Will I Get Published Any Other Way?

A few weeks ago I corresponded with a frustrated writer who was considering vanity publication. When I advised her against it she replied with words to this effect:

“I can see why you don’t like it. But I can’t get my book published any other way. There are millions of writers out there, and only a few of them get a publishing deal. It’s luck more than talent these days.”

It saddened me that she considered publication some sort of lottery, rather than the meritocracy it really (mostly) is. It also saddened me to think that she valued her work so little that not only was she prepared to give it away, she was also prepared to pay someone to take it off her hands. This has to be wrong: we all work hard at our writing, and we should recognise its true worth. Even if our work is not appropriate for mainstream publication it still has value, which can be measured by the efforts we’ve put into it and the satisfaction we’ve derived from writing it: why hand it over to a company which is only interested in how much money you give it, and not how well your book reads, looks or sells?

There will always be books which are not appropriate for mainstream publication, because of their subject matter or their writer’s lack of experience or talent. I would never recommend that the authors of these books use a vanity press: such presses are almost always exploitative, costly and ineffectual when it comes down to producing a high-quality book and then selling those books to anyone but their authors. So what alternatives are out there for writers who are desperate for publication, but who are not likely to attract the attentions of the mainstream press?

This is where self-publication comes into its own. It is available to everyone and needn’t cost a penny if you choose a POD provider like Lulu, CreateSpace or Lightning Source (and yes, I’m well aware that there are other options out there and I hope you’ll suggest a few which aren't vanity publishers in disguise). POD providers allow you to download your text into a book template and add your own cover art or image (or they provide you with stock images which are copyright-cleared). The book will be available for sale through the POD provider’s website, and if you pay for an ISBN to add to the package you can also get it listed on Amazon and other online retailers. You’ll be able to correct or amend the book at any time, without paying any extra cost (although substantial alterations require a new ISBN, which you will have to pay for). But doing that will give you everything that a vanity publisher will give you, at a far lower cost.

The Real Value Of Mainstream Publishing

Last spring, the lovely Sally Zigmond linked to this interesting article on her blog. It's a great piece about the value—or not—of publishing by non-mainstream routes.

It's essential reading for writers—particularly those who believe that some sort of Great Publishing Conspiracy is in operation to stop new writers from getting published, and that Indie Publishing is the Next Big Thing.

The Christmas Box

Every writer I know feels a certain bitter thrill when they hear of a story like this one. An unknown writer writes a beautiful story, which he self-publishes. He prints only a handful of copies, which he gives away to family and friends as Christmas gifts: word quickly spreads and he prints up another batch, and before you know it he’s sitting on a publishing sensation. He makes a deal with one of the biggest publishers in the world and goes on to make a fortune from the sale of this single short book.

Despite myself, I love stories like this. I resist the books concerned for as long as I can because I don’t like getting caught up in all the excitement, in case it clouds my judgement: and when reading a book which has already earned millions I find I’m constantly looking for that trick—the reason behind its amazing success. I do usually give in and read them once all the fuss has died down (I only read the Da Vinci Code once the DVD of the film was in the discount bins, not that it took very long to get there) and I can usually see something of merit in the big-fuss books which explains their huge success. A new twist to an old story, perhaps; or a writer who might not produce the loveliest prose there is but can nevertheless make the pages turn almost on their own. No matter how cynical I become, I’ve always managed to spot that important detail. Until now.

After years of hearing about Richard Paul Evans's book The Christmas Box I finally gave in and bought it despite the reverential sentimentailty which tinged many of the Amazon reviews. As I read the book I was amazed that it had done so well: the story is predictable, draw-droppingly sentimental, and pretty badly written too, full of oddly-formal dialogue and exposition. It took me less than an hour to read through to the end; it was simplistic, sentimental tosh. Despite the many shortcomings of the text it was a very pretty book, I thought, with its small size and gorgeous design: but making a best-seller has to involve more than binding a short story up into an odd-sized book, designing an elegant, uncluttered layout and printing it on heavy cream stock. Perhaps it was the delicious, jewel-like dust jacket heavily laced with gold which appealed to me: I'm a sucker for a pretty design. I just don't know why I reacted as I did. I will grudgingly admit that while I found The Christmas Box a ridiculously sentimental story, full of lacklustre writing and clumsy technique, there is something about it that I loved.

