The Stigma of Self-Publishing

Self-publishing in any form carried a heavy stigma as recently as five years ago. Even three years. Many things have changed since them, though, and I would be surprised if they were to change back, ever. That means we are at a turning point in history on the scale of the invention of the printing press itself.

Historically—meaning the late aughts (00s) and a century or three before—if you had a manuscript you wanted published, you had two choices. You could cast yourself into the crucible by submitting your manuscript to publishers and hoping someone at least read it, and if you were really lucky they might include comments upon rejection, and maybe someday after enough rejections and luck and dogged determination, magic would happen and you’d get into the system. Or you could skip all of that and pay to print up copies of your own book, and try to sell them by mail or in small bookstores.

In a way, nothing has changed, in the sense that these are still your choices. Submitting a manuscript to publishers is, I’m told, basically the same procedure now as ever. The thing that has changed is that self-publishing has become a practical option, partly thanks to ebooks/e-reader technology and, frankly, largely due to business decisions by Amazon that have made them unpopular in various quarters.

The process of submitting a manuscript through the publishing chain is so miserable that many writers are disheartened long before they even try. I can’t speak authoritatively about this from either side, but I’ve seen nothing that convinces me anything’s changed there. I’m not saying success via this route is impossible, and I’m not even making the statement that the alternative is necessarily better in most cases. But there are a lot more things you have to overlook to go this route these days.

Conversely, the process of self-publishing has changed massively. I’ll likely go into more tech detail down the road, because this post is about perception, not practice. But the short version is that you write your book, ideally hire a story editor and a copy editor when you’ve got it as far as you can on your own, decide when you think it’s done, then format it or hire someone to format it as an ebook (in one or two formats depending on where you want to sell it), and post it up. From there it’s a question of marketing it, which is a whole other discussion.

You can also set up your book for print on demand if you want to try to sell physical copies, or be able to produce them for various marketing-related reasons. The economics of print on demand are still very much less attractive for both writer and reader. So I view it as a loss leader and check-box-tick more than a plausible moneymaking option, but I am likely to research this more later and report on it separately, and maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong, who knows.

All of this machinery makes it possible to publish your own novel (or other book) with historic low levels of difficulty and cost. That’s not really what makes it work, though—this is:

1. The fact that Amazon (and other stores following their model to a greater or lesser extent) are willing to sell basically any ebook that an author takes seriously enough to format properly. This means that rather than trying to peddle copies of a physical printed book in small town bookstores one by one, you post it on 1-3 ebook stores and you’re available worldwide.
2. The fact that readers—customers—are willing to base their puchasing decisions on, and gush or vent spleen via, the typical internet-style rating and review system. This is such a huge factor that it is hard to keep perspective on how big of a change this has really been for writers and readers…and it happened so subtly that it’s been hard to even notice.

For now let’s stay focused on perception. As a reader of genre fiction, in my case urban fantasy and sci-fi, I will often look for a new series, buy one book in the series, and if I like it, buy the rest in one pass. I would do this based on the publisher’s blurb, same as from the jacket of the physical book, and the ebook versions might cost a little less than the physical book, or in some insane cases where the publisher and not Amazon sets the price, quite a bit more.

Nowadays the process is the same except that there are many self-published ebooks/series out there to choose from as well. These are almost always cheaper, but otherwise unless you’re paying attention to the details of the sales page, that might be your only clue that it was self-published.

Historically, self-published books had a greater chance of weak content, from trite stories down to spelling and grammatical errors. This is, of course, still a potential issue. But then again, I’ve seen all these things in standard-publisher-published ebooks, too.

This is why #2 above, ratings and reviews, are so important. Really this is the only thing that matters now. An urban legend, which may also be true, says that Abraham Lincoln once endorsed a product by saying ”people who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like.” That’s exactly what these reviews achieve, without the facetious undertone.

To wrap this up so we can move on to other topics, it boils down to this: if you are willing to bet your book’s success on your own judgment as to its quality, and your willingness to take on 100% of its marketing, you have a receptive place to offer it up for sale. You have a large and growing audience of ravenous readers who are looking for more of what they like. If you can get your ebook in front of them somehow, via linked also-likes or paid ads or whatever it takes, they will see it right alongside mainstream-published books. They will take it as seriously as the title, cover, blurb and sample pages deserve. And they do not care if it came from a publisher. They will judge it based on the reviews written by their peers.

And like that (*snap*), the stigma of self-publishing was gone.

I’m willing to go even further. I would stipulate that—and I base this on nothing but my own opinion as a heavy reader and once-and-future writer—we will start seeing genre fiction that takes more risks and deviates from formula in more interesting ways than publishers can afford to experiment with. Granted, if an author goes too far afield, he will pay the price for failure alone…but if he strikes a chord, this sort of thing can make his career. I think we’re going to see a lot of self-published ebooks coming out that will actually be better than a lot of the same-old that publishers have to put out to keep their finances predictable.

Of course on the flip side we’re always going to see a lot of crap the author should not have self-published because it wasn’t ready or good enough. But then, Sturgeon’s Law applies equally no matter who does the publishing.

Is this revolution good or bad for publishers? The answer isn’t as obvious as I originally assumed…