The Murky World of Self-Publishing

Ok so, I haven’t been self-publishing long and I’m new enough to still have plenty of optimism about it. I’ve written a novel and a couple of short story collections, all of which are available on Kindle, and I have had some encouraging feedback from people who have downloaded it. I haven’t made any money yet but the signs are hopeful that people might actually like me, and I take this to be a good thing.

So, I’m getting slightly annoyed at everything I read/hear/see in the so-called “proper” world of literature that defines self-publishing as the dirty end of the book trade. (N.B. the phrase “book trade” in itself has a dirty connotation, but this might be a subject for another blog post re. books as commodities and the etiquette of selling them.) In every single medium, news/arts programmes etc., even in the opinions of some published authors, there is a definite snobbery given out about people who choose to publish their own books and who spurn the big name, or even lesser known, publishing houses.

Actually, it’s more usually assumed that these publishers have already spurned you and that self-publishing was your only recourse.

Kindle publishing is looked down on and dismissed by the world and his wife (who think that anyone with half a brain can see their point) as either being inferior to the current hardback chart or just all-round bad and not worth the comparison. There are very few prizes that consider self-published fiction either, and (as far as I’m aware) no literary grants available for people writing a novel that isn’t going to be published “legitimately” and placed on a shelf somewhere. (You CAN, on the other hand, apply for grants if you’ve written a work of literary fiction – more snobbery, they don’t like genres either – and are currently struggling to write the next.)

Consensus then: self-publishing is worth nothing in the real world and is not rewarded or even considered by people with actual clout. (Unless you’re E.L. James or somebody and the people’s voice screams louder than the editor’s prejudice . . . but I’ll come back to that.) The issue now is: what’s actually wrong with it?

Ok, I’ll say it. I’m not the greatest writer in the world, nor am I the greatest artist. There was a time when I thought I could take the world by storm and everyone would think I was brilliant, but several years at university proved to me that, as a writer, my ambitions would have to be more modest. There ARE people in the world who are better at this than I am, and there ARE people who have, apparently, got some sort of professional credential to prove it.

But I’m not bad either. I designed all the covers for my books thinking that I could do a competent job. (And I’ll get onto the whys and wherefores of that in a moment too). But I was made slightly unsure by everything I read that told me the efforts I had made just wouldn’t be good enough for people.

Now, I know just as well as anybody else that people judge by covers. It’s a fact. But, despite the fact that my cover did not launch my book instantly to the top of Amazon’s “Top 100” list, I did not receive much of a backlash either. (Someone even tweeted me to say that one of my covers was beautiful, while others have seemed to really respond to the fact that I illustrate my work because, let’s face it, not a lot of writers are brave enough to try).

But this, by and large, is looked down on and often, I think, unfairly. Because, often, people don’t look at what you’ve done before they make their judgment; sometimes people will hear that you have illustrated or designed your own work and automatically assume it’s bad, others will look at examples of people who’ve done that and assume that, across the board, it must all be awful. Well, yes, it might be bad but, until you look, you don’t know do you? You can’t assume that because someone hasn’t paid £300 to a professional designer for their cover that it will obviously be terrible – the artwork MIGHT be very good and they might have great talent as an artist. You have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I was reading something the other day about how to be successful as a self-published author on Kindle. You know the kind of thing I mean, there are websites all over the place that tell you how to do it. “How I made a million with my first novel just by irritating the f**k out of people on Twitter”. And, I’m not going to lie . . . That IS how you do it. Although, personally, I think I’ll be lucky to scratch a living doing something I love. But anyway, I digress, the point was that this guy’s website was all about the do’s and don’ts of self-publishing and one of the things he was very keen to point out was to avoid the “home-made” look because it made the book look amateurish and unprofessional.

All points valid, and he’s entitled to his opinion, of course. But . . .

Ok, firstly, what does “home-made” mean? Well, to most of us, it means something that someone’s knocked together in two minutes and then shoved on the internet expecting to be praised. So, by implication, if you illustrate your own books, or design your own covers that’s bad, because it means that you will have just scribbled a little picture on a piece of paper, scanned and uploaded it and “of course” it looks crap . . . well, if you did like that, to be fair, it probably would, but that is NOT actually how I did mine and I don’t think it’s necessarily what other people do. Anyway. The website I checked very carefully warned me that “people are judgmental”, and “people don’t like things with a personal feel”. Well, that’s bullshit. People are judgmental, yes. But people DO like things that are personal and that have a unique element to them. They also like to feel like someone has thought about what they’ve done and thought about what they, the reader, might really take delight in – I hope that I’m right about this because that was what I had at the front of my mind when I wrote my novel. I think that people like to read things that come from a true place and have been created by someone who just loves what they do and wants other people to love it to.