Now all I need is for someone to explain to me why I found this little book so very covetable, so that I can write my own international bestseller in just a few thousand words.

Self-Publishing Sales Statistics Clarified

When I appeared on The Write Lines last week I mentioned that the average self-published book sells between forty and two hundred copies, depending on which set of figures you consult. Compared to mainstream publishing, where sales of three thousand copies for commercial fiction are considered by some to be disappointing, these figures are terribly low and the reaction from the other studio guests (a literary agent and three successful mainstream-published writers) was obvious: if you listen to the recording you can clearly hear them gasp.

After the broadcast I caught up with the reaction on Twitter, and found that a few writers were discussing the figures I quoted and reaching some rather unsound conclusions. While I'm not going to quote anyone here (it’s just not appropriate to single anyone out), I do think it’s important that I respond to their points. But first, a very quick primer on how sales figures are usually gathered in the book trade.

Nielsen Bookscan collects the sales figures of various online and physical retailers, then collates those figures and reports them to the book trade (it’s Nielsen which produces the best-seller charts we're all so envious of). However, as relatively few copies of self-published books are sold through bookshops, and quite a few self-published titles don’t even have the ISBNs which are essential for books to be tracked by Nielsen, the majority of self-published sales aren't included in Nielsen’s sales reports: therefore, if you rely on Nielsen to provide sales information about self-published books, you’re likely to be way out of whack with the real picture.

The Tweeters seemed to assume that I was relying on Nielsen, and that therefore my figures had to be way off.

They would have had a very valid point if I had relied on Nielsen’s reports for my statistics, but I used a far more generous source for the figures I quoted on air: the publishers themselves (there’s an obvious difficulty here: my figures came from companies which style themselves as self-publishing service providers, which many consider to be vanity presses: but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll ignore that issue, which is a little off-topic here. I shall return to it at another time, have no fear).

As most publishing service providers of this type offer only print-on-demand services, copies of the books that they publish are only ever printed in direct response to an order; a copy printed is a copy sold, no matter who buys it. So long as a book is printed and sent out from their premises they consider it a sale—when these companies report sales what they’re really reporting is the number of copies printed. You can see that there is not going to be a hidden stash of sales which fail to get included in the sales statistics: if anything, these companies are likely to over-report, rather than under-report, their sales.

As the sales figures I quoted came directly from POD-based self-publishing service providers, not only do those figures include all copies sold in bookshops or by Amazon, etc.; they also include all copies subsequently returned by bookshops to their authors (because with self-publishing the author is the publisher, and so they have to credit the bookseller’s account for those returned books even if they’re no longer in a sellable condition); they also include as sales every single copy that the authors bought and then sent out, for free, to reviewers, or gave away to family and friends; and every single copy which all those hopeful authors ordered, only to have them left mouldering away in their garages when they found they couldn't sell them—of which there are far too many.

Which means that it’s impossible for the sales figures I mentioned to be under-reported: unlike Nielsen's figures, they are going to be higher than the sales which really count in an author's career: the sales made to interested readers who considered the books potentially good enough to pay their hard-earned money for.

If Self Publishing Really Is The Future....

During last week's outrage over Harlequin Horizons, one comment really caught my attention and remained with me for days. It appeared in the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog site but came in part from an earlier blog post. I reproduce it now with permission from its author, the brilliant Stacia Kane.


When self-publishing becomes the only option, only the rich will be able to publish. When publishers can make more money taking cash from aspiring writers than by selling books to the public, writers and readers both suffer. Writers who can’t afford to publish will be lost, or we’ll have to go back to the 18th century model and whore ourselves out to rich “patrons” who might agree to pay for our publishing—not pay us, but pay to produce the books themselves.

Imagine a world where the only books on the shelves are those written by people with enough money to pay to have them published. Very little quality control, no attention paid to whether or not the book is actually worthwhile. How much fun will reading be then?

