Publish and be Damned

What follows is a true story, those very words are one of the most often used lies in the world of fiction (kind of obvious when you think about it). Another is the idea that authors are overnight success stories and rolling in money. This story then recounts my experience of shunning traditional publishing and using the internet instead. It taught me a lot about the industry, things I already knew but chose to ignore, but where I am at now is a better place.

At the present time there is something of a dilemma - getting discovered as a novelist seems to be becoming harder than any number of similes an aspiring author could care to construct (and if finding a needle in a haystack is the best they can do, another career may better suit). Still, with two hundred thousand new books published each year they could argue that it has never been easier. And that is especially true with the new wave of self-publishing. 

Often known as vanity publishing, self-publishing used to be seen as the sole preserve of the very rich or very docile. Perhaps that is still true, but one thing has changed: you no longer need to spend a large amount of money to get a book on sale. Before I explain I want to point out that many aspiring authors will have flirted with the idea at some point in their career, even if not deliberately. Numerous adverts can be found requesting manuscripts to be sent to a new “publishing house” occasionally even on these pages (hint one: publishing is a buyers market - reputable companies have no need to advertise for submissions; they get more than enough without soliciting), in some cases anything you send the company will accept and then look for ways to screw you out of money, for instance by claiming you have to pay for an editor to fix some grammatical problems in the book, or to pay for advance typesetting design. Real publishers would never do this. 

Unscrupulous agents, again in inverted commas, will do the same thing – proclaiming how wonderful your work is and how they will easily publish it for millions after you pay their yearly members fees (hint two: much like real publishers, real agents will never ask you for money, only they will take a cut of any earnings you make, many authors believe this is worth it for the knowledge of the publishing market an agent brings). Of course there always used to be a number of legit vanity publishers, who would make no issue that this was what they were doing, arguing that many people simply wanted to create a book to share with themselves or friends, or even attempt to sell it themselves having grown tired of the frustrations of the Sisyphean nightmare that is the traditional submission/rejection cycle. 

The internet self-publishing revolution is the same thing, except that there is no need to pay upfront for copies of books that no one will ever read. The key phrase is “print on demand” (pod), with print on demand you can publish the book exactly as you would like for no charge, everything is held in computer storage, and then the only payment is made for each copy of the book that is printed. The print on demand company take a slice of this fee, but with so many facets of traditional book selling removed (no publishers, agents, stores, or van drivers to pay) they claim that the royalty you get from each sale is far higher than the usual sub-10% scrape of pie. There is nothing to stop you purchasing an ISBN number and list the work on Amazon or the like. 

One of the big players in this new industry is Lulu.com, and on the surface it seems a noble set up; however, it doesn't take a genius to work out that almost all users publishing a book will at least buy one copy of it. The upshot is that the dream of being published is now as real as death. But be forewarned here, publishing my first novel, and by first I mean third, but let's not dwell on semantics, writers seldom do, was one of the singularly most underwhelming moments of my life. I know now I was looking for the wrong things. But more of that later.

So what went wrong? Perhaps it was the one man band nature of it all. For my novel, Animals Are Automata, I played the role of writer, typesetter, editor (on weekends), publisher, cover artist, and promo writer. I use the word played deliberately. I even took a turn wearing red braces and setting the cover price, naturally over-egging my cut. Total sales so far one and peaking. Suddenly the image is of an alcoholic tramp in a soiled dinner suit, with a cymbal glued to each knee, metal arms holding out a harmonica, and bass drum bashing along in time to each pathetic step. The print on demand revolution was supposed to change the face of publishing, so what has happened to my sales?

Part of the problem is that it is now too easy to rub shoulders with the literati: you can have as many novels as Dan Brown published in no time, quicker than you can say “religious conspiracy”, no matter what the quality. Hell, I even considered publishing a book with blank pages called Snow blind for the art vote. It's just that everyone is doing it, like teenage rabbits. The process itself is surprisingly easy – a standard Word document is all you need, with behind the scenes wizardry taking care of the conversion process. And then the book is ready to preview and play 'spot the mistakes' with. A few tries at this and you have a ready to go best-seller in the making. Typical novice mistakes to look for include any of the following: leaving the page size set to A4, not starting a chapter on odd pages, font too big or small, and forgetting the copyright notice and the line “all characters are fictional”, though I am not sure if this is needed, it just seems most people on these sites include it, so why not? After all, no one is buying the this is a true story nonsense. 

There are so many books on an average site like Lulu that it is staggering. And it is hard to know exactly who is looking at these encyclopaedias of banality thinking, “hmm a book of poems about frogs, I must buy that for my aunt”. There is absolutely no guarantee of quality, in fact you may be excused in thinking it is quite the opposite – a guarantee of no quality – and I include my own work here, as I am sure it would be so much more polished with the input of a good editor and doubtless still contains mistakes somewhere (they will just make the first edition that much more valuable in the future). Also while sales of certain non-fiction books seem high, it's a struggle to find any high selling works of fiction. 

