Publish and be damned
Do-it-yourself book publishing takes off on the Web. This really interests me. The fact the POD industry is proliferating means that there’s potential for keeping every book in print and for niche writers to find their audience, given that the big publishers spend all their marketing on one per cent of their writers and the small publishers have no marketing spend.
I have an ulterior motive too - my dad is author of two self-published books on shipwrecks around the Devon coast. (Check his site submerged for more). He’s sold over 5000 copies of each one over the last 10 years. Mainly by the simple expedient of going into every bookshop in the local area and cajoling them into taking a few copies. In the last two years this has become impossible because the booksellers can no longer deal directly with someone like my dad - he has to go to their distributor, who takes a huge cut for effectively doing nothing. But the net has become my dad’s new distribution channel - and through using the Amazon Advantage programme (as opposed to the Affiliates program) and Ebay, he’s managed to keep his sales constant. Pretty impressive for someone who couldn’t even operate a computer 2 years ago. More importantly, the initial print run of both books is now running low and there’s enough demand to warrant a second edition of each; but to do it the same as before means stumping up a considerable amount of cash and then having boxes of books strewn around the house.
So, POD could be the ideal solution for him. Of course, it’s easy to see these things as a panacea when they will inevitably bring their whole unique set of headaches to the production process - but with the learning curve of using a POD publisher completed, it paves the way to knocking out other titles much more easily.
The reason I’m quite passionate about this is that, obviously, it’s my dad’s work, so I want it to succeed - but also because my dad’s books are objectively Good Things In The World - they cover a lot of maritime history that would otherwise be wholly lost. Therefore he is the perfect candidate for using POD, as opposed to the god-awful self-indulgent vanity crap that so many people already use it to produce. 90 per cent of POD books are no doubt crap - but 90 percent of everything is crap.
What’s opening up here is a diamond of a chance amongst the shit of the publishing industry for authors to get their work not only published but distributed through wholly new channels. It’s not easy and it requires a lot of post-creative work on the part of the writer to get it done - but it is feasible. As JG Ballard recently commented, “Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it“. So - I think there’s a real chance here that POD will help distinctly shape the publishing industry and, more importantly, what becomes available to us, the readers. I await my father’s obscenity-fuelled emails concerning the incompetencies of online publishing with interest.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- When Authors Attack Interesting article in Wire…
- A magazine about books - what a novel idea
- Book Promotion and Macmillan New Writing List
- Completely Free Print On Demand
- Haruki Murakami in direct reader contact shocker
