4 ms·

For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers: Give Me A Break

29 points by cwan 16y ago

derefr 16y ago
The article's only alternative to a publisher is to "do everything yourself"—but that's not at all realistic. Most non-publisher-affiliated authors today contract their editor and marketer, just like they contract their agent. This is the future for publishers: turning into talent agencies authors hire from for market rates, rather than "owning" a stable of authors (and their works) and paying them peanuts off those works' earnings. This is what publishers really fear: not being made irrelevant, but being forced to the other side of the table.
- dnautics 16y ago
  Agreed. I'm not sure why these days, a writer can't find themeselves an editor. I was publishing a website and it wasn't so hard for me to find a friend that I paid for three progressive sessions of editing.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Sure they can find them, but at what cost? Having a full-length book (200 pages in 9 by 6) edited is going to cost $5000. Plus $500 for a jacket design, $5000 for marketing, a 1000 in expenses left and right - before you know it you're out 10k before you even sold your first copy, and not counting the hours you put in. Compare that to a published author: if you're an OK writer (no superstar but still sellable) you get a 10k advance (so that you can actually, you know, buy food and pay rent while you write), don't have to spend the 100's of extra hours in coordinating all the other tasks (during which you can work on your next book...) and generally live a much more secure life, with (much?) less risk. Most authors are just regular people who want to put their kids through school and live a good life, not ball-to-the-wall entrepreneurs who are 'going to make it big of crash' or whatever business bravado strong talk is in style this week. I don't understand where this hate against publishers comes from - don't people see that they're being used by people like Godin who, once they themselves have become successful the traditional way, are going to tell people that that's not the way to do it, and oh buy my book on how you should do it nowadays? PS no offense but if your frame of reference is 'I was publishing a website', let's say you weren't quite in the same spot most authors are (depending on the website, but when I assume your was 'average'...)
    - dnautics 16y ago
      no offense taken... sounds like there is a market need for some web based disintermediation? calling ycombinator...
- robryan 16y ago
  Maybe the publishers to realise this and react first will be the best placed going forward. Maybe there is some space for a startup which provided authors with high quality services. Similar to a rentacoder but you would probably want to develop strong contacts and position it for quality.
- sown 16y ago
  Is this similar to how movie studios operated in relation to actors way back when?
- naner 16y ago
  Not entirely true. There are tools like CreateSpace which cover a lot of the publishing and distribution part for you. You just have to send them a PDF. You're on your own for marketing, editing, and formatting, though.
kevinh 16y ago
This article was interesting, but it didn't present any particularly novel points of view. Yes, I know publishers provide services for authors, but it seemed as if the author repeated the same points over and over and completely glossed over the counter-arguments. He mentions the greater freedom that self-publishing allows, but then completely dismisses it and doesn't mention it again. For a persuasive piece, I thought it was weak. Personally, I would have rather had him interview a few people who were self-publishing and a few representatives for publishers and gotten both sides out there, rather than just the publisher's point of view.
patio11 16y ago
There are a lot of authors who seem to have Stockholm Syndrome. (I'm still fuming at about a half dozen of them who filled my inbox after I made a blog post about my love for Kindles and total, comprehensive lack-of-care for publishing houses. One of them explained, at length and with much profanity, that her publisher was her customer and I was just some slackjawed idiot allowed to read the book. I can only assume that she was saying what many think, because otherwise the "write a paying customer and tell them they should not be allowed to buy your product" trick those folks were pulling was just freaking bizarre.)
- teilo 16y ago
  That Is Hilarious. You just made my day.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Doctors - Insurance Companies - Patients : Writers - Publishers - Readers Didn't realize that was the analogy. Glad those authors cleared that up for us.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I could see that being true from a certain perspective. Many authors see themselves as being in a strange B2B market, where they function as manuscript producers, whose job is to sell manuscripts to manuscript-consuming businesses. The fact that the manuscripts are then used as raw-material inputs to manufacture products for a different market (printed books sold to readers via bookstores) isn't irrelevant, but can feel a bit disconnected.
wyclif 16y ago
I wish the author had divided the market into fiction and non-fiction for purposes of comparison. I don't have numbers, but I suspect non-fiction titles will be relegated to dead tree pulp in far greater numbers than fiction. I think Amazon eBook sales figures reflect this.
teilo 16y ago
