Today's guest blogger is Adrian Slatcher. He has written poetry, short stories and longer fiction, as well as occasionally working with cartoons, music and sound art. Adrian also has a long running blog
Art of Fiction.
Self Publishing
Not that I wanted to start a trend or anything, but I’ve always self-published. Show me a writer who hasn’t and I’ll probably show you a writer with plenty of contacts in the publishing industry. For the rest of us, it’s sometimes useful, sometimes necessary, sometimes even desirable.
Yet I’ve never paid anyone - other than a printer - to “publish” anything I’ve written. The vanity publishing scams are still there, fees paid up front for services that never materialise, or agreeing to pay a “marketing fee” of several hundred pounds in return for the book being published. If you’re in any doubt of what is legit and what isn’t then Google the company’s name and the words “vanity publishing” and you’ll soon get a sense of who is providing a genuine service to authors, and who is just peddling snake-oil.
Self-publishing might not be that far away from vanity publishing, but then again, vanity publishing is sometimes not that far away from proper publishing – there have been plenty of fly-by-night presses over the years who writers have regretted signing with. Just read Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin for instance.
But these caveats aside, there’s something of a self-publishing renaissance going on, and it’s mostly to the good. Just as desktop computers and DTP software made it possible for any to put together a reasonable magazine, full service print-on-demand companies such as
Lulu and
Blurb have made short-run book publishing easier than ever – and that’s without thinking about web based publishing or e-books.
As I said, I’ve always self-published: handmade comics as a kid, photocopied collections of poems and stories handed round to friends, and, more recently, print-on-demand books as a way of archiving my works. And yes, I could easily get an ISBN, create an e-book or any of the other things that would make my work look indistinguishable from published books. Yet, I’ve shied away from this for a number of reasons. After all, I’m not a designer, a photographer, a proof reader or an editor. I’m not a marketeer or a distributor; a salesman or a critic. Bits of all of these things, of course. Yet, when it came to publishing a small book of my poems earlier this year, it was an approach from established publisher,
Salt, that led me to put the book, Playing Solitaire for Money, together. They had the ISBN, the designer, the distribution etc etc. Yet, I was still proof reader, wrote the cover blurb, supplied the author photo, and will be marketing the books (and selling them) when I read at the Didsbury Arts Festival in September.
What I’m trying to say is that whereas once there’d have been a snobbishness about the self-published work, (and if anyone asks for money to publish your book, walk away quickly, though not before you’ve Googled them and the term “Vanity Publishing”), it’s harder to know where the fault lines lie these days. Ezra Pound paid for an early collection to be produced, friends of George Herbert collected his poetry together after he died, and Emily Dickinson carefully tied her poems together in little chapbooks. Yet it’s not just niche interests like family histories, and debut poetry collections that benefit from self-publishing. Writers of technical manuals, business books and fast moving reference works find the speed-to-market of self publishing far better than what many traditional publishers provide; whilst if you want to create a beautiful artefact – a high end limited edition or art book – then self-publishing can give you total control over the whole process.
The old reasons not to self-publish: that it won’t be taken seriously, or won’t be reviewed, can just as easily be applied to the majority of regularly published books. What I’d add, is that whichever route you take, don’t take it on your own. Form your own press, get a proper designer in, make sure you have a good photograph – or work with someone else, maybe a magazine that’s published you, or a collective of other writers. And, if you feel there’s a market for it, don’t think that print-on-demand is the only way forward, as many printers will be more than happy to quote for short-runs. Just make sure you have the skills needed to make the final product as professional as your writing deserves.
And just as Farmers’ Markets have sprung up in our towns and cities, independent book fairs are becoming more commonplace. In London there is
The Openned Book Table, whilst in Manchester we have the independent book market in St. Ann’s Square, the zine library at Islington Mill, and coming soon, the
Piccadilly Self Publishing Fair.
But I feel the argument about “self publishing” is moving on as we speak – for surely the Ebook will offer the ultimate opportunity for the self-published author? Ironically, I’m not sure it does – as yet . For books, even self published ones, still have value, there’s still a business model if you want to put the work in to promote them. Ebooks are another matter – unless you’re Stephen King or similarly well known, who will pay? And the skills you need to format an Ebook in the various formats required by iPad, Sony Reader and Kindle, never mind distributing the work, might tax even the most technologically savvy writer. However websites like
Smashwords are starting to do the heavy lifting for you.
My own experience last year with another site,
Feedbooks, was an illuminating one. Although my novella was downloaded over 500 times, the lack of social networking capabilities of the site, and the lack of an author profile there, meant that I never knew who those people were – or who read it – and I’ve since removed it from the site. Formatting a PDF for
Lulu.com whether for print or download has often been a frustrating and time-consuming experience. If you want to develop an iPhone App, put aside several thousand pounds to help you do so.
Yet, lets look on the bright side – there’s many more people with portable e-reading devices on the bus and on the beach. It does seem to me that though we might not want to read “War and Peace” on our iPad, there may well be room for the short story, the novella, the small poetry collection. As authors, without the restrictions of a big publisher behind us, we should at least try. As readers, it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell whether a book is published by a major publisher, a small press or someone’s mate. The gatekeepers are still there – perhaps are still necessary – but we no longer have to accept their legitimacy. If you’ve got something worth publishing, then why not give it a try? The self-published volume shows you care about your writing far more than the dogeared manuscript in the bottom drawer, after all.
Adrian's new book
Playing Solitaire for Money is available to buy now and you can catch Adrian reading with James Davies on Thursday 30 September at Pizza Express during the
Didsbury Arts Festival.
