September 27–October 4, 2001

book quarterly

Self Storage

Self-publishing may sound great, but in practice it often means printing books that no one wants to read.

by Meredith Broussard

When I set out to explore the world of self-publishing, I assumed that there must be hundreds of individuals creating exciting literature outside of the mainstream. I’d heard about e-publishing, and e-books, and the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded Stephen King’s self-published, electronic-only novella Riding the Bullet. I assumed that the self-publishing world, especially the e-publishing aspect of it, must be teeming with great, undiscovered writers.

Wrong.

The archetypal self-published author is Maine writer Horace P. Landry. A former journalist for a Bangor newspaper, Landry spent his Labor Day weekend at a craft fair in Kennebunkport peddling copies of his Maine-based mystery novel. Above his table hung a sign with a giant image of Landry’s face, bearing the legend "Book Signing Today! Meet Horace P. Landry, Author of Murder in the Tall Pines." Sandwiched between a pottery vendor and a woman selling hand-knit children’s hats, Landry’s table drew a steady stream of interested tourists eager to purchase local color.

"I sent the book to four or five publishers," says Landry. "None of them wanted it. So I figured, I’m a newspaperman, I know what the hell I’m doing, I’ll just publish it myself." He found a printer near his winter home in Florida, had some books printed and embarked with his wife on a home-grown promotional campaign.

Flipping quickly through Murder in the Tall Pines (which, incidentally, is sold on Barnes & Noble’s website as Murder in the Small Pines ), it’s easy to see why the manuscript was rejected by any number of publishers. The characters are cartoonish, the plot is slightly less interesting than a Hardy Boys novel and the reading-comprehension level hovers around fifth grade. The book itself is poorly typeset, making it difficult to read.

Welcome to the world of self-published novels.

The Real World

"Nobody starts out wanting to self-publish," explains Pennington, N.J.-based literary agent Rosalie Siegel. "To get a book published by a Random House or a Knopf or a Simon & Schuster, there’s nothing harder. I can’t think of anything harder to do besides climbing Mount Everest. Ninety-nine out of a hundred fail."

This failure is what causes most authors to turn to self-publishing. The community of self-publishers is infinitely more accepting — that is, if a frustrated author has money. There are workshops, and writing coaches, and magazines, and writing prompts, and cute blank books for when inspiration hits. All designed to promote the romantic, long-held notion that the writing life involves sitting by a fire, sipping coffee and thinking great thoughts.

Exploiting this naivete is big business.

There are a handful of writers who are heroes to the self-publishing industry. M.J. Rose, whose e-book Lip Service was acquired by Pocket Books. John Grisham, who self-published A Time to Kill. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy. Even Benjamin Franklin comes up occasionally. What most authors ignore is that although publishing is filled with book lovers, it remains a business. A big-ticket business, in which it takes upward of $50,000 to bring a book to market. Most writers don’t have the business sense that it takes to get a book in front of a profitable percentage of the 281,421,906 consumers in the U.S.

Here’s a quick sketch of the U.S. publishing industry: Despite the success of Amazon.com, the majority of books are bought by people browsing in bookstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble. These megastores rely on major publishers, providing tested literary product that’s palatable to the general public. If you want something unusual or experimental, they’re glad to order it; otherwise, it makes sense for them to reserve their valuable shelf space for products that sell — namely, the latest Danielle Steele, not the latest anthology of experimental poetry.

Chains and independent bookstores acquire their stock through distributors, usually an international behemoth like Ingram or a regional distributor like Moorestown, N.J.-based Koen Books. Distributors provide the space and labor necessary to warehouse and ship hundreds of thousands of titles. Imagine the physical space that would be necessary to store (much less ship) every Harry Potter book ever sold — it’s sure not going to happen in the Random House office in midtown Manhattan.

This long-established business chain is what the self-published author must negotiate and master. And don’t forget the marketing and promotional aspects of publishing: getting word of mouth circulating among newspaper and magazine editors, creating flyers and promotional postcards and nifty giveaways, buying and creating advertising suitable to the book’s target market, booking an author tour, contacting reviewers, and throwing enough fuel on the publicity fire to get the general public talking about the book.

The Netherworld

A self-published author has four major options. The first is subsidy publishing, in which the author pays a publisher to produce a book. Another option is print-on-demand publishing, in which a publisher prints and ships a copy of the book only when it is ordered by a consumer. E-publishing or e-book publishing means that the book is turned into a secure electronic file, readable only on a computer or handheld e-book device. Finally, an author can choose private printing, wherein he finds his own printer, illustrator, typesetter etc. to produce the book. All of these categories are lumped together under the rubric of "self-publishing."

More than 50 years old, subsidy presses (a.k.a vanity presses) like Vantage Press and Dorrance Publishing are the elder statesmen of the self-publishing industry. These publishers will take an author’s manuscript and "publish" it — as in, print fewer than 1,000 copies — for a fee ranging from $7,000 to $20,000. "It’s easy to lose a lot of money in self-publishing," says literary agent Rosalie Siegel. "Vanity presses lead people on to think that they’re getting a book published, but these poor suckers don’t know that they’re not really getting a book published. They’re getting a book put between covers. It looks like a book, it is a book, but it goes nowhere." Dorrance titles include The Prodigal Son by Danita Hammock, whose blurb reads: "In this poignant novel of the family conflicts and Christian beliefs, a son of a jealous of his father’s treatment of his wayward brother." With author-created blurbs like this, it’s a small wonder that the Vantage website cautions subsidy press authors, "Please be realistic. Most books by new authors do not sell well, and most authors do not regain the publishing fee."