Everything you read about self-publishing more or less tells you to feel ashamed of yourself for being precious about your work in this way. They make you feel inferior if you haven’t at least approached a professional to help you “market” your book. But, let me just clue you into something here, they do that because they’re middle men.

Now let me explain what “middle men”, as a concept, means.

It means people who don’t produce anything themselves (they don’t make the book/bind it/print it etc.), and who don’t actually have anything to do with the possibly quite brilliant thing that you’ve produced (they didn’t write it or have any of the ideas for it), but who cash in by convincing you that you need them in order to make truck-loads of money on it. In actual fact, book marketing is really easy now, with all manner of social media taking over the globe. And this has sent publishers, editors, and book marketers all over the world into a panic because they realize that they are now in danger of losing their seemingly legitimate jobs and going bust as their secret is finally revealed. We don’t need them. Yes, the traditional book business is a wonderful thing. I love it too; but it’s a dinosaur. And it has taken away so much of the power from the people who actually do the work; it’s the old master-slave thing again. They make us believe that we are the inferior, lowly people who must learn from them. But, if they know so much about how to write and create what people are, eventually, going to love then why don’t they just go and do it? Why are they making so much money “facilitating” (horrible word) the careers of other, equally intelligent and far more talented people? What do they actually do? And, most importantly of all, where would they be without us?

If you ask most writers with publishing deals (and I know a few who have said this) they will tell you that they spend half their lives chasing their publisher trying to find out why they haven’t done more to get people to buy/read their books. Writers are always complaining that they do not get enough coverage, sales don’t rise quickly enough etc. etc. And they will ask the question again and again, what are these people actually doing for me? I know tons of disillusioned writers who are now thinking of turning to self-publishing because the traditional route is doing nothing for them.

As I said, it is now easier to get a book noticed if you just do it yourself and stick to simple and slightly shameless plugging via social media. There are a few things you have to consider, of course.
You’ve got to make sure, firstly and most importantly, that what you’ve done is good.
You’ve got to ask yourself: Would you want to read this book if you hadn’t written it? Do you love it so much that you think it’s worth paying money for? And, all important question, would you buy it if you weren’t you?

All of this is a boiled down version of what publishing houses will consider on your behalf. It’s the basic principle of what they do but without all the bullshit. That’s really all you need.

And, as long as you follow the above rules, I think that any snobby comments you might get from people who don’t like you and think you’re worth nothing because no publisher would touch you with a bargepole can be dismissed and ignored.

Contrary to what anyone might try to say, I did spend a hell of a long time trying to get my first novel written and designed to a good standard. I got the idea for “Jewel” in 2004 when I’d just started university, and it has only just gone up on Kindle. It took me a long time to develop the characters, decide on the plot, design the artwork, etc. And yes, it does have a slightly home-made look and it may not be perfectly formatted, but I’m working on all that.

(One other thing I also want to answer while I’m here though – formatting on Kindle is bloody hard! And bad or imperfect formatting may not actually be the fault of the author – there are no fixed pages on Kindle so the text becomes more malleable – presumably to enable readers to navigate more easily. But that means that judging alignment and page breaks is really impossible sometimes. I really tried with mine. Just saying.)

I am now working on developing the world of “Jewel” in the hopes that it will become a series and I am almost halfway through writing the second novel. I am not telling you this to get you to sympathize with me for all the hard work I’ve done, or to be interested in me as a person, or even because I want you to go and buy my book (although that would be nice). I just want you to know that I DID work really hard to develop everything I’ve written so that I can respond, upfront, to any claims that, because I chose Kindle as my outlet, that must mean I’m no good. I spent nearly 9 years at university studying literature, I have English Lit degrees coming out of my ears, and I have seen and heard enough about what goes into the production and promotion of fiction to know more or less what I’m doing. I am not, therefore, someone who just woke up one day and assumed I could write a book and make a lot of money. I do actually know a thing or two.

So, anyway, back to the issue of publishing. It’s hard to get a proper, legitimate publishing deal from a publishing house, let alone a well-known one. Even people who are really well established struggle to be successful! And the reason for this, of course, is that publishers give very few people a chance. Most of what they get sent ends up on a slush pile and the rest is only given a brief shot at being the next Harry Potter or Salman Rushdie masterpiece before it gets junked as well.