From my blog:

We’d have books written exclusively by those who could afford it. Much like in the 18th century, when so many books were diaries of some peeress’s trip through Europe with titles like, “My Gleanings.” FUN. I know I can’t wait to read books written exclusively by the wealthy, with no viewpoints other than their own. I’m sick of hearing what baby boomers think already; I can assure you I don’t want to read more of their “Gee, the sixties were sooo great!” back-patting. I know I can’t wait for a world where books written by those from other cultures have no chance to be translated into English and released here, when we become even more ignorant of the lives of those in the world outside because there’s no way to get their books in front of English-speaking audiences. Oh, and of course, given that self-published books tend to be much more expensive, thanks to POD technology, I can’t wait for a world when reading and books are even less available to the poor. When they don’t have the same opportunities thanks to their inability to get hold of books.

Oh, what’s that you say? Oh, right. The internet will provide all of that. Of course. Because I know when I want something to read I’d much rather spend hours and hours slogging around online looking for something decent than just go to a bookstore. I know people who can’t afford books totally have the money for laptops and ereaders and the internet. So in seeking to democratize literature, what you are actually doing is STEALING IT from those less fortunate than you.

We’d also have a lot more unreadable books. I’m sorry, but it’s true. For every excellent work of self-published fiction–and they are out there, make no mistake–and for every one that’s not bad, just not terribly polished or professional or interesting, there are dozens of horrible ones. Really.

Let’s not forget that the way most people learn proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling isn’t through school. I mean, we do learn those things at school, but we develop those skills by reading. So you tell me, how literate will we be as a society when there are no professionally written books? When there are no people to judge if a work is even readable or not before it gets published? When anything goes? Would you like to go back to the middle ages, when words were just spelled however they sounded? Because I wouldn’t.

If you'd like to thank Stacia for this piece, buy her books.

Moving From Self-Published To Mainstream Publication

If you've self-published then you've already tested your book, as a product, on the marketplace. If it failed to sell in any great numbers, then in the eyes of a lot of publishers, you’ve proved that it doesn't have the potential to sell in sufficient quantities for them to take it on. This might well be because you, as a publisher, don't have access to the same sales and marketing clout that the bigger publishers employ, but many of those big publishers aren’t interested in that: all they see is the numbers they find on Nielsen’s sales reports. As far as they’re concerned, your book hasn't sold well and so you've shown that it's an uncommercial product.

This probably means that those publishers miss out on a few books with real potential: but as publishers have so many titles to pick and choose from, it's no wonder they tend to dismiss books so easily.

Vanity Publishing or Self-Publishing?

How can vanity publishers and self-publishers be distinguished from one another? And why is it important that we make this distinction?

When an author self-publishes then the copyright page of his book bears the name of his imprint; his publishing company—even if it publishes just one title—owns his ISBN and the publication rights to that book. As publisher he’ll know exactly how many copies of his book have been printed, where and when they have been sold, and who to. Consequently he remains in full control of both the production and distribution of his own books.

A vanity publisher, however, will usually have its imprint listed on the copyright page of each book it publishes, and will control most aspects of their production and printing; consequently, the author will not have authority in the publication of his own book, nor will he have immediate access to vital information about stock levels and sales records. While vanity publishers often masquerade as mainstream or self-publishing services, their books usually carry the name of their own imprint: and by definition, if the imprint doesn’t belong to the author, it’s impossible for them to have self-published the book.

If you're considering self-publishing your book then it's important that you understand this: otherwise you could end up making a very costly mistake, and losing your precious first rights to an unscrupulous vanity publisher.

Sales Statistics: iUniverse

On March 17 of this year I posted some self-publishing sales statistics courtesy of Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, and I thought it might be interesting to play around with them a little. I should have been an accountant.

In the article I quoted, Victoria wrote, "According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies."

If you have a look at the link she provided you'll find this information about sales figures for iUniverse books in 2004:

18,108: Total number of titles published

14: Number of titles sold through B&N's bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500 copies

792,814: Number of copies printed

32,445: Number of copies sold of iUniverse's top seller, If I Knew Then by Amy Fisher

So 18,108 different titles were published in 2004 and a total of 792,814 books were printed, which gives a mean average of 43.8 copies printed per title. And as iUniverse relies on print-on-demand technology, and only prints books in direct response to orders, “printed” here is the same as “sold”.

If you take away the 32,445 copies that Amy Fisher's book sold and then do the numbers again, that average number of copies sold per title goes down to 41.9.

