Self publish?

[monty]

My uncle has told everyone in the family that he will be happy to pay to publish my book when it's done. Putting aside the pressure this causes, is this a good idea? Am I selfish to want to try to get it published for real first? I'd like to have him hire me an agent instead but thought I'd get feedback first. Much appreciated.

 

[Ghost]

Personally, I'm leery of this sort of thing. Friends/family + business venture = headache. Okay, so that's not real math, but it gets my point across. You have to think very carefully about it. Also, when you self-publish, I assume you have to promote the novel yourself or hire someone to do that. You'd be doing a lot of the legwork yourself or paying extra for someone else to do it. I don't think it's selfish to submit to publishers first.

You don't hire a literary agent. Generally, you submit queries and samples to them after deciding which ones would be best for your novel. They offer representation if they've like your work and think they can sell it. They don't work for you. If an agent asks you for payment, run the other away.

Ahem, shouldn't this be in the publishing subforum?

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

The money flows to the writer, or should. When you pay to publish your own book, (up till recently) it is called a vanity press. People who don't feel like putting in the time, trouble, and effort to learn how to write well enough to get a publisher to pay for it, bypasses this part and pays some company to make it printable for them. All for a fee of course.

There are MILLIONS of vanity novels out there. MILLIONS! The other sad fact is they usually cost more than books from a standard publisher.

My way of thinking might be considered old, but it's like anything else, time and money. The cost of a book is relatively trivial. When you compare it to the time invested in reading it. The readers time is far more valuable than the book cost. I've had this discussion in the past, and I've heard most of the arguments.

Publishers are the thing of the past. I hope not. These deranged people sift through thousands of badly written unpolished drivel day after day to find the stories that I might actually want to read. Yes, they do it for money, and I'm thrilled there are people who are willing to go through all that agony to save me from having to do it.

In comes vanity press, and now amazon direct to kindle (for a fee) publishing. No one sifts through the crap to find things worth reading, no one. Supposedly, there are supposed to be new sources of people that will sift through all the crud and tell me which ones are worth the money, for free...well, for the reputation. Right. Someone is going to buy a copy of all these books so they can read and review them, all for the joy of having a reputation that is just like....a publisher?

I love fantasy books, but I do know that fantasy isn't a part of this reality, no matter how much we might want it to be. So, I will believe a publisher will try and find the best books available to sell it to me and others like me. I don't buy the reputation crap that someone will pay to read garbage when publishers have people begging them to read their garbage.

Am I saying your writing is garbage, no, I haven't read it. But here are a few statistics...85% of all submissions get a form rejection letter. Most for things that the writer couldn't take the time to do...like spell check, or lack of any sense of grammar, plain poor writing, ect. Things most of us can spot right away. 10% get a rejection with some type of comment on why it was rejected. These are the ones that we actually pretty good, but not good enough to convince the editor someone would pay for it. That leaves the last 5% which of which some will be bought, and others rejected for business reasons, not what the publisher normally publishes, or they have met the max number of books they can publish for a certain time frame...and probably a number of other reasons.

So, you can self publish, but the question is this, have you put in the effort for your writing to be worth my time to read it. This is a fact to think about. If I start to read your book, and put it down because it isn't that good, you have no chance of getting me to bother with anything you write ever again. With all the available books to read, any author only gets one chance to get me to trust them, one. Blow it the first time, you've blown it forever.

For those that disagree with me, that's fine, since it is unlikely you will get my time, or money. Unless you get a real publisher to publish your book.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

So, you can self publish, but the question is this, have you put in the effort for your writing to be worth my time to read it. This is a fact to think about. If I start to read your book, and put it down because it isn't that good, you have no chance of getting me to bother with anything you write ever again. With all the available books to read, any author only gets one chance to get me to trust them, one. Blow it the first time, you've blown it forever.

For those that disagree with me, that's fine, since it is unlikely you will get my time, or money. Unless you get a real publisher to publish your book.

And this, of course, should be the goal of all self publishers. If you self publish a book, the bar you should set for yourself is to produce something good enough that the average readers *can't tell the difference* between your book and a NYC-produced book. Your target, as a professional, should be to produce professional quality work.