One Vantage editorial rep scoffed: "Print on demand is glorified Xeroxing." Indeed, as explained by Dave Giorgio at Infinity Publishing in Haverford, POD seems to be a high-tech, Internet-enabled variation on the services available at any neighborhood print shop. Customers order Infinity titles online or in a bookstore. When the order comes in, Infinity prints the book on high-resolution digital printers, binds it and trims the pages, then ships it the same day.

Infinity’s runaway bestseller this year has been Haunted Delaware: Delightfully Dreadful Legends of the First State by Caroline Woods, which has sold 4,500 copies. Compared with John Grisham, who has more than 60 million copies of his books in print worldwide, it’s small potatoes. But considering that Haunted Delaware is available only online or by request at the sales desk of a bookstore, it’s a fairly impressive record.

POD publishing has flourished in the Internet age, since it’s one of those rare industries perfectly suited to the Internet. Authors can submit their manuscripts electronically, pay their setup fees online, receive digital proofs and place online orders for books. Giorgio estimates that this summer alone, Infinity has seen its sales double. It’s also moved from sharing office space with its parent company, a Bryn Mawr-based printer, into its own digs. With a setup fee of $400, the price is much more attractive to aspiring authors who believe in their work but balk at paying as much for printing as they might for an SUV.

The disadvantage with POD is that authors must take care of their own marketing and promotion — a formidable task for literary folk better versed in poems than press releases. Even for professional marketers, book promotion is tough: Ardmore resident William Kosman, who also runs a tech-focused marketing and communications firm, has only made $200 so far on royalties from his POD novel The Picasso Paradigm. He’s spent at least $675 on the publishing setup and promotion, including the 3,000 promotional postcards he had printed to announce the book’s release.

Kosman decided to go the POD route after his novel was rejected by several agents and publishers. Although this is the eighth novel he has written, it is the first one to see the light of day. "I am an obsessive writer," explains Kosman, who also paints in his spare time. "I know that this is the best one I’ve written. After I was turned down by several publishers and agents, I decided to self-publish."

Carpal Tunnel of Love

E-publishing, since it is such a new and vaguely understood area, is even more enticing to the publishing outsider. The dream is that publishing on the web, or creating an e-book with an accompanying website, will draw millions of readers compelled by the force of the prose.

The reality? That e-book will be ignored by millions, simultaneously.

R.R. Bowker, which publishes book and serial reference materials, estimates that there are slightly more than 40,000 e-book titles on the market currently. And absolutely nobody wants them. In August, the New York Times announced gently that "Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature." According to Amy Pierpont, senior editor at Pocket Books, e-book sales are so slow that even a title selling more than 60 copies can be a bestseller. Reviews make or break a book, but many book reviewers have never even seen an e-book. After all, who wants to buy a $300 gadget to read a book on a tiny screen, when the publisher sends review copies for free? Even Starling Lawrence, editor in chief of the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, noted that, "If e-books were the only thing to buy in a ‘bookstore,’ I would buy a lot fewer books."

The only successful self-published authors are the ones who use their sales to get in the door of major publishing houses. And the publishing houses are more than happy to take on books that appeal to niche markets when an author demonstrates, through sales figures, that the niche market is willing to buy the book. In this case, says Pierpont, "The author does the marketing for us."

Consider the Cinderella story of Karen E. Quinones Miller, a first-time novelist and former Inquirer staff writer who privately printed her novel Satin Doll after being rejected by big publishers like Random House. Miller relied on her industry connections to get Satin Doll reviewed locally. Her promotion campaign was not only exhaustive, but slightly manic, to the point where a barbecue truck on Broad Street handed out a Satin Doll flyer with every order of ribs. It paid off: Miller eventually sold the book to Simon & Schuster for an unprecedented six figures.

Miller is now a tireless advocate for the rights of self-published authors. "There’ve always been self-published authors who crossed over," she says. "What I did is I made them pay me, pay me well, for crossing over." Miller’s bargaining power was substantial: When she began entertaining offers from major publishers, Satin Doll was in its third printing and had sold 24,000 copies in a period of only eight months. Miller shakes her head at the folly of the publishers. "For Satin Doll and another book that’s coming out in July, I got $165,000 — for the same book that I would have paid them the year before to publish. I would’ve paid them ! In 1999, they could’ve had that book for $500."

If she were publishing Satin Doll now, Miller would actually be able to pay a big publisher to put out her book — without even going to Manhattan. Random House owns a stake in Old City-based Xlibris, a print-on-demand publisher. Or she could go to iUniverse.com, a popular site whose stakeholders include Hungry Minds (formerly IDG Books) and Barnes and Noble. iUniverse.com has particularly savvy rhetoric: An advertisement on the back cover of a $4.99 Writer’s Digest magazine (subtitled "Publishing Success: The Writer’s Survival Guide to Self-Publishing and E-Publishing") reads, "I can write because I am a writer. Nothing can stop me. Doubt. Fear. Rejection. These words mean nothing to me. I am a writer. I will show the world."

It’s a brilliant move on the part of the major publishers. Now, the same authors originally rejected by the publishing houses turn around and actually pay those same publishing houses $300 to languish in obscurity.

Declining book-review requests from self-published authors is par for the course at most publications, including this one. "By and large, we’re not going to look at a self-published book unless it’s making waves," says Frank Wilson, editor of the Inquirer’s book-review section. It’s a given that any book that crosses a reviewer’s desk represents an immense amount of labor. But out of the 120,000-odd books published each year, the ones from the major publishers are the only ones guaranteed to have had enough critical faculties applied to them to make them worth reading. Reviewers must make arbitrary selections to narrow down the field, and despite great technological advances and interest among authors, self-published books still don’t make the cut.