If you then consider that 83 of iUniverse’s books sold at least 500 copies, and take those 83 books and their sales out of the equation (for simplicity I’ve assumed that they sold bang-on 500 copies each but several will have sold more, and so reduce this average further), the remainder of the books published—that’s a whole 18,025 titles, or 99.5% of all books that iUniverse publishes—sold an average of 39.9 copies each.

Let’s assume that those books were priced at £10 each (which is a reasonable-ish price for a paperback right now). I don’t know what rate of royalties they’d have earned from iUniverse (anyone?), so can’t make a direct comparison here: but let’s assume that the writers had not self-published their books and had instead been published by a mainstream publisher, with a contract which specified a reasonable-to-generous royalty of 12% of cover price. On that deal they’d make £1.20 per copy sold: so on sales of 40 copies they’d earn a total of just £48 per book published.

I’d like to find out how many of the titles concerned sold under twenty copies: this would at least filter out a lot of the people who used iUniverse to produce books just for friends and family and had no intention of ever seeking sales for them (which is how I’ve used Lulu in the past). Because if I could take those books off the total it would push the averages up a little bit and give us a better idea of the average sales levels that iUniverse authors were achieving when these numbers were collated—but the numbers would still have a long way to go before they equalled the sales figures of the least successful books from a mainstream publisher.

Moving From Self-Publishing To Mainstream

I've heard a lot of self-published writers insist that self-publication is a good route to mainstream publication. But is that really the case? Probably not.

Literary agent David Fugate of LaunchBooks Literary Agency has written,

looking back at my PublishersMarketplace search, I noted that 29 deals were listed where the book had been previously self-published. That sounds like a decent number until you realize that more than 30,000 deals have been reported there over the last 2 years.

So out of every thousand deals reported by Publishers' Marketplace over the last two years, only one concerned a book which had previously been self-published: a statistic which effectively flattens the argument that self-publishing provides a good route to mainstream success.

I'd really like to find out how many books were self-published in that same time-frame, and how many of them went on to be published by mainstream publishers: but it's proved impossible to find anything verifiable and hype-free (if anyone knows where I can get such statistics for free, I'd love to have them). Because if we had those figures we'd be able to see just how likely it is for books to cross over from self-publishing to mainstream, and possibly how fast this trend is increasing.

None of this is meant to imply that self-published books can't be successful without making that transition: of course they can, under the right circumstances. Mr Fugate goes on to write,

Does that mean I think you shouldn’t self-publish your book? Not necessarily. There are circumstances where self-publishing - especially when taking advantage of the speed and ease of print on demand - makes a great deal of sense (generally when speed to market is very important and where the author has a significant marketing platform to draw upon).

Bolding mine. If you're going to self-publish, you're going to have to do a lot of marketing and promotion in order to see any significant sales; and unless you go on to make those significant sales, you're no more likely to find yourself a mainstream publisher than anyone else who has written a book. Unless your book is stonkingly good, which is, of course, a whole different discussion.

Selling Books To Book Shops (Part I)

The following article first appeared on my blog in October 2008, but thanks to my technical ineptitude it disappeared from view a couple of months ago. Here it is again. I hope it stays here this time!


Mainstream publishing houses employ sales representatives who work all over the country, visiting all the book shops they can find. Their publishers provide them with gorgeous colour catalogues to work from, which show all the books on their publisher’s lists; they use streamlined ordering systems which deliver books swiftly and efficiently, and usually the next day; and the book shops have accounts at their wholesalers or distributors, and so don’t have to pay for the books that they buy straight away, which gives them a chance to sell the books before they have to pay for them, and so gain a nice bit of positive cash-flow.

Independent presses often don’t have access to such sales teams. They might employ a sales agency to sell their books for them, and so increase their turnover that way—but there’s a fair amount of cost involved in this, and it’s not an option that the smallest independents can take. Once they’ve developed a good-enough reputation they are sometimes allowed to sneak in under a bigger publisher’s wing, which allows them to remain independent but still gives them access to the bigger publishers’ sales teams; this gives them that all-important nationwide representation, which invariably leads to a swift improvement in sales figures and, therefore, turnover (which is not the same as profit).

