Getting Published: “Self” vs. “Traditional”… the “Great Debate”
(Reputed to have been Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke.)
The linked email exchange, introduced here, actually happened. It was edited only slightly, simply to help clarify.
(If you’d like to cut right to it, click this to skip my contextual intro: The Great Non-Debate!)
This all began with an email from the program organizer for a major upcoming writing conference where I’ll be presenting three workshops in August, asking if I’d like to participate in a videotaped “debate” to help with the promotion and marketing of the event. It would be a face-off from two sides: the advocacy of traditional publishing, versus a defense of self publishing as the better call, presumably seeking to recruit writers to either point of view.
I would, of course, be the spokesperson for the traditional vote… which he seemed to believe was my obvious wheelhouse. Not sure why, actually, as I write about craft rather than marketing. Maybe it’s the constant references to “getting published” in my posts that cast me in the old school mode for this (because anybody can publish anything in the self-publishing world, thus confusing the issue.
These days, that phrase applies to either camp.
My opponent in this “debate” would be Linda Needham, an experienced and highly respected author who will also be presenting at the conference. Linda, I gleaned from the context of the invitation, was a huge advocate and expert in the self-publishing realm.
The organizer meant well. He wanted it to be funny, a “mock” debate in the “Larry you ignorant slut” tonality of an old Saturday Night Live sketch. I got that. It was actually a clever idea.
Let me say here, I was never tempted to say yes.
I waited 24 hours to respond, then wrote to say thanks for the offer, it’d be a fun project with the right players, but I wasn’t the right guy. I hate conflict. I avoid debate. I don’t need to be right, and frankly there are no clear cut lines dividing these two publishing preferences. It’s a “debate” nobody can win. Both positions have upsides and horror stories, and examples of each abound.
Let me say also that I’ve done it both ways. I’ve published eight books (six novels and two writing books)… traditionally. And I’ve distributed five ebooks on writing… as a self-published author.
That said, I have broken the code for neither.
I copied my response to the invite, my decline, to my so-called opponent (Linda), just to make sure I remained respectful to all parties. Frankly, I was pretty certain that she’d kick my ass in such a square-off, and I wanted to make that clear… I can’t defend traditional publishing as a goal any more than I can, using the numbers and the sparsity of valid examples, justify self-publishing. (Any metric to measure success in either realm is an issue of scale and personal goals… one self-published writer’s home run in terms of sales is another traditionally-published writer’s dismal failure.)
Holding a book in your hands that has your name on the cover, or looking at its listing online, is a wonderful feeling, no matter how one gets there. But it’s not remotely what it used to be, and what it means depends on the writer.
All of which is pretty depressing, when you think about it.
It leaves us with, well, no promising options whatsoever if more than “holding my book in my hands” is the goal. And yet, books do get published, they do get bought and read, and from both strategies. Some writers come out the other side with the beginning of an actual career, though the number lean toward traditional on that count, by a long shot.
As for seeing your book on a shelf in a bookstore, however, that one remains a near impossibility for one strategy, and lately, a very iffy prospect for the other.
Linda wrote back, asking me to offer up more details.
I did that, and suddenly the debate has morphed into a sort of manifesto exploring the dark world of the writing aspiration. The objective of sharing it with you here is to bring you to the point of such a discussion, and make you aware of the species of shark with which you are swimming regardless of which pool into which you dive .
For me, it comes full circle back to what I’m doing here on Storyfix, and why I keep writing fiction in what amounts to my spare time lately, because dreams die hard. It’s why I coach writers on their stories for a living, the goal being to give their novel the best possible chance of floating in those shark-infested waters.
I teach so that I might learn.
I will never hang my shingle out as a publishing consultant. Beware of anyone who does.
So there will be no debate.
There never will be. Certainly argument and advocacy will continue, cloaked as campaign or propaganda, often told from behind blinders. There is a lot of noise about self-publishing, but the number of viable, money-making, truly bestselling authors out there still come from traditional publishing by a factor of about 1000 to 1 (I once told a large keynote audience that the number of bestselling authors from their state could fit into a booth at Denny’s… the reviews were mixed on that one).
In other words, for every story that goes like this – “hey, Joe Blow has sold one million ebooks on Kindle, and he’s not even that good!” – there are hundreds of bookstores full of titles from the traditional publishing world, with nary a single self-published title on the property. And among those books on the story shelf, there are many that have sold more than one million copies.
We must choose our goals and our strategies very carefully.
And, with the realization that both are at once viable while remaining long shots, we must be realistic about our talents and our time, both in terms of writing a story and our ability to promote it on our own (which the vast majority of traditionally published authors face, as well, thus throwing a point toward the self-publishing position).
The only odds that are in your favor as a self-published author is the chance to actually have a title for sale on Amaxon. com. And the only odds in your favor as a traditionally published author is that, at some point, an box will be delivered to you door full of copies of your latest title, without having to write a check to make that happen.
But first, before we choose our strategy, we must choose our stories carefully.
That’s the most important and least heralded argument of all in this face-off. And on this, count there is no debate whatsoever relative to what that means.
Because the whole thing is still a cloud of dust, one in which the morning email ad from Amazon might include the next Jo Nesbo or John Grisham or Debbie Macomber right next to the next Joe Blow ebook (a bad example, because that’s also something the self-published writer has absolutely ZERO control over). Sooner or later the dust will settle and some sort of qualitative vetting mechanism will surface (it’s already happening, with websites that review only self-published or small press titles, and bookstores and magazine stands that carry only traditionally published titles), herding books into niches and levels, and when it does we’ll be right back where we left off when traditional publishing went dark.
In the art world there are mall poster stores, mass produced art stores, county fair art booths, community art shows. local galleries, hotel resort galleries, art district galleries, big name galleries and major auctions for collectors. Nobody is confused. We are heading for something like that, but in the meantime we are being seduced into believing this is a level playing field.
It isn’t. Both are minefields where the dead outnumber the survivors.
Our job is to figure out which business we want to be in, and then be there when the walls and storefronts go up, still in the game.
Click this link — The Great Non-Debate - to read the non-debate commiserating and illuminating email exchange between Linda Needham and myself on this issue. The good stuff is mostly hers (I’m mostly bitching and moaning, truth be told), with a lot of encouraging and sobering truths we need to ponder before we can truly decide with clarity.
Linda Needham is a multi-published, USA Today bestselling author of traditionally and self-published historical romance. She is also a multi-produced playwright, librettist, tap-dancer and proud grandmother.
Getting Published: “Self” vs. “Traditional”… the “Great Debate” is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com
The post Getting Published: “Self” vs. “Traditional”… the “Great Debate” appeared first on Storyfix.com.
