It’s Just Publishing, Folks
A while back, I saw a blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch which discusses the divide between self-publishing authors and those who are traditionally published (e.g. published by someone else). It’s a great article, and you should read it. The general gist, however, is that somewhere in the timeline of publishing history, the publishing world fractured into two camps, and the chasm between the self-published and the traditionally published continues to grow. Well, it’s time someone put their foot down.
It’s just publishing, folks.
It turns out that all publishers, from the big “legacy” publishers to the meekest self-publisher, have to do the same things. They must find and develop work that they believe in, create book-like experiences (physical books, ebooks, apps) from the work, distribute the books to retailers with customers who might actually buy the books, and market to and build an audience who will eagerly continue to buy the books that publisher produces now and into the future. That’s it. Some people are better at certain aspects than others—I’m pretty damned good at building physical books and ebooks, for example—but that doesn’t mean that the next guy can’t also be good at what I do. Self-publishing advocates like Dan Poynter and John Vorhaus want you to believe that everyone can and should be good at everything (does anyone remember Don Novello’s character on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s, Father Guido Sarducci, and his declaration that “All men are Pope”? It’s kind of like that). I use John as an example because I used to build John’s books for him, and when I saw him speak at a conference a few months back, he used my service as an example of why the authors in the room didn’t need a service like mine! If John could build his own books—a trick he learned from his experience with me, and I am not making that up—so can anyone. But the funny part is, traditional publishers don’t think like that. Mike Shatzkin just wrote a blog post that discusses how “traditional” (or “legacy” or “full-service”) publishers specialize in what they are good at, and farm out the work that they don’t do as well, but that there is room for innovation. Mike’s article talks about how the big publishers are starting to think more like self-publishers. It makes sense, therefore, that the self-publishers started thinking like the big guys.
By the way, I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the difference between self-publisher who publishes exactly one author and the bigger publishers who publishes more than one author. Monogamous and polygamous have the wrong connotations. Monograph and polygraph? Both used. I have a hunch that the answer lies in the use of an obscure foreign language, but so far I haven’t found it.
What does a publisher of many authors have that a publisher of one author doesn’t have? Money? Not necessarily? A lot of titles? That depends on how long they’ve been publishing. I know of some best-selling authors who own all their titles and only publish their own work, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are making 6 figures each year, and a couple make more in one month than I made in a year working for other people. These authors have large fan bases and at least 10 titles, and they are constantly turning out new material to feed their audience’s appetites for their writing.
So let’s do away with this siren call for Do-It-Yourself publishing. That’s not the point.
From what I can tell, the “line in the sand,” as Kristine Rusch calls it, is not between the self-publishers and the traditional publishers. It’s between new publishers with one or two titles—the newbies, the inexperienced—and established publishers with many titles and a large audience. Either you have a successful business, or you don’t. Simple as that.
For those of you playing along at home, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t talked about authors very much. And really, isn’t publishing really about the authors? I’m going to have to say no to that. Publishing is about content. Most authors I know don’t want to be business people. They don’t want to take risks with their egos and with their dollars. They “just want to write” (which is something I hear about once a week from just about every author I know). Authors, as content providers, should be paid well for their contribution to the publishing process. I mean that. And most would love to be picked up by one of the big publishers so they don’t have to worry about all that ugly business stuff.
But the problem with the big six publishers is they have so much fixed overhead—buildings, salaries, printing equipment, etc.—that they have to take the lion’s share of the money from the sale of a book just to stay in business. Those big six publishers are coloring the perceptions of authors everywhere. Authors have a love-hate relationship with the big six—they want to be “recognized” by these big publishers, but they also want to get paid a lot of money. And when the authors can’t get what they think they’re worth—or can’t get picked up at all, at any price—many of them decide to “take their share” by publishing themselves. But often when they see how much work becoming a publisher is, they take shortcuts—on quality of editing and production, usually—and wind up with questionable content and poorly designed books. And then they wonder why self-published works still have a bad reputation. This isn’t a wholesale condemnation of DIY publishing any more than it is a condemnation of bloated businesses with budgets so big that can’t get out of the way of their own success.
If we really are going to draw a line in the sand, let’s draw it on the quality side of publishing. If you are publishing quality content, you are making money from those endeavors, and you are paying your authors well for it (even if you, yourself, are the author), you are a publisher. If not, then you’re not a publisher.
How hard was that?