Self-publishers don’t have the option of employing a sales agency, or of persuading a big publisher to help them out with their sales (after all, if they could do that then they probably wouldn’t have self-published in the first place). The only way that they can realistically hope to get their books into bookshops is to sell them in there themselves, which means visiting each and every bookshop they can find. And even in a country as small as ours, that’s an awful lot of bookshops for one writer to visit, and a very unprofitable way to sell just one title.

Guest Post: Your Search For A Publisher, by Jonathon Clifford

Every wary writer will have heard of vanity publishing. It occupies the shadier side of the publishing business, and involves less-than-scrupulous publishers charging writers for publication. In vanity publication, the quality of the work is never considered, just the willingness and ability of the writers concerned to hand over large chunks of their cash. The books are often shoddily produced and rarely make any decent level of sales: the good writing is published alongside the bad, and while the vanity publishers make money out of the deal, the writers almost never do.

Jonathon Clifford came up with the term of "vanity publishing" a few decades ago, and has worked ever since to expose the truth about vanity publishing. He's written numerous articles about vanity publishing for the mainstream press, and is widely acknowledged as the primary expert on this nasty subject.

My thanks to him for this post.



As an aspiring author it isn’t writing your book that is the problem, it is when (without guidance) you come to search for a publisher that you risk being ensnared by those determined to take your money while giving you little or nothing in return.


So who am I to offer you guidance?

For eighteen years I have carried out a one-man campaign to clean up the world of vanity publishing. During that time I have been sent copies of hundreds of their promotional letters, editorial reports, quotations and contracts. Through this material it has been proved to the satisfaction of the courts that many vanity publishers are guilty of “gross misrepresentation of their services”. As a result many authors have—with my advice—successfully sued the vanity publisher with whom they had become embroiled.

In 1996 I was invited to our House of Lords for lunch to speak about the need to change the law to control vanity publishing. Fifty-eight Members of Parliament answered my call for support, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the law had been sufficiently altered to allow those bodies who wished to take action against dishonest vanity publishers. In 2000 I organised an Awareness Campaign backed by a website and free advice pack (which may be freely downloaded from my website) giving advice on Finding a Mainstream Publisher, Internet Publishing, the Market for Short Stories, Self-Publishing, Copy Editing, Proof Reading and Vanity Publishing

I have also made programmes for both regional and national BBC and Commercial TV, have taken part in a host of national and regional radio programmes and there have been articles about my work in magazines and newspapers both in the UK and around the world.


How (very easily) can you be taken in?

You find an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine which asks for manuscripts to be submitted. You send off yours and it is ‘accepted’.

But you do not appreciate that almost anyone who submits anything gets it accepted and, in the euphoria of that ‘acceptance’, your brain goes out of the window! You do not see the £ sign followed by the noughts. You fail to remember (if you ever knew) that the only publishers who ever advertise for authors are vanity publishers who are there to make money out of the unsuspecting author, not from the sale of copies of the books they publish - for once they have received your final payment they have all the money they are going to make out of you and promotion and marketing would cost some of it.

Along with the ‘acceptance’ of your manuscript you must also wary of two other phrases: ‘Print-on-Demand’ and ‘Self-Publisher’.

The honest print-on-demand outlet is extremely useful, but it is a phrase that can be misleading. If the publisher does not implement an effective promotion and marketing strategy for your book there is little or no demand for it, other than from your own efforts. He can then quite legally print only the very few copies ordered by your friends and family—whatever you may have paid!

Self-publishing cannot by definition be done for you by a third party and there have already been cases in the UK where vanity publishers masquerading as ‘Self-Publishers’ have been taken to task by the Advertising Standards Authority.

However the required payment is described, it is you who are going to pay for your book—not (as you are led to believe) a part of, or a share of, or a subsidy towards, but all of the cost plus a handsome profit and once it has been ‘published’ it will no doubt simply disappear into the woodwork.

Publishing your book should be an enjoyable and stimulating experience, not the fiendish nightmare created by so many vanity publishers. So before you answer an advertisement, go to my website and request a copy of my Advice Pack which is available to all—at no cost.


© Johnathon Clifford May 2009

Income: Self Publishing vs Mainstream Publication

I always advise writers to exhaust all possible routes into commercial publication before they consider self-publishing their work. Recently, I was told that I was wrong. The reasoning went something like this:

Forget about going to one of the big publishers. Put your work out yourself, pay for your own barcode and ISBN, and hire someone to sell it for a cut of the cover price. You’ll make far more money out of it than you’d earn in royalties.

