seems to me — “But I didn’t want to do it. It was fine with me to spend money so that someone else would do it for me.” I don’t mean the actual writing of a novel. I mean everything else, all the rest of it. It seems to me this client could easily say, “Did you build that sunroom extension on your house yourself? Do you do your own taxes? Did you fix your car yourself last time you had car trouble? Why not? It’s not hard! You could learn to do it yourself!” Because it’s always true that your fundamental choice is to do something yourself or pay someone else to do it for you, and either is perfectly fine.

And then if someone thinks they overpaid, well, they chose to pay that much, and that was their decision, exactly as though they paid one landscaper to put in a rose garden and then realized they could have hired a different landscaper who might have done a better job for less money. They should have shopped around. But if the publishing service does a good job providing the services they contracted to provide for the price both parties agreed to up front, the service is not a scammer, even if the author realizes later they could have gotten a better value for their money elsewhere.

So basically, I think hybrid publishing is fine and reasonable and you should know what you’re going to get for what you pay, and then whatever, it’s fine and there’s no problem with it.

Oh ho, THIS is an interesting comment:

At this point, though, I think it’s going to become more difficult for hybrid publishers. I don’t think it’s a long-term growth piece of business.

And why is that?

Just as traditional commercial publishing appears to be (very) slowly (but surely) dying, I think hybrid publishing will be buffeted by coming demographic and cultural dynamics. … The biggest challenge for hybrid publishers is that it’s actually a pretty straightforward process to publish a book. We know how to do this. But it’s really difficult to market and sell books. … And every single toolset that you think works, or did work in the past, doesn’t seem to work anymore. What might have worked last year doesn’t work today. And unfortunately, when there are activities that do work, they are not codifiable or repeatable.

… [T]he vast abundance of books published and the decline in overall book readership means that the chance for a sales success decreases daily. … While not every book’s success or failure is measured by book sales, how many authors are going to be willing to spend their hard-earned dollars to produce books that sell fewer than 200 copies?

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All right, let’s pause right there. Quick, KDP, show me lifetime sales for all my books. … Okay, everything but the omnibus print volumes has sold more than 200 copies. That doesn’t count KU pages read. If a book publisher tells me that most books self-published today sell fewer than 200 copies, I would wonder what categories of unreadably terrible, utterly unpromoted books that publisher is including in the estimate, because including unpromoted, unreadable books is the only way to get that figure. And if a “book publisher” is not promoting books, fine, because that’s not their job, but if they are bringing out unreadably terrible books without telling the author those books are unreadably terrible, they are a scammer or very close to it.

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Wilk then continues: none of this applies to the book categories where self-publishing authors are being successful publishing on KDP and other digital platforms where true communities of readers and authors have formed an ecosystem that operates completely outside of traditional publishing formats and processes.

Well then, NAME THOSE CATEGORIES and be specific about what you are talking about, because that is kind of relevant! It’s absolutely nuts to make a statement like that and then just go on without specifying which categories you think are dead and which categories are doing fine because of “an ecosystem that operates outside of traditional publishing,” because I think that is surely ALL the fiction authors who are succeeding to ANY DEGREE at all as self-publishing authors. This is ALL OF SELF-PUBLISHING, or all that I pay attention to! It’s not some trivial category to be ignored!

Here is the actual useful, practical take-home message for anybody considering hiring a hybrid publishing service:

[M]aybe the only way that authors can protect themselves is to look at the other books from the hybrid publisher, and actually read some of them. Are they good enough? Will you, as an author, feel good to be in their company?

That is basically the only question that matters when you’re sorting out legitimate services from any flavor of scammer. Go take a look at the books they produced. Are those genuinely good books? Are they presented genuinely well? If so, then if you personally want to spend money to have that publishing service do a lot of work for you, fine. And just be aware that publication does not equal promotion, so if a publication service doesn’t do promotion, then that’s fine, but in that case the author is going to have to do something at least minimally useful in that regard. And if the service does do promotion, then this statement:

It’s really difficult to market and sell books. … And every single toolset that you think works, or did work in the past, doesn’t seem to work anymore. What might have worked last year doesn’t work today. And unfortunately, when there are activities that do work, they are not codifiable or repeatable.

is a concern, and I would want not want to pay a lot for promotion without some basic feeling that the promotion service — which might well be quite separate from the publishing service — had some basic clue about what they’re doing.

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