Books don’t get sold in a fair and equal market any more – they’re either money spinners or they’re just another wodge of paper. We’d all like to go back to the days when people would pay good money to read the latest offering from a writer or poet; the days when books were not in abundance and really were special sacred things that people could appreciate and cherish – bound in leather and sold in old-fashioned shops for more money than most people could afford. But the truth is that now books are everywhere, everyone wants to write one and now everyone can. Now it is only people like Salman Rushdie who get hailed as great literary geniuses and he has had to struggle and battle to get where he is. Not only is he a keen Twitter user, he has (as I’m sure most people know) had more than his fair share of press attention over the years. I’m not saying he cashed in on this, of course, but you have to admit that being nearly murdered countless times for writing “The Satanic Verses” must have inspired quite a few more people to go out and buy it than would have done otherwise; which says nothing about Salman Rushdie, who I think of as a man of integrity, but says everything about how hard it is to achieve literary fame, or even modest success, as a writer.

My point, at this juncture, is really that publishers cash in on people who make the headlines. It’s a celebrity thing, they’re like TV producers or movie people – it’s all about how much you can bankroll just by turning up somewhere. If they have to TRY to get you noticed then they’re not interested. This is why so many published authors now have to take to Twitter anyway to get themselves out there, because they know that if THEY don’t shove their work under other people’s noses then they won’t have publishing deals for much longer.
The publishers, it seems, are not doing the work here even though they are, in fact, supposed to be doing it; and, if we want to be really precise about this, THAT’S what they’re paid for.

So, essentially, self-promotion is already something you have to resign yourself to, whether you’re published by Bloomsbury or Kindle.

So, why is self-publishing still considered so dirty and lowly and not worth anyone’s notice? Why all the snobbery? Yes, I know that it’s open to everyone. I know that a lot of it may not be good because it could conceivably be written by anyone and have absolutely nothing worthwhile about it. I get that. But that’s not why I think people want to dismiss it. I think that there is just this incredible defensiveness among the publishing world because this new phase of publishing has no place for middle men. It cuts them out. Yes, it’s here, it’s a revolution and it will destroy as much as it creates. It’s what writers all over the world have been waiting for. It’s what Douglas Adams might have been wishing for when he wrote about publishing companies being bombed and the useless third of the world’s population being sent off in a spaceship in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Nobody likes middle men. And we have finally realized that publishers are just such people. They sell something that is not theirs and make a profit for doing it and then try to convince us all that we can’t get by without them. As if they’re gods.

I may be becoming slightly maniacal now so I will draw this to a close. But you take my point though, don’t you? There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing. It’s not dirty. It won’t necessarily bottom out the world of literature to have the good stuff mixed together with the slush.

Now, I’m not claiming that MY stuff is any good. You may be reading this and thinking: “But she’s rubbish, why is she bothering to defend herself?” But I have to respond to that by saying: Let the people decide what’s good. They’re the ones who read the books, they have to be the ones to decide what they like. Fuck elitism!

That was why I drew the damn pictures, wrote the damn blurb, and am now doing my own damn marketing. (Too many damns? Maybe. Oh well!) But I did all that with a purpose because I wanted total control over what my book looked like. Yes, I admit it, I’m a control freak. I don’t trust other people. I didn’t want to hand it all over to someone else and let them decide if it was worth anything.

I hate most of the books you see on supermarket shelves because you can tell that they have been packaged and designed specifically to grab people’s attention. It’s almost like they contain some sort of subliminal message. The cover design with the eye-catching image, endorsements by other writers, stupid covers that have nothing in common with the story inside the book, blurbs that do not accurately describe the story, all of this gets on my nerves, because it’s completely impersonal, totally unnecessary, and it gives people unrealistic expectations of the books – most of which, to be quite honest, are not spectacular. So, that’s what professional marketing means. It’s misdirection. It’s illusion that gets you to buy something that might not actually have any substance. It’s not that paperbacks are any better because they’ve had all this airbrushing done on them – most of them are just as dodgy as the kind of things you might get on Kindle - it’s just that they look as though they’re worth buying.

It’s like seeing an advert for a new toy on TV; they make it look bigger and more dynamic in the ad, but when you buy it and get it home it’s just plastic and batteries. Most people are disappointed when they get the thing home and realize that they’ve fallen for some sort of hype or trick. I know. I’ve been there. Many times.

I am now going to say that, with me, what you see is what you get. And you can believe this or not, but it’s the truth. I don’t like lying to people. I don’t like to disappoint people. I don’t make things out to be something they’re not. And I’m not going to start asking people to buy my book if they don’t think they’re going to like it. I hope they will like it, but . . .

That is my promise to whatever readers I may have in the future. I, unlike a lot of people in the publishing world, am not full of shit and I don’t want to con people out of their money. And I think any other good writer in the world will, and should, tell you the same thing.

All I’m saying is that you can’t dismiss people for having something to say. If you don’t like it, ok. But don’t trash it until you’ve actually tried it. Don’t buy into other people’s prejudices either, because that’s just as bad as believing what you read in the papers.

Think for yourselves. Decide what YOU like. Embrace progress.

Thank you for reading.