I love Paul Carr, but he's wrong on this one. He may indeed love his publisher, but I have seen, far too often, struggling authors fighting with their publishers just to maintain control over their own works, much less get proper remuneration. Certainly, the problem is not as bad as it is in the music industry, but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works. Sorry, but the world is changing. It hasn't yet hit the publishing industry nearly so hard as it has hit the recording industry, but it will. Two things in particular almost guarantee it: First the digital revolution. The Kindle / Nook / etc., are not fads anymore than the iPod was a fad. The publishing world is going digital. Second, the publishing world will always have real ink and paper books (this is my industry, BTW) - but the technology is shifting rapidly toward print-on-demand. Lulu.com, with their fleet of Xerox iGen presses and web-to-bindery workflow has led the way giving everyone the ability to publish hard and soft covers one at a time, and make a profit doing so. I am already seeing mainline publishers doing similar for older works which are not economical to print on conventional presses. These works used to go out of print. Now they are being made available once more, because the publishers suddenly are able to print them at a profit, even if it is just one book for a single customer. But ironically, the more they embrace this technology, the more readily available it will be to smaller and smaller shops. Self-publishing - long an expensive proposition - is quickly becoming the norm for new authors, and it is only a matter of time before the marketing of such books will move to the web. Authors already tend to form their own communities, critiquing one another's works and encouraging them to improve and advance their art. The ability to do this on the web gives them a natural platform from which to market their works to a worldwide audience, without a publisher of any sort playing middle-man.
- cstross 16y ago
  but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works. No you don't. In fact, if your publisher asks you to assign your copyright to them, what you should do is walk away, very fast, and let the appropriate folks know that there's a scam artist on the loose. (Unless you're in a work-for-hire agreement, which is a whole different kettle of fish -- but not something you should stumble into by accident.) As for self-publishing becoming the norm for new writers ... you may be right: but that doesn't mean self-publishing will become a successful career path for those who take it. There are some fundamental differences between the music biz and writing which weigh the dice heavily against authors going it alone. (For example: bands can make money off live gigs and merchandise while using CDs and MP3s for promotion -- but when was the last time you went to hear some middle-aged guy read from his latest novel? And paid for the privilege?) The real rent-seeking middle-men in the publishing business aren't the publishers, but the distribution chains and customer-facing retail outlets -- of whom Amazon and Lulu are two. They chow down around 60-70% of the revenue in the retail book trade. My reading of the "why not publish it yourself?" propaganda is that it's promoted by POD imprints and folks like Amazon, who anticipate getting much more favourable terms from sole traders and clueless wannabes than they can currently obtain from the major publishers. Sure you can self-publish -- but you're still going to have to deal with the retail distribution supply chain. And there be dragons ...
danbmil99 16y ago
The system works for him, he's got his. Why would someone who's won the old-boy-network lottery want to tear down that edifice?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
edanm 16y ago
My summary: Publishers do a lot of things authors need. They're like companies that "hire" programmers in a way - they give programmers a more direct route from "writing code" to "making money". Sure, some programmers could go and create a startup, but the vast majority prefer working for someone else. In a similar way, publishers provide authors with a few important things: * Editors * Fact-checkers * Marketing * A filter for the public against bad books * Legal help and protection * Most importantly, an advance. This means guaranteed money for the author, regardless of the book being a success. Publishers can afford this by "funding" lots of authors. Without this, a lot of authors could probably never keep working long enough to make a decent living. My biggest takeaway is that there are a lot of problems going from the old world of publishers, to the perhaps-inevitable future. Startups which attack any of the things above which publishers provide authors, but do so in an innovative way, could become huge and successful, and help define the future.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  It's suddenly struck me how important an advance is. It seems that there's lots of money to be made by giving people who aren't good with money a small slice of future income right now, see the music industry, publishing and payday loans. That last one just strips away all the pretence and is a usually fairly bad deal loan. The others build up a whole industry to justify the money they take. Maybe there's a future in VC for authors/musicians?
postfuturist 16y ago
Publishers are damn thieves, at least as far as educational textbooks go. A decent portion of a student's budget is in books. It's a waste of money and tree pulp. Full disclosure: I teach a programming course or two at a local university.
lsc 16y ago
eh, honestly, I think the publisher-hate is as much from non-authors than authors. Now, of course, if you are an author, and you don't need what a publisher provides, by all means, go at it without a publisher. Modern technology now means that many of the things that were the exclusive domain of the publishers are now available to even us little guys. But, speaking as an author, I /do/ need what the publisher provides, therefore I went with a publisher rather than going it alone. And this is common and valid as well. Now, in my field, Technical books, very few authors expect to more than pay for the pizza consumed while writing. Anyone remotely qualified to write a technical book can likely make a lot more money in less time consulting. You write a technical book to educate people, and to give yourself credibility. Really, trading away the bulk of the money in exchange for that credibility would be a good deal by itself; the fact that the publisher also takes care of all the minutia of actually manufacturing the books and getting them out to the stores is just gravy. Hell, in my case, the publisher talked me in to writing the book in the first place, and