Right now, over half the top 200 ebooks in every genre I've scanned are self published. Most of those top sellers are virtually indistinguishable from anything NYC produces. They are well written, have good covers, excellent editing, good blurbs, etc. They are professionally published books. Self publishing is no excuse for shoddy craftsmanship.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

I did a bit of looking, and most of those I found were 99 cents. Not having read them, and a dollar is worth so little these days I could buy dozen and not think twice. The question then becomes, are they selling because they are good, or that they are good enough at the price? I've bought quite a few things that weren't really good, but were good enough for the cheap price. The difference is most of the things I have sacrificed quality for cost on, aren't things I spend a lot of time with.

Place all those dollar books at the $8 or more, I suspect they wouldn't be selling as well.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

I think price helps. I doubt price is the only factor, though. Let's put it this way... You and I both sell coffee. You run a Starbucks, sell coffee for $5 a cup. It's good stuff, really good. You get a lot of customers coming in for the top end coffee.

I open a Dunkin Dougnuts down the street. Coffee is pretty darned good, but about $3 a cup. Not as upscale a look to the place, but still "nice". I get customers too.

John Doe opens a discount coffee shop down the street. He's selling coffee at 99 cents a cup. Does he make sales?

Depends. If his coffee is truly terrible, people are going to come to buy from you or I even though we cost more. Very few people will buy bad coffee just because it's a buck or two cheaper. If his coffee is decent, he'll make some good sales.

But if his coffee is as good as your and my coffee, he will in the end outsell us both. Not at first - because we have name brands behind our stores. But over time, as word spreads, he'll outsell both of us if he even matches us for quality.

Novels are entertainment. They have to entertain. If a 99 cent novel entertains as well as an $8 novel does, it will in the long run almost certainly outsell the $8 novel. If the novel doesn't entertain as well as the $8 novel, I'm not so sure it would.

Remember, we live in a world now where almost everyone reads sample chapters before buying an ebook, and where all ebooks are *returnable* for a full refund over the first five days or so. "Good enough" is probably selling. Bad books are unlikely to do so in any serious numbers.


(PS: Look deeper. A large and growing number of indie books in the top ranks are selling in the $2.99-5.99 range. You have to know the business names they use, as these higher priced books tend to have an actual business name listed as publisher. If you don't know the names, then they really look like any other small press publication.)

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

I can agree with that. I think my problem is the time factor. While the first couple chapters might be good, is it sustained throughout. Being a writer I know how difficult it can be to keep it going through the middle.

For me time is a premium, I don't have enough of it, and so at $20 a book, my time is more valuable than the book price. Maybe I'm in a minority, but how much is 12 plus hours of my life reading a novel worth? To me, quite a bit. So, good enough isn't really good enough for me. I want good to excellent, because if I invest my time into it, I want it to be worth it.

I've seen many people who like writing I find lacking. So do I trust the masses who might be ok with writing that they think is good, but isn't really, or an editor who makes a living at it?

Honestly, I'd rather spend a few extra dollars to pay for that editor and improve the chances the book will be worth my time.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

Does that editor always make a difference, though?

I bought a copy of "Out of the Dark" by David Weber. Now, I love his Honor Harrington work. But (no spoilers) OOTD was just poorly written fiction. I was honestly appalled that it was as bad as it was. I've never seen him produce work that dissatisfying.

Orson Scott Card - AMAZING author, multiple major award winner. Wrote "Empire" which, while sort of interesting in premise, was (IMHO) one of the worst bits of fiction I've ever seen the man's name on.

How did those little gems make it through the editorial gatekeepers, but B.V.Larson's fun adventure SF and Fantasy were kept out? Larson's work could have used an extra editorial pass in a few spots, mind (his science is so bad in a couple of spots in his SF that I had to grit my teeth a bit), but the stories are fun to read. And he's selling thousands of books a month, on his own. No shock there. I follow two of his three series, and was literally buying the next book within minutes of finishing the last.

