Self-published? No thanks.
Why do readers value ‘real’ publishing more than self publishing?
“Not self-published but a real publisher.”
This was the penultimate line of a message from a friend whose prodigy teenager has written a book. She wondered if I had any tips or inside contacts to help her find a publisher.
Tips, I have aplenty, after almost a decade being involved in publishing one way or another. Inside contacts … none at all. I’m a self-published author.
Offended? Not at all. I was always a reader first. I know what people think about books. They think: if it’s properly published, it has credibility; if it’s been chosen, it must be good. And, by inference, if it hasn’t been, there must be something wrong with it.
I thought that too — until a few years ago — so this brief exchange got me thinking.
Reading new books is a luxury of both time and money, a pleasure for those who are paid well and have leisure time. Who has time to read more than the good books?
Why would you?
Publishing is broken
The problem is that proper ‘big’ publishing is broken. Not in a way that readers might consciously notice, but its systems are running on empty. Empty promises. Empty marketing budgets. Empty of innovation. Not completely empty, but running on fumes.
New unknown authors pop up every season, though they often plop straight back down into oblivion if they don’t make their advance. If they get one. And there’s no shortage of celebrity ‘authors’, cookbooks for those who can still afford to buy avocados and pine nuts, and children’s books. Academics writing for a wider audience are also a guaranteed sale, especially if they’ve got a strong Twitter following.
And that’s the kicker. Publishing is marketing before it is books. Big publishing has to guarantee sales or it’s a loss leader. No sales, no existence. The same, you might argue, for self-published authors, if not more so. But instead of publishers who are prepared to pour thousands into dedicated marketing streams for unknown authors, a book can live or die at source on the basis of the author’s social media presence.
There simply isn’t the money any more to make the old models of publishing work for them now. Their shareholders need that cash.
But what does that mean for readers?
Why big publishing is letting readers down
The trouble with proper publishing right now is that every error makes cuts that reduce its potential audience.
Lack of innovation. Back in 2015, big publishing apparently thought innovation meant product diversification, so it produced colouring books. They sold millions, then the craze died and so did their sales. But what would happen if they took a risk and diversified their authors? I mean really diversified (not this).
I don’t know about you, but part of the reason I read is to experience other lives, and so many readers are Black and brown, autistic, disabled, female … Big business knows that diversity is key to creativity and innovation, so why does big publishing give only lip service to that? Disruption is good for business.
You know what’s not good for business?
Unreasonable pricing. Ebooks are dead in the water. Big publishing has announced this every year for quite some time. Of course they’re dead (to them): the average price of an ebook is £7, or possibly more now. Why would you spend that money if you could get the physical book for the same price? It’s probably a one-time read on your phone, unless you have an e-reader, and even then, good luck in a year’s time remembering you even have it. You can’t pick it up, show it off, and you don’t actually own it.
Wait, what?
Digital rights management. You don’t own the ebook, just license it. In most cases you can only use it on one specific device, you can’t store it elsewhere and you definitely can’t pass it on, not even to just one person who might love it. The product is devalued in the name of security (which can be easily bypassed) and to what end?
Instead of aiming at a wide audience, flinging open the doors to the enjoyment of literature to everyone, big publishers are still rocking the hardback sales. Hardbacks are expensive, the target audience is ‘those who can afford them’, while innovation and disruptive risk taking is low. Sure, there are some amazing books being published by them, and a tiny percentage of those are diverse, but there are far, far, far more out there in the distant reaches of independent publishing.
But readers (and plenty of authors) continue to believe that only ‘proper’ publishing has value.
Let’s take a look at that.
Why do readers believe that ‘real’ published books are better than self-published books?
- Quality concerns. Many self-published books are of poor quality. Poor spelling, poor design, poorly developed stories, questionable writing skill … the list is longer than this.
- Credibility. When you’re spending your hard-earned cash and 8–12 hours of your precious free time, you want to be certain the experience will be worth it.
- Availability. You never see self-published books in Waterstones or Barnes and Noble, and certainly never in independent bookshops. At least, you think you don’t …
- Chosen by experts. (But experts in what, exactly?)
- Available in paper format, because not everyone has an e-reader, or wants to read on their phone. And anyway — price.
These are absolutely valid concerns. No-one wants to read a book they could have written better themselves. No-one has time or money to waste. But no-one should be spending nearly a tenner on an ebook they can’t pick up and smell.
So, what’s the answer?
As I’ve hinted, there’s more to publishing than just the Big Four. Small, independent publishers, amongst whom are ‘proper’ publishers who don’t always have the cash to access the big distribution networks, and self-publishers — many of whom are professional producers of high-quality books.
How can small- and self-publishing meet those very valid reader concerns?
(Hint: it already does, but its biggest issue is distribution. The second is cost.)
Quality assurance
The quality we all look for — the wonderful wordings, the precise grammar, the spelling perfection, plus the excellent story and character development, and multilayered stories — all this already exists in independent books. But to identify the best books, readers have to be able to discern quality using markers that aren’t wedded to the ability of the publisher to distribute via the major networks.