rode me until I actually finished it; something I almost certainly would not have done on my own. I mean, to give you some idea, "The book of Xen" took me and a guy who is better than I am three years to write. We've sold something like two thousand copies. Even if we kept $30 a pop (about what amazon sells the thing for) that's only $60,000; maybe half a year's pay for one of the two people doing it (counting benefits, etc...) Now, we wern't working three years full time, but it was more than 6 months full time, and this ate some of our best and most productive hours. Now, of course, in reality, my friend and I split 15 percent of the wholesale price, which is something like half the cover price, so we earned considerably less than we would have if we could have moved that many books on our own and paid zero for printing. Yeah, if you are Knuth, you move a lot more books than I can. But, if you are Knuth, you can also make a lot more money doing other things. Would you give Knuth a cut of equity to sit on your board? I would. So yeah; money (at least money directly from book sales) is not the reason why anyone writes a technical book, so it doesn't really matter that the publisher takes a cut. The number one thing a publisher brings is: Credibility. Next time you are at a cocktail party, mention you are working on a book. I guarantee, the first thing someone sizing you up will ask is "do you have a publisher?" I mean, there are many other useful things my publisher did for me, but the credibility is at the top of the list. Even assuming near superhuman levels of perseverance, enough to hire and supervise a good editor, etc... I still couldn't gain that credibility by myself. Figure out how to replace the credibility function of publishers, and you will have a reason for technical authors to publish indie.
jrockway 16y ago
Publishers are hit or miss. I wrote a tech book for Packt a few years ago, and while I wouldn't use the expression "disaster", I do have trouble finding any value they added. I got lots of complaints about the typesetting. I was required to write the book in Word, and that's what they used for typesetting. The book looks like a big Word doc printed out. If I had self-published, I would not have made such an elementary mistake. I got lots of complaints about various grammar/spelling issues. Guess what guys, those were "edited" into the final version without my approval. I don't use expressions like "do the needful". I got lots of complaints about the overall flow of the book. I had technical reviewers, but nobody commented on this part. The technical reviewers were not instructed to do anything but check that I spelled "sqlite3" as "sqlite3" and not "sqltie3". They did that, but some deeper insight would have been helpful. Finally, I noticed the book was up on TPB before it was actually published. Can we say, "leak"? So anyway, there are lots of publishers out there that are happy to take 95% of your income. This is a poor deal in most cases. (Best part is, there was a second edition of my book that came out not so long ago. I asked to have my name removed, and I'm glad it was. The new edition is basically my original text, with occasional mis-grammered boxes that say things like, "The above advice is wrong." It's like someone published their superficial notes, and called it a second edition. LOL.)
acabal 16y ago
My startup is a site for aspiring writers so I get to hear different sides of this argument a lot. I, for one, am completely certain that e-books and self-publishing will not sound the death-knell of big publishing houses. Once the publishers get used to the concept of digital, it'll just be another avenue of sales for them. I say this for most of the reasons Paul lists in this article, but the big one is this: Publishers act as gatekeepers to quality. If anyone with a pulse can publish an e-book and sell it online, it's impossible to tell if the book is good. The only way to find out is to read it, which to many is a huge time commitment. If you're going to commit a few days of your time to something that you hope will entertain or enlighten you, you sure as hell don't want to waste that time on a sub-par book. Buying a book from an established publisher guarantees that at least an objective third party has read this book and thinks it's worth other people's time, and that same third party has edited the book to ensure a certain level of quality in the writing, grammar, and spelling. On the other hand, spending $19.99 on a PDF file called "Eternal Moonlight: The Vampire Chronicles" that you downloaded from a random guy's blog has no guarantee that anybody but his mom signed off on it. Does anyone want to waste a weekend reading that when they could read something that at least a small committee (the publisher) has decided is worth your time and money? Finally, the marketing and legal aspect is huge as well. I interact with many authors every day. They don't understand that writing the book is only half the battle. As with any business venture, marketing is just as, if not more important than, the act of writing. You can write The Great American Novel but it'll die in a landfill if nobody knows they should read it. Writers assume that if they write something truly incredible that cherubs will descend from the heavens and magically lift their book into the hands of the slobbering masses without any effort on the author's part. This, of course, is a fantasy, and publishers provide the incredibly important marketing muscle to promote a great book to an already media-saturated public. So, in short, having spent the last few years surrounded by authors, publishers, and web 2.0 entrepreneurs, I'm totally confident in agreeing with this article because I've been making these exact same points for a while now myself :)
- wccrawford 16y ago
  I think your 'a committee approved this book' bit is completely wrong. I have seen a TON of really, really bad books that got published through large publishers. I've also ready really, really good books that got rejected for them. Publishers don't publish what they think is good. They publish what they think will -sell-. It's quite a bit different.