Then there's books like Twilight (haven't read it myself) - which is on the top 10 most beloved books on Goodreads, and also on the top ten most hated. Really? How can a book be both? The answer is taste: it varies. You might love a book that I can't stand, and vice versa.

Honestly, I don't trust anyone's opinion over my own. If I see a book that looks interesting, I check out the sample. If I like the sample, I try a book - most indies offer at least one book for 99 cents or $2.99 specifically as a "check me out" trial book. If I hate it, at least I'm only out a buck or three. If I hate the latest Ace or Dell or Baen or whatever, I'm out $8-25.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

Hehehe, I actually liked Out of the Dark...well, I can't say the ending was what I would have done, but I enjoyed the tale. I also found Empire to be a nice change from the never ending run of Ender books.

How do some books get through a publisher in ways that none of us could? Simple, name recognition. Authors that sell get more leniency. Let's twist around and go with the self published. Someone does an amazing novel, maybe two, then since they have a following, start their self righteous novel to convince the world of whatever it is they believe in. There isn't even a chance for an editor to question it. Yes, not all books put out by publishers are what I want to read, but they are professionals that are in a business of selling books. If they get a bad reputation for making crappy books that don't sell...well, they go out of business.

Twilight...I think most people who aren't into teen romance want to upchuck at even the thought of them.

Of the last several books I've picked up (I probably have a good hundred laying around waiting to be read), one I finally put back on the shelf. It wasn't badly written, and it had excellent reviews, but moved about as fast as a snail and was too much into the details of a society I didn't find that fascinating. Obviously people loved it, I'm happy for them. I could feel cheated out of the money I paid for it, but it comes down to the reality it isn't quite what I am interested in. I'll just grab another one that grabs my attention off the shelf.

The nice thing for me is that I'm not that hard to please, assuming the writing is good. If the writer feels the words should be the source of attention, I wont get far before I will get rid of it. All the editor does is ensure that most of what ends up on my bookshelf might be worth my time.

Years ago one of the people in a writing group I was in thought her writing was the greatest thing ever. It wasn't. We were all told how ignorant we were because we actually found fault in the bland writing and cliched story. I think she was the only person to actually get banned from that site...that I knew of. Anyways, she went and created her own publishing company, of which the only thing it's published is her writing, which according to the reviews on amazon is "just like Harry Potter."

That's the kind of thing that I'd rather not bother with. No editor would have bought her book, and every year or so when I go check, not many people have either.

I can accept some books I won't like. Overall, there are a good 500 plus I've enjoyed quite a lot.

The main difference is this, I would rather trust an editor who's livelihood depends on making sound buying decisions, over someone who might not have the first clue what a story is. Of the two, I'd rather trust the one who has a lot riding on their choices, which end up being the things that are my choices. Are the perfect? No, but they know their business. The same can't be said for self publishing.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

The main difference is this, I would rather trust an editor who's livelihood depends on making sound buying decisions, over someone who might not have the first clue what a story is. Of the two, I'd rather trust the one who has a lot riding on their choices, which end up being the things that are my choices. Are the perfect? No, but they know their business. The same can't be said for self publishing.

That's a perfectly fine perspective -- let an "expert" do the work of filtering the good from the bad, so that you don't have to. The editor adds value by winnowing the wheat from the chaff in advance.

Except editors don't always run the same filter that you would. Their filter acts on whether a work will sell to a wide enough audience, not whether you in particular will enjoy it. Those two things correlate to some degree, but not perfectly. But okay, that's fine, no one expects some random editor to have the same taste you do, and they are working for a business, after all.

But there's another problem: If everything is filtered through the small number of gatekeepers out there, it backs up. Not everything can get through; of the set S (can you tell I love set theory?) of all works written by authors, a subset of S called E are submitted to editors, and a subset of E called A are published. It's not that the rest of E (or S) aren't worth reading; editors just don't have enough time to publish everything that's sellable. They have to pick the ones that will sell the best.

