Podcasting "Self Publishing"
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, “Self-Publishing,” an essay about the structural shifts in the publishing industry over the past half-century and how and why that has driven people to try self-publishing.
https://doctorow.medium.com/self-publishing-41800468bcfe
The tale starts with the rise of Big Box stores, after Reagan’s deregulation got Sam Walton to take Walmart national. This concentrated the “mass market” — the huge, variegated world of pharmacy and grocery and cornerstore spinner racks that were the cradle of genre fiction.
The big boxes demanded a single national distribution system, and hundreds of local distributors — whose unionized Teamsters stocked the spinner racks based on long territorial experience — collapsed to a handful of database-driven decision-makers.
The number of titles for sale fell off a cliff. Writers who had a single underperforming book were no longer welcome in the big boxes and thus no longer economically viable (remember all those established writers who switched to pen-names? They were trying to beat this).
Monopoly begets monopoly. The predatory discounting of the big box stores put the squeeze on chain bookstores and indies. The chains merged and merged into a duopoly, while the indies underwent a mass die-off.
Publishers were caught in this squeeze: the two national bookstore chains and the big box stores demanded extra co-op payments, preferential discounts, and more generous credit and return policies. The publishers merged and merged, down to six (now four).
This also happened with trade distributors (who sold to bookstores, not the mass market) — the industry collapsed into a duopoly (today, it’s a monopoly, run by Ingram).
This is a familiar pattern across all monopolized industries.
As David Dayen described in MONOPOLIZED, this neatly parallels the monopolization of health care: pharma monopolized and gouged hospitals, who monopolized in self-defense and gouged insurers, who monopolized in self-defense.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu
Both monopolistic trends had the same end-point: after all the companies had finished monopolizing, the disorganized group of suppliers and workers were the only ones that the monopolies could strong-arm. In the case of hospitals, that’s health-workers and patients.
In publishing, it’s workers and writers. If you work in publishing and your resume is rejected by four companies, it has been rejected by every major publisher. If you’re a writer whose book is rejected by four publishers, then you’ve been rejected by every major house.
That’s why writers are now expected to give up graphic novel, audio, world English, and other valuable rights for the same advances — with fewer companies bidding on books, the likelihood that one will pay more or demand less goes down.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, some writers hoped that they’d be able to sidestep publishing by allying themselves with a different monopolized industry, locking themselves to Amazon’s platform. But as competition from publishers dwindled, so too did Amazon’s largesse.
The authors who shackled themselves to Amazon now face tens of millions of dollars in wage-theft. The solution to unfair treatment at the hands of giants isn’t to ally yourself with an even bigger giant and hope for its ongoing generosity.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx
A more promising sign is in the wave of mid-sized houses that have snapped up the workers shed by Big Publishing during mergers as well as the promising new publishing workers who are surplus to the Big Four’s needs.
These presses punch way above their weight, thanks in part to the number of great books that just don’t fit into the publishing needs of four giant houses. But as great as this is, it’s intrinsically precarious.
These mid-sized houses can’t stand up to the might of one distributor, one national bookseller, four big box stores, and one giant ecommerce monopoly. Earlier mass die-offs in indie publishing (like the American Marketing Services horror story) show how fragile this is.
Which brings us to self-publishing. There have never been more sophisticated tools for making polished, professional books on your own — Lulu.com, Smashwords, Bookbaby — and (thanks to layoffs) it’s never been easier to find publishing pros to help with that process.
But that’s not “publishing.” As Patrick Nielsen Hayden once told me (paraphrasing), “Publishing is identifying a work and an audience and doing whatever it takes bring the two together.” In other words, how do you convince people to give a shit about your book?
This is an incredibly hard problem. It’s the hard problem of advertising, religion and politics. There’s no established method for it because the attention wars are a race against adaptation — what worked yesterday won’t work today.
https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/
If you want to self-publish, you need to observe books like yours, identify how they are discovered by their audiences, formulate a plan to do the same, execute the plan, measure your results, and change the plan and do it again, and again, and again.
Publishers don’t just have systems and experts — they also have multiple data-points, a stream of books where they get to try different things, refine their successful tactics, and try again. You have a data-set with one point in it: you.
It follows that if you’re not prepared to work as hard (and well) at marketing, sales and promotion as you did at writing, you probably shouldn’t self-publish. Doing those things won’t guarantee your success, but without them, failure is all but assured.
That said, the one area where self-publishers can sometimes outdo publishers is accessing (parts of) the mass-market. The vast majority people aren’t “readers” (in the sense of being people who regularly buy books, go to bookstores, etc).
Every mega-bestseller is just a book that succeeded with a tiny sliver of nonreaders. And you might know more about a community of nonreaders — a faith group, fandom, subculture or political movement — than anyone in publishing.
If that’s the case, and if you are both diligent and lucky, you might be able to successfully market you book to that group and even leverage that success into a publishing deal that brings your book to “readers” — whom a publisher knows more about than you ever will.
I published by first book in 2000. Since then, I’ve published a couple dozen more, everything from novels for adults to YA novels to a middle-grades graphic novel to a picture book to essay and short story collections to book-length nonfiction.
I’ve published many books, including multiple bestsellers, with one of the Big Four publishers, and I’ve also published with several mid-sized boutique presses (some of which have merged with bigger publishers since).
I’ve successfully self-published, including a $267,000, record-smashing Kickstarter campaign. I’m a recovering bookseller and I’m unhealthily drawn to great bookstores, which are doing surprisingly well (thanks partly to Libro.fm and Bookshop.org).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book
Despite all this, I’m keenly aware that runaway consolidation makes my position as a worker in this system intrinsically precarious. The wonderful people in big publishing love books and treat me very well, but they can’t fix the system.
I’ve met sincere, talented people at Amazon doing their best to support publishing, but they can’t fix the system either. Neither can James Daunt, a true hero of bookselling who has come to America to transform Barnes and Noble.
Monopoly begets monopoly. If any part of the supply chain is allowed to monopolize, the rest will follow in self-defense, and it will always be the workers — the writers and staff — who struggle to push back.
That’s why the current resurgence of both trade-unionism and antitrust are so important. In a world whose outcomes are more determined by power relationship than by good intentions, the only way to secure workers’ futures is to make them stronger and make business weaker.
The essay is here:
https://doctorow.medium.com/self-publishing-41800468bcfe
The podcast episode is here:
https://craphound.com/news/2021/07/05/self-publishing/
The MP3 is here (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive, they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_396/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_396_-_Self_Publishing.mp3
And here’s my podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