29 points by cwan 16y ago

The article's only alternative to a publisher is to "do everything yourself"—but that's not at all realistic. Most non-publisher-affiliated authors today contract their editor and marketer, just like they contract their agent. This is the future for publishers: turning into talent agencies authors hire from for market rates, rather than "owning" a stable of authors (and their works) and paying them peanuts off those works' earnings. This is what publishers really fear: not being made irrelevant, but being forced to the other side of the table.

dnautics 16y ago
Agreed. I'm not sure why these days, a writer can't find themeselves an editor. I was publishing a website and it wasn't so hard for me to find a friend that I paid for three progressive sessions of editing.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Sure they can find them, but at what cost? Having a full-length book (200 pages in 9 by 6) edited is going to cost $5000. Plus $500 for a jacket design, $5000 for marketing, a 1000 in expenses left and right - before you know it you're out 10k before you even sold your first copy, and not counting the hours you put in. Compare that to a published author: if you're an OK writer (no superstar but still sellable) you get a 10k advance (so that you can actually, you know, buy food and pay rent while you write), don't have to spend the 100's of extra hours in coordinating all the other tasks (during which you can work on your next book...) and generally live a much more secure life, with (much?) less risk. Most authors are just regular people who want to put their kids through school and live a good life, not ball-to-the-wall entrepreneurs who are 'going to make it big of crash' or whatever business bravado strong talk is in style this week. I don't understand where this hate against publishers comes from - don't people see that they're being used by people like Godin who, once they themselves have become successful the traditional way, are going to tell people that that's not the way to do it, and oh buy my book on how you should do it nowadays? PS no offense but if your frame of reference is 'I was publishing a website', let's say you weren't quite in the same spot most authors are (depending on the website, but when I assume your was 'average'...)
  - dnautics 16y ago
    no offense taken... sounds like there is a market need for some web based disintermediation? calling ycombinator...
robryan 16y ago
Maybe the publishers to realise this and react first will be the best placed going forward. Maybe there is some space for a startup which provided authors with high quality services. Similar to a rentacoder but you would probably want to develop strong contacts and position it for quality.
sown 16y ago
Is this similar to how movie studios operated in relation to actors way back when?
naner 16y ago
Not entirely true. There are tools like CreateSpace which cover a lot of the publishing and distribution part for you. You just have to send them a PDF. You're on your own for marketing, editing, and formatting, though.

kevinh 16y ago

This article was interesting, but it didn't present any particularly novel points of view. Yes, I know publishers provide services for authors, but it seemed as if the author repeated the same points over and over and completely glossed over the counter-arguments. He mentions the greater freedom that self-publishing allows, but then completely dismisses it and doesn't mention it again. For a persuasive piece, I thought it was weak. Personally, I would have rather had him interview a few people who were self-publishing and a few representatives for publishers and gotten both sides out there, rather than just the publisher's point of view.