Self-publishing helps remedy this by allowing other works to reach an audience. The problem, as you point out, is that there isn't any filtering... yet. That'll evolve. (It already is.) If an author, through hard work, gets some people to read his work -- and it's any good -- then word of mouth will spread, and maybe some of those readers have blogs/review sites of their own, and post their work, and eventually the good stuff bubbles up to the top.

Don't conflate "sellable" with "what I enjoy." I find Stephenie Meyer's writing to be awful, and so do a lot of people -- but it sells. Sellability and things I enjoy (or things that any particular person enjoys; remember, there's no such thing as objectively good writing) have a nonzero correlation but they are not equivalent.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that you in particular start picking things at random from the vast set of self-published works. Clearly you aren't interested in doing that and I'm not going to try to convince you that you should be. But professional editors aren't the only ones who can detect good writing. If several people you know, who share your taste, like a book, then it's not unreasonable to maybe give that book a shot. (Or an independent reviewer, or if it has loads of 5-star reviews on Amazon, etc.).

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

Duplicate. Can be removed

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

Not everything can get through

I believe that is the point.

But professional editors aren't the only ones who can detect good writing.

This is true, and they've been teaching it to editors for a long time. Every reader figures out what they like and don't like, and speak with their wallet. Then editors follow the trends of the readers. As much as I detest the entire teen vampire/werewolf/horror creature made into sappy love idols, they sell. I don't buy them, just like I don't buy mysteries or general drama. They don't fit in my taste range. Doesn't mean they don't deserve to be in books, I'm not in the target audience for the book.

I do have people that I trust when they recommend books, but pretty much all of them have the same view I have. If you can't make it good enough to get someone to buy it, then it might not be worth buying. I didn't say there aren't exceptions, and the previous book I mentioned by the self centered woman who published her own book has five stars...or did the last I checked. The handful of reviews by her friends and relatives I'm sure helped that happen. Looking at some of them I'd swear she wrote half of them herself. So, at a few hundred reviews I might start to believe, but lately with the blog/twitter/facebook trends, how hard could it be for someone with a few thousand followers to convince them to swamp amazon and make them sound like the greatest writer that ever lived?

I guess if I had absolutely nothing else to do but browse the internet hoping to find the diamond buried under the pile of manure, then I might not think this way. As it is, the 100 plus books I've read by tor give me a good bit more respect for them then the average blogger. The fact they've been doing it for longer than I've been alive, says they have somewhat of a clue which books people want to read.

I also find those that are planning the self publishing route without ever trying to submit their works to publishers are often holding the biggest banner and touting how great self publishing is.

Here are some reasons why I find paid publishers valueable:
The shocking truth about the slush pile
Confessions of a slush pile reader
Tor, with images

I could add dozens more easily, a nice google search is all you need.

One of them I didn't link to but found interesting is that the article mentioned that self publishing is becoming the new slush pile. Which I think I agree with. So, the simple reality is that do you try the slush pile of the publishers, or the slush pile at amazon? I think the point that burning a reader once can loose you a reader forever is only really true for the self publishing. Editors tend not to look at who wrote it for most except the well established authors, and only care about the current story in front of their nose.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

I think that "just like Harry Potter" person you mentioned is a good example, Darkstorm. You said not many people have bought her work. That's not really a shock to me - bad books don't sell. Upload as much bad fiction as you want, it's NOT going to sell.

The good news is, bad indie fiction probably isn't a career ender, either, because it doesn't sell. It won't sell, which means it won't rise in the lists, which means most people will never see it. So later, when you (if you) gain experience and write something good, the bad book won't really have any name recognition and won't bring you down. Why? Because nobody read it, anyway. The tiny handful of people who might have are *probably* irrelevant in the sea of hundreds of millions of people buying books.

Um, might want to take down the bad book that never sold when you do finally get one which does, however.

On the flip side, if you write a stinker and it sells to NYC for some reason - OR you write a decent book that gets orphaned and therefore the print run is tiny, it gets zero marketing, it gets an awful cover, or any of myriad other things happen which make the book simply not sell - your NYC career is going to be in tatters. I've heard more stories than I can count about writers who simply had *bad luck* with one book and it ended their career. Others - much fewer in number - who fought their way back to a solid career after a crash like that. One ISBN with horrible sales attached to your name, and you may be writing under a pen name for the rest of your life, if you stick with traditional publishers. Or not - some writers come back from that OK. But it's tough.