In other words, internet print on demand publishing does not appear to be the route to success: given the hit rate to number of books ratio, using a traditional publisher would probably be more likely to produce a positive result (even with the sobering Sunday Times experiment of submitting two old Booker prize winner manuscripts that were rejected in every case). If the modern industry is struggling to recognise true talent then taking that talent online does not seem to be the answer. Then again many now famous authors self-published and it did them no harm (Beatrix Potter being a topical example). I discovered that the lacking ingredient in getting anywhere in self-publishing is that another role needs adding to the long list of career types – marketing and public relations. Put simply if you don't tell anyone about your book then they aren't going to rush to buy it. Or read it online, or whatever. 

So it becomes very much the job of the individual. Lulu is no X-factor for novelists, which is an intriguing prospect – imagine standing before the judges reading some writing that isn't your own. OK wait, that wouldn't quite work. It's a difficult analogy. You couldn't go out live on a Saturday night and read out some Shakespeare with some choice additions made at the suggestion of Louis Walsh. The X-factor only works in that it is a showcase of style over substance. You can sing or you can't. Writing doesn't work the same because writing requires effort on both the reader and the writer. Lulu offers some help, but it is not revolutionary. You can pay for marketing packs, which offer things like postcards and business cards you design; alternatively, the site gives links to outside agencies who promote your book in the small press (useful perhaps for non-fiction). The final option is to use the Lulu community pages, which is a kind of Myspace for adults and lets you join groups and make friends by typing in interests. Many groups have a store front, where you can view selected titles from members of the group (e.g. UK authors). There is a vetting process for new work too, so this perhaps hints at some guarantee of quality. But just how well judged the moderators are is anyone's guess. Again the vast number of titles, even on smaller sized groups, detracts, coupled to the fear that very few members of lulu are there to buy rather than sell. 

It takes a bemusing number of skills to succeed in pod publishing, but I suppose the question is does it have any advantages over the traditional synopsis and sample chapter approach hell already discussed? One obvious upside is that you do get to see the finished product; you get to cradle your baby, albeit an uglier baby than you suspect it could have been (after all, you designed and produced it) – as if you got desperate and had children with the nearest anybody, rather than holding out for the supermodel genes you always believed you could breed with. Another benefit of publishing online could soon appear if buying trends of the general public ever change in the near future.  What the internet can offer is ever improving search technology, and maybe some time soon people will start to move away from the idea that the best way to choose a book is to walk into a retailer and pick up one of the titles near the door that has been suggested by a company exec. 

The new “Reader” by Sony is too said to revolutionise the book market, doing for it what mp3 players did for music. The strange thing is that print on demand takes writing most probably suited for penny downloads in a digitally dispensable format and lets it cross over to a more traditional format. I can't imagine something similar being available for wannabe music makers. It's probably because success in writing seems much easier than in music because you don't need musical ability, a good voice, lyrical talent, and / or good looks. Writing is unlike other art forms because it requires the least resources. If politics is show business for ugly people, then what of writing? Busking for the intellectual? I am of course only joking; it's far worse than that – guitar cases hold much more spare change than mortarboards.  

The problem is that I get the suspicion that most blog writers and print on demand self-publishers still have that dream that they will be discovered; I'll be honest, I used to too. I've now realised they, we, are all no different from the string of beautiful people who each year move to Hollywood in the hope that someone will spot them in the street and give them a role in their next film. It happens occasionally, very rarely, but the way society works these lucky ones are the ones we aspire to emulate and believe we can, because it happened to them. But what of the thousands of other equally talented individuals who ended up with nothing? Do we harbour these irrational beliefs in other areas of life? Do we leave the house each morning believing that today is the day we will be killed in a motor crash? Of course not. And if, by some fluke, an editor were to discover my book and offer me some kind of deal, so what? The way the industry works today it would be given a small advance, not supported with much marketing, sink like a stone (unless I were very very lucky), and after a few books that would be that.

The truth as I realised looking at all those never ending shelves of books in shops is that writing success, like success in other arts, is largely due to chance and being in the right place at the right time. I guess it all depends what you are looking for. Over the course of trying to sell a couple of novels and other forms of writing with limited success,  I have come to learn that the pleasurable part is in the creation, in the writing itself. And this is the hobby for me. In the same way as people spend ages watching birds, or building scale models, always for the love and never expecting to get paid. Self-publishing and self promotion offers the writer the freedom to write about whatever they choose free of constraints. Sure, immeasurable wealth would be nice, but in writing there is no way to assure that no matter how hard one works. It's an irrational career choice.

So I will continue to have intimate conversations with myself, and write them down. I do not need to have my work validated any more. It is there on its own merits, it exists, and if it sells, it sells. There is no magic formula. The most wonderful thing about print on demand is that it lets you hold a piece of your art, and display it for anyone to see. Surely no-one can begrudge that of a struggling artist. Just don't see it as a route to fame and fortune. Writing is full of alchemist's traps. There are an avalanche of people willing to take your money: self-help books, self-publishers, competitions, and critiques, all peddling the dream. If anything the internet has made this worse. The truth is you have to give and give of your time in order to have a slim chance of moderate success, and like the candle that goes out if given too much of the air it needs, this constant push to be famous can kill any pleasure you once had.