On a book-by-book basis, that’s probably true. A typical royalty for a commercially-published book is 10%, which equates to a per-unit rate of 90p on a book with a cover price of £9. With self-publishing you can set your own cover price, so it’s possible to earn far more per copy.

There are costs associated with those self-publishing sales, though: it would be difficult to hire anyone competent to sell your books on percentage, as each bookshop visit would barely cover the travelling costs incurred even if every bookshop approached took half a dozen copies each.

Even if you do the legwork yourself you’re still likely to end up losing money because of those travelling costs, and because you will only be able to cover a very small part of the country.

Commercial publishers have their own sales and distribution networks in place. Their sales representatives frequently visit every bookshop in the country, and discuss their new and forthcoming books.

Commercial publishers also have publicity departments which routinely send out stacks of review copies to TV programmes, newspapers and magazines, to ensure that potential readers will get to hear about each book as it is released.

The self-publisher simply cannot match this vast sales machine, and so is unlikely to sell anything like as many books: few self-published titles sell more than one hundred copies, while most commercially-published books sell more than a thousand.

And that’s why I almost always recommend mainstream publishing rather than self-publishing. It is likely that the royalty rate per book will be lower than with self-publishing: but the overall sales, and therefore the total amount earned, and the number of readers reached will be so much better that mainstream publication has to be the obvious first choice.

Two Excellent Posts About Self-Publishing

A couple of days ago Nicola Morgan blogged about some of the problems which self-published writers face; and today Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware discussed the growing trend for self-published writers to call themselves "indie" publishers.

Read both posts. They are excellent. I wish I'd written them.

(Apologies for my relative silence this week: I hope you don't feel ignored. I'm just a bit busy with work right now, but it shouldn't last too long.)

How To Respond To Reviews

I have a tiny blog called The Self-Publishing Review in which I consider self-published books from the viewpoint of a mainstream publishing editor. As I read I count all the errors and instances of sloppy writing that I find; and once I've found fifteen problems I stop reading and post details of how far I got in the book, and the sorts of errors I found.

I began the blog because a self-published writer took exception when I wrote that most self-published books were dreadful. He insisted I just hadn’t seen enough of them: and so I decided to start my review in order to rectify that.

Overall, I’ve found it a disappointing experience. Judging by the books I’ve been sent so far, the vast majority of self-published writers are bad writers who have published terrible books. So far I’ve only read one book right through to the end. I’ve not even got half-way through any of the others and some of the writers involved have not taken it too well: a few have tried to engage me in arguments and one author even had the misfortune of having some very argumentative friends who were determined to defend her writing reputation.

I was more than a little pleased when Rosalie Warren, the author of Charity's Child, emailed me to thank me for the review I’d written about her book. It was clear that she had thought about my comments, understood them, and had gone on to apply them to the rest of her book. I had no doubt that her writing would improve as a result of her positive attitude and I wasn't surprised when I subsequently learned that she has a novel called Low Tide, Lunan Bay being published today by a good mainstream publisher, Robert Hale. I shall buy myself a copy with a great big smile on my face—which is much more than I'd have done if she'd argued with me!

Self Publishing: Get Your Facts Straight

Daniel Poynter is a self-styled expert on the self-publishing world. He has written and self-published many books which he claims have sold than a million copies worldwide. He offers a self-publishing consultancy service, and has a web site packed full of information for the aspiring self-publisher. And he's not alone: a quick Google reveals thousands of websites which suggest that self-publishing is a good route to success.

Daniel Poynter offers for sale a list of his own self-published books, and he also sells "My Book Project In A Binder" (you'll need to scroll nearly all the way down to find it), which is priced at $297 and seems to consist of a zippered three-ring binder with a CD, some paper and coloured dividers. He is nothing if not resourceful.

However, in his zeal to promote self publishing as a viable route into print (and, by doing so, to sell a few more copies of his self-published books about self-publishing) Mr Poynter has allowed a few errors to creep onto his site. In this PDF (which will download if you click the link), Poynter lists several authors who he claims are self-publishing successes. But in many cases the writers he names didn’t actually self publish: either publishing was a whole different business when the writers were alive (like William Blake), or they didn't self-publish anything (like John Grisham). And while it's true that Mark Twain did self-publish he almost bankrupted himself in the process, and then had to undertake a lecture tour to pay off the resulting debts which nearly killed him. So when you read sites like Dan Poynter's, be very sceptical about some of the claims you find: and remember The Big Question About Self-Publishing Successes.