Probably can be tough as an indie, too. But - at least there's no gatekeeper saying that since you wrote one book which didn't sell well enough that they won't buy any more of your books.

 

[MichaelSullivan]

My uncle has told everyone in the family that he will be happy to pay to publish my book when it's done. Putting aside the pressure this causes, is this a good idea? Am I selfish to want to try to get it published for real first? I'd like to have him hire me an agent instead but thought I'd get feedback first. Much appreciated.

I think in the "old" days self-publishing was not considered "real" but nowadays that has changed...so much so that many noted authors are jumping from traditional to self publishing (Michael Stakpole, Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, Bob Mayer, K.W. Jeter, Blake Crouch) and many of these people are saying people shouldn't sign with a publisher because they have more freedom and can do better financially on their own.

That being said, it seems like your goal is to be traditonally published...and there are multiple ways to accomplish this goal: Use a small press that generally does not require an agent, get an agent and have them persue a big-press deal, or self-publish. I've recently been signed by a big-six publisher BECAUSE I self-published and built an audience. So one does not preclude the other.

 

[MichaelSullivan]

The money flows to the writer, or should. When you pay to publish your own book, (up till recently) it is called a vanity press.

Yes money is a primary motivation for many writers (although not all). But self-publishing is like any entrepreneurial endevour - you make upfront investments in the hopes of receiving 100% of the profit. In the old days this investment could be substantial - now a days is could be little or even nothing. When I self published my books my total expense was $50 (for ISBN and Createspace setup fees). If you do ebooks the expense is $0 as you don't need an ISBN and the major venues don't have any setup fee.

People who don't feel like putting in the time, trouble, and effort to learn how to write well enough to get a publisher to pay for it, bypasses this part and pays some company to make it printable for them. All for a fee of course.

What makes you think that people who self publish don't put in time, trouble and effort to write well? I wouldn't say that description fits me or most of the self-published authors I know. Many self-publish because they want 100% control and a larger percentage of the money made per book.

There are MILLIONS of vanity novels out there. MILLIONS! The other sad fact is they usually cost more than books from a standard publisher.

Not true. In fact in ebooks, most self-published people are using low-price points to beat the publishers on volume and gain audiences. If you are talking about print...yes a POD book costs more than a large press run but there is enough room in the margin to price competitively and still make good money. When I sold my trade paperbacks the prices were $12.95 which was the same as those from major publishers and I made about $3.50 when sold from Amazon, $6.50 when sold from my site, an $0.90 when sold through a bookstore.

My way of thinking might be considered old, but it's like anything else, time and money. The cost of a book is relatively trivial. When you compare it to the time invested in reading it. The readers time is far more valuable than the book cost. I've had this discussion in the past, and I've heard most of the arguments.

Times have changed - and some of what you are saying applied several years ago. You are expressing a bias toward traditional and that is fine...and valid. I'm not trying to dispute that as a viable option because it is (heck I'm traditionally published) I just want to clarify some of the changes that have gone on. And I agree with you readers value their time more than the cost of the book so whatever path you choose you must put out the best book possible.

Publishers are the thing of the past. I hope not. These deranged people sift through thousands of badly written unpolished drivel day after day to find the stories that I might actually want to read. Yes, they do it for money, and I'm thrilled there are people who are willing to go through all that agony to save me from having to do it.

Publisher's are not a thing of the past...but they also do they sift through tousands of badly written unpolished trival. That responsibility is now in the hands of the agents as most major publishers won't take unsolicited manuscript submissions. If we are talking about small-presses then yes your assertion is 100% accurate. Because publishers have agents doing the slush work, their job becomes largely one of profit-loss risk analysis and multiple departments have to sign off on a book before it is acquired. In the past all that was needed is "being loved" by the acquisitions editor...nowadays marketing and sales will have to sign off as well.