Just because you can’t get a book from Waterstones doesn’t mean it’s poor quality. It could be:
- the publisher didn’t pay Gardners a premium to ship the books, or
- they didn’t sell enough books through IngramSpark to be spotted by high street bookstores, or
- they didn’t offer a large enough discount to make money for bricks-and-mortar booksellers, or
- they didn’t set up an imprint (frankly, Waterstones won’t carry obviously self-published books at all, no matter how many thousands of units are sold).
None of this has any relationship with quality.
Just because the book is only available in ebook format doesn’t make it poor quality. It means the publisher can’t afford — or chooses not — to do a print run of a thousand or more, and didn’t want to do expensive print on demand.
(Print on demand (POD) is a fantastic technological opportunity allowing authors to make paper books available, but it often makes the books outrageously expensive. Like £12–£16 for a book that in our heads should be valued at £8.99).
So for readers like you and me, quality has to be discerned quickly, prior to buying, and the cover isn’t always the help you might expect.
The best way to identify quality — and therefore avoid buying a mistake — is to read a sample. Online bookshops often provide a sample, and, if I’m honest, I won’t buy from them if there isn’t one. As readers, we have to be ruthless. I have a first page policy. If I see even one red flag (a typo, a clunky sentence, grammatical issues) I’m usually done. I often wonder if my own novel would pass muster with me!
Credibility and availability
Where on earth can you find independently published books and ebooks? The obvious answer is Amazon, but … let’s face it, that place is a melee of retail. It’s hardly a bookshop. Just a place you can buy books, despite its early origins. Most small publishers and authors do use Amazon. It supports the creation of print-on-demand books, and provides a relatively easy upload / download system for the sale of ebooks.
But if we’re talking about credibility as well as availability, there are some major issues with buying books on Amazon. Don’t ask me about the scammy Instant Pot recipe book I bought there, with its 600 recipes directly stolen from the internet without even the rudiments of book design between its leaves. Shameful — and I’m embarrassed I fell for it.
Many small publishers don’t offer direct sales from their own sites, but those that do are well worth discovering. Professionals, like Louise Walters Books, provide not only ebook and print versions of their lovingly edited, nurtured books, but they are also in charge of their own special offers and the majority of them are DRM-free.
Ebook distribution sites like DriveThruFiction and Smashwords are also useful, especially if you’re a voracious reader. Even Kobo. You get samples, information to help you figure out what you’re buying, and the prices are amazing.
If you do have an e-reader, or you are able to read on a phone or tablet, the world’s your shellfish when it comes to independent ebooks. You can find an absolute tonne of varied bookshops, publishers, and author sites on this ebookshop list. All DRM-free, if you prefer to own your ebooks outright, and many sell print versions too.
But … there’s still an issue.
How do you know these bookshops will be any good?
Seriously, how much time could be wasted searching through countless bookshops only to end up on Amazon? I know this pain, and I’ve made some bloopers.
All you can do is use them and learn which bookshops and publishers carry books you’ll like. While aggregate sites like bookshop.org seem more convenient, touting themselves as supporting independent bookshops, there are worrying signs that they could be damaging the indie book business, not improving it.
But lots of bookshop sites are lovely, so it’s not too much of a drag if you keep a bookmark list of your favourites in your browser!
Pen and Sword Press, for example, have been around for decades and publish historical non-fiction, both print and ebooks.
Fahrenheit Press publish crime noir, and give you a free ebook download with every print book bought.
Queen of Swords Press and Fox Spirit Books cross the genre lines with diverse, exciting fiction designed to release you from banality. These both offer print and ebooks.
Then you’ve got independent author sites, like Toby Weston’s, where you can find his Singularity’s Children series and even download the first for free.
These are professionals, they’re grafters, their products are beautiful, well-written, reasonably priced (especially the ebooks), and many of those books are well outside the limited scope of the Big Four.
Why I’m invested in independent publishing
Apart from the obvious choices I’ve made in my alternative career, I’m passionate about independent publishing because I love reading. I want those weird worlds, the tenacious viewpoints, the multitude of attitude of which they speak. The lived experiences, the uncomfortable themes. Genre-crossing works of wisdom that mostly don’t come from the pen of a well-heeled white man with a housekeeper wife.
These are books that exist at least partly because of the democratisation of publishing. Because big publishing didn’t get to say no to them. Because the authors have an unstoppable passion for what they have to say.
To be a high-quality, professional independent author or publisher means pushing back against social norms. Authors and publishers who choose to publish this way fund their own editing, their own book design, their own covers. They front all their own marketing, while they keep writing and their lives afloat. But this isn’t a pity party.
The point is, with all of that keen effort made, and the accompanying skills and knowledge involved— not to mention the writing itself — the idea that their work is poorer quality or less credible than novels produced by monopolised publishing conglomerates with merged names is ludicrous. Big publishing brands itself as ‘better than’, and because their marketing is great, we believe them.
The independent publishing model is sustainable, even if the profits aren’t what they should be. With no shareholders skimming the cream and reducing the creative opportunities, readers get more for their money. Authors often take home more money per sale than they would get from a big publisher. And that’s good for us as readers, because authors who are paid well can keep writing and creating. The more of us who buy independently, the bigger the opportunities for us all — readers, as well as independent authors and publishers.
So, we have to ask ourselves: do we want to live in a sustainable, creative, diverse world, or are we happy just reading what corporations decide will sell?