The Problems With Selling Self Published Books

Mainstream, commercial publishers will publish just about anything they think they can make money on. So when a book is widely rejected (assuming it’s been submitted to the right people and places), it’s because the people who know and understand the market best consider that it’s not commercial enough to sell well. That it’s not going to appeal enough to readers to sell in any quantity.

If a writer then goes ahead and self-publishes the book, chances are it won’t sell many copies. Not only do they have a product which has already been judged insufficiently commercial, they won’t have the same support that commercially-published books receive—no editorial advice, no marketing clout, no sales team, and no promotional material or expertise.

Because they have no editorial support, their book is unlikely to be edited as well as a commercially-published title. Sure, they could get the book worked on by an editorial agency: but this edit is unlikely to be carried out in much detail, and might well focus more on typo-hunting than real line-editing.

Because the first-time self-published writer has no reputation for producing good books they are unlikely to be able to attract the attention of any of the major reviewers, and so that particular promotional route is closed to them.

So long as they have an ISBN, their books will be listed with Gardners and other wholesalers: but they’ll stand very little chance of getting any real distribution for their books; and even if they manage that, they’ll have no sales activity other than that which they carry out themselves—which means they’re restricted to sales in local bookshops only, with little hope of national stock placement. It’s not surprising, then, that few self-published books sell more than fifty or a hundred copies.

The suggestion is often made that self-published books might achieve better sales figures if given the same sort of support that is routine for a commercially-published title.

While some might, I doubt that many would. I've seen a lot of self-published books over the last few years and it's clear to me that most were rejected by the commercial presses because they simply weren’t good enough to command a decent level of sales. I don't think they'd sell many more copies if given more support: I'm just surprised that so many have managed to sell more than five or ten copies each, given their general lack of expertise involved in bringing them to publication.

A New Model for Publishing?

For decades, the publishing business has worked pretty well. Writers write books; agents sell those books to publishers; publishers make the books available to the market. Money flows through the system from reader to writer via the publisher and agent. Everyone involved makes money, and gets what they want.

The publishing process—and the flow of money through it—begins to break down when the people involved in it aren't up to scratch.

You've written a book but your writing is so poor that you can't get an agent or a publisher to take you on? Learning to write well is the Old Model for writers, and therefore outdated. Publish your book yourself, then you'll have books in your hand within a week which you can sell direct to your own readers, mistakes and all!

You want to be an agent but you lack the expertise, experience and contacts you need to sell books to publishers? No problem! Make your money direct from writers! There are plenty of them and if they’re paying you direct, you can do away entirely with submitting to publishers. This New Model saves you both time and money!

You're a publisher, but can't sell your books to readers? No problem! Sell them to your writers instead! They’ll not be put off by poor writing or mistakes in their own books, so you can do away with editors; and you won’t have to employ sales people to get your books into bookshops (not that they’d stock them anyway, with all those mistakes in them), as your authors will buy their own books online, direct from you. Your New Model for Traditional Publishing will earn you a heap of cash—and you won’t even have to read any submissions. Just stick them out there as fast as they’re submitted, and watch the cash roll in.

Be very wary of new models of publishing. The old one works just fine.



[Note: this piece first appeared on my blog last June but somehow moved itself back into my list of draft posts, along with a couple of others. I will republish them all when the schedule allows. If you have read it before, apologies for the repetition; if you haven't, then please ignore this!]

Self-Publishing vs Vanity Publishing

Self-publishing and vanity publishing can be very difficult to tell apart.

There are marked similarities between them: both often involve little or no editorial selection or input; both usually produce books which are difficult to market or sell effectively; and very few books from either sector make a decent number of sales. But there are differences too.