In comes vanity press, and now amazon direct to kindle (for a fee) publishing. No one sifts through the crap to find things worth reading, no one. Supposedly, there are supposed to be new sources of people that will sift through all the crud and tell me which ones are worth the money, for free...well, for the reputation. Right. Someone is going to buy a copy of all these books so they can read and review them, all for the joy of having a reputation that is just like....a publisher?

There is no fee for publishing on kindle, or nook, or smashwords, or ibookstore. Most people use sampling and read reviews to help them decide. If they buy and they don't like they can always return the books. I'm not aware of "the sources" that read/validate books...although I'd be interested to learn more.

I love fantasy books, but I do know that fantasy isn't a part of this reality, no matter how much we might want it to be. So, I will believe a publisher will try and find the best books available to sell it to me and others like me. I don't buy the reputation crap that someone will pay to read garbage when publishers have people begging them to read their garbage.

I agree with the first part, but not sure I understand the last sentence.

Am I saying your writing is garbage, no, I haven't read it. But here are a few statistics...85% of all submissions get a form rejection letter. Most for things that the writer couldn't take the time to do...like spell check, or lack of any sense of grammar, plain poor writing, ect. Things most of us can spot right away. 10% get a rejection with some type of comment on why it was rejected. These are the ones that we actually pretty good, but not good enough to convince the editor someone would pay for it. That leaves the last 5% which of which some will be bought, and others rejected for business reasons, not what the publisher normally publishes, or they have met the max number of books they can publish for a certain time frame...and probably a number of other reasons.

I think your numbers are actually pretty generous (assuming agent/small press) doing the slush-pile reading. I think it is much less than 1% that will ever make it to the stage of being seriously considered and probably 20% of that 1% that will get a contract offer. But here's the thing...you are assuming that the rejects are done because they are "unworthy" (and many of them are) but...the there are thousands of good and even great novels that are turned down, not because they don't deserve to be "out there" but because there is only so much bandwidth. Publishers have a finite number of slots in the publishing calendar each quarter and so many very good books will be passed over because there is no slot available.

So, you can self publish, but the question is this, have you put in the effort for your writing to be worth my time to read it. This is a fact to think about. If I start to read your book, and put it down because it isn't that good, you have no chance of getting me to bother with anything you write ever again. With all the available books to read, any author only gets one chance to get me to trust them, one. Blow it the first time, you've blown it forever.

We are in complete agreement that you have to put in time and effort to make the book worthy of an audience. And also in violent agreement that if you blow it you'll not get another chance at bat. Where we differ, is the assumption that if is self-published it CAN'T be good.
For those that disagree with me, that's fine, since it is unlikely you will get my time, or money. Unless you get a real publisher to publish your book.[/QUOTE]

 

[MichaelSullivan]

You don't hire a literary agent. Generally, you submit queries and samples to them after deciding which ones would be best for your novel. They offer representation if they've like your work and think they can sell it. They don't work for you. If an agent asks you for payment, run the other away.

I agree with almost everything you say...except the part about agent's not working for you. Yes they choose who they wish to represent but once selected they absolutely work for you. And you need to think about it that way. Personally, I would not sign an agency agreemnt I would write an agreement and ask the agent to sign it. The "business terms" will be essentially the same but you should be in a position where you are in control...in other words able to fire them if they are not performing etc.

 

[MichaelSullivan]

I did a bit of looking, and most of those I found were 99 cents. Not having read them, and a dollar is worth so little these days I could buy dozen and not think twice. The question then becomes, are they selling because they are good, or that they are good enough at the price? I've bought quite a few things that weren't really good, but were good enough for the cheap price. The difference is most of the things I have sacrificed quality for cost on, aren't things I spend a lot of time with.

The answer is both...they are cheap and they are really good. There are hundreds of thousands of books at $0.99 and even free that don't sell well. For any book to make the best-selling list they are doing so primarily because of word-of-mouth sales. People don't recommend junk to others.