Self-publishing involves a writer publishing their own book, and controlling everything from the content to the sales. So the imprint on the copyright page has to be theirs, and not that of the publishing service they’re using. The copyright statement refers directly to them, or indirectly by referring to the copyright holder (who happens to be them), and not to the publisher or printer. If a book is published with someone else’s imprint on the title page, it can’t logically be self-published, right? Further, the self-published writer maintains control of the editing, production, PR and sales processes all the way along: while they might pay other people to do some of the work for them—like editing or design—they project-manage the whole thing. This means that at any stage in the process the self-publisher knows exactly what’s happening with their book, how many copies are printed or sold, and how much profit or loss has been incurred as a result.

As I’ve written before, a vanity publisher is defined as a publisher which makes the majority of its money from its writers rather than its readers, whether by up-front charges or through selling books back to them once the book is published (which is how PublishAmerica does business). It’s a question of focus here, and websites are a good source of information: if the publisher focuses on finding new readers to sell to, chances are it’s a mainstream house; if its focus is on impressing writers and getting them to submit then chances are it’s a vanity press. Writers who use a vanity publisher have little or no control of the publishing process, they usually don’t have easy access to sales or royalty figures, the imprint on the copyright page is rarely theirs (although I have seen this happen) and often the copyright statement doesn’t refer to them either. Then you can argue that there’s a question of intent on behalf of the vanity publisher; and a question of the author’s knowledge and understanding of the process—but those two points are much more difficult to quantify and establish, and sound either spiteful or insulting, depending on whether you’re the publisher or writer concerned, so I’m not too fond of them.

This is a difficult distinction to make. It’s made even more difficult by most of the vanity presses insisting they’re self-publishing service providers, subsidy or cooperative publishers, or are working to a new business model or other similar nonsense; and by writers not understanding that there are so many differences between mainstream, vanity and self-publication. Many organisations don’t distinguish between vanity and self-publishing: I remember hearing that the Arts Council, for example, lumps them in together. But I know of several dedicated self-publishers who do very well for themselves; and I know of many writers who have been stung by vanity publishers and have been deeply hurt as a result.

Why Do Vanity Publishers Sell To Writers, Not Readers?

It’s widely accepted in the publishing industry that the difference between a vanity publisher and a mainstream, commercial publisher is that the former makes most of its money selling books back to its writers, while the latter makes its money selling books on to new readers: but why is this the case and why is that distinction so important?

Mainstream publishers focus on selling their books to readers. This is done through the efforts of salespeople, distributors, wholesalers and booksellers, with the assistance of publicity teams which manipulate a vast network of media contacts in order to bring books to their readers’ attention. It’s a two-pronged attack which simultaneously makes the book widely available and makes potential readers aware of the book, and publishers which only focus on one side of this equation rarely succeed.

Vanity publishers focus on selling to their own authors because they know that those writers are keen to see their books sell well, and they provide a guaranteed market for their own books. Vanities don’t attempt to sell to bookshops or to promote to new readers because that’s a complex system which can be very expensive; and because they know that bookshops aren’t likely to buy their books and reviewers aren’t likely to review them.

Authonomy, Blurb And Book Army

As I've discussed before, HarperCollins' manuscript display site, Authonomy, contacted a proportion of its members earlier this year to announce that it was adding a new service to its site: it had teamed up with Blurb.com, an American-based POD printer, in order to enable Authonomy members to download their books to Blurb directly from the Authonomy site and (the implication was) start selling copies of their book straight away.

Is this a good idea? Some people think not, and seem convinced that it's just a cynical ploy by HarperCollins to make money out of writers they have no intention of publishing. And when you link this idea to the worries I have about HarperCollins’ Book Army site you might begin to see the potential for problems here.

It is going to be easy for Authonomy authors to download their books to Blurb; hop over to Book Army and link their books to all sorts of other titles; and sit back and wait for sales to roll in (and your notice, here, more than a little touch of irony to my tone). Authonomy will, I'll bet, earn a commission on those sales, so what we have here is a grab at the Holy Grail of publishing: a way for a publisher to make money out of its slush pile. Funnily enough that doesn't outrage me as much as it does some: HarperCollins is a business, after all, and I have no problem with it making money in this way. What does trouble me is its choice of partner (because, as I've discussed elsewhere, Blurb isn't necessarily the best option for Authonomy authors planning to go POD), and its apparent endorsement of self-publishing as a realistic route into mainstream success. Because despite all the hype, sales of self-published books are notoriously low and very few ever make that leap into mainstream publication, let alone widespread mainstream success.