Place all those dollar books at the $8 or more, I suspect they wouldn't be selling as well.[/QUOTE]

 

[MichaelSullivan]

(PS: Look deeper. A large and growing number of indie books in the top ranks are selling in the $2.99-5.99 range. You have to know the business names they use, as these higher priced books tend to have an actual business name listed as publisher. If you don't know the names, then they really look like any other small press publication.)

Back when I was self-published I definitely resembled that remark. I was on the tops on Amazon in: Historical Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, and Fantasy. Also on the "Mover's and Shaker's" List and sold for $4.95 (and one of my books was $6.95)

 

[MichaelSullivan]

That's a perfectly fine perspective -- let an "expert" do the work of filtering the good from the bad, so that you don't have to. The editor adds value by winnowing the wheat from the chaff in advance.

Except editors don't always run the same filter that you would. Their filter acts on whether a work will sell to a wide enough audience, not whether you in particular will enjoy it. Those two things correlate to some degree, but not perfectly. But okay, that's fine, no one expects some random editor to have the same taste you do, and they are working for a business, after all.

But there's another problem: If everything is filtered through the small number of gatekeepers out there, it backs up. Not everything can get through; of the set S (can you tell I love set theory?) of all works written by authors, a subset of S called E are submitted to editors, and a subset of E called A are published. It's not that the rest of E (or S) aren't worth reading; editors just don't have enough time to publish everything that's sellable. They have to pick the ones that will sell the best.

Self-publishing helps remedy this by allowing other works to reach an audience. The problem, as you point out, is that there isn't any filtering... yet. That'll evolve. (It already is.) If an author, through hard work, gets some people to read his work -- and it's any good -- then word of mouth will spread, and maybe some of those readers have blogs/review sites of their own, and post their work, and eventually the good stuff bubbles up to the top.

Don't conflate "sellable" with "what I enjoy." I find Stephenie Meyer's writing to be awful, and so do a lot of people -- but it sells. Sellability and things I enjoy (or things that any particular person enjoys; remember, there's no such thing as objectively good writing) have a nonzero correlation but they are not equivalent.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that you in particular start picking things at random from the vast set of self-published works. Clearly you aren't interested in doing that and I'm not going to try to convince you that you should be. But professional editors aren't the only ones who can detect good writing. If several people you know, who share your taste, like a book, then it's not unreasonable to maybe give that book a shot. (Or an independent reviewer, or if it has loads of 5-star reviews on Amazon, etc.).

Very well said. I agree 100%

 

[MichaelSullivan]

On the flip side, if you write a stinker and it sells to NYC for some reason - OR you write a decent book that gets orphaned and therefore the print run is tiny, it gets zero marketing, it gets an awful cover, or any of myriad other things happen which make the book simply not sell - your NYC career is going to be in tatters. I've heard more stories than I can count about writers who simply had *bad luck* with one book and it ended their career. Others - much fewer in number - who fought their way back to a solid career after a crash like that. One ISBN with horrible sales attached to your name, and you may be writing under a pen name for the rest of your life, if you stick with traditional publishers. Or not - some writers come back from that OK. But it's tough.

This is the whole notion of control. Some people self-publish because they trust the books being in "their hands" rather than someone else's. Some of them are deluded by their own visions of grandeur but not all of them. I'm published through a big-six publisher and received a six-figure advance which is MUCH higher than the average for a new author...but it was a huge risk in my mind -- as Kevin pointed out there are many things that could go wrong and I'd be helpless to do anything about them. Now we are just days away from the official release of Theft of Swords and I can say that the gamble paid off I'm very happy with what Orbit has done for The Riyria Revelations so it turned out well - but it could have just as easily gone the other way.

When I was self-published I heard the same types of comments that have been expressed elsewhere in this post, "Well you're writing must not be good enough because you can't be published. But sometimes it's a matter of you choose not to go the traditional route. The books are pretty much the same in traditional form as when self-published so they obviously were good enough so don't assume that every self-published author is that way because they have no alternative. For many it is a viable method of publication with its own set of risks and rewards. Neither is "better" they are just different and it really depends on what your goals of an author is as to which you should utilize.