patio11 16y ago

There are a lot of authors who seem to have Stockholm Syndrome. (I'm still fuming at about a half dozen of them who filled my inbox after I made a blog post about my love for Kindles and total, comprehensive lack-of-care for publishing houses. One of them explained, at length and with much profanity, that her publisher was her customer and I was just some slackjawed idiot allowed to read the book. I can only assume that she was saying what many think, because otherwise the "write a paying customer and tell them they should not be allowed to buy your product" trick those folks were pulling was just freaking bizarre.)

teilo 16y ago
That Is Hilarious. You just made my day.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Doctors - Insurance Companies - Patients : Writers - Publishers - Readers Didn't realize that was the analogy. Glad those authors cleared that up for us.
_delirium 16y ago
I could see that being true from a certain perspective. Many authors see themselves as being in a strange B2B market, where they function as manuscript producers, whose job is to sell manuscripts to manuscript-consuming businesses. The fact that the manuscripts are then used as raw-material inputs to manufacture products for a different market (printed books sold to readers via bookstores) isn't irrelevant, but can feel a bit disconnected.

wyclif 16y ago

I wish the author had divided the market into fiction and non-fiction for purposes of comparison. I don't have numbers, but I suspect non-fiction titles will be relegated to dead tree pulp in far greater numbers than fiction. I think Amazon eBook sales figures reflect this.

teilo 16y ago

I love Paul Carr, but he's wrong on this one. He may indeed love his publisher, but I have seen, far too often, struggling authors fighting with their publishers just to maintain control over their own works, much less get proper remuneration. Certainly, the problem is not as bad as it is in the music industry, but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works. Sorry, but the world is changing. It hasn't yet hit the publishing industry nearly so hard as it has hit the recording industry, but it will. Two things in particular almost guarantee it: First the digital revolution. The Kindle / Nook / etc., are not fads anymore than the iPod was a fad. The publishing world is going digital. Second, the publishing world will always have real ink and paper books (this is my industry, BTW) - but the technology is shifting rapidly toward print-on-demand. Lulu.com, with their fleet of Xerox iGen presses and web-to-bindery workflow has led the way giving everyone the ability to publish hard and soft covers one at a time, and make a profit doing so. I am already seeing mainline publishers doing similar for older works which are not economical to print on conventional presses. These works used to go out of print. Now they are being made available once more, because the publishers suddenly are able to print them at a profit, even if it is just one book for a single customer. But ironically, the more they embrace this technology, the more readily available it will be to smaller and smaller shops. Self-publishing - long an expensive proposition - is quickly becoming the norm for new authors, and it is only a matter of time before the marketing of such books will move to the web. Authors already tend to form their own communities, critiquing one another's works and encouraging them to improve and advance their art. The ability to do this on the web gives them a natural platform from which to market their works to a worldwide audience, without a publisher of any sort playing middle-man.

cstross 16y ago
but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works. No you don't. In fact, if your publisher asks you to assign your copyright to them, what you should do is walk away, very fast, and let the appropriate folks know that there's a scam artist on the loose. (Unless you're in a work-for-hire agreement, which is a whole different kettle of fish -- but not something you should stumble into by accident.) As for self-publishing becoming the norm for new writers ... you may be right: but that doesn't mean self-publishing will become a successful career path for those who take it. There are some fundamental differences between the music biz and writing which weigh the dice heavily against authors going it alone. (For example: bands can make money off live gigs and merchandise while using CDs and MP3s for promotion -- but when was the last time you went to hear some middle-aged guy read from his latest novel? And paid for the privilege?) The real rent-seeking middle-men in the publishing business aren't the publishers, but the distribution chains and customer-facing retail outlets -- of whom Amazon and Lulu are two. They chow down around 60-70% of the revenue in the retail book trade. My reading of the "why not publish it yourself?" propaganda is that it's promoted by POD imprints and folks like Amazon, who anticipate getting much more favourable terms from sole traders and clueless wannabes than they can currently obtain from the major publishers. Sure you can self-publish -- but you're still going to have to deal with the retail distribution supply chain. And there be dragons ...

danbmil99 16y ago

The system works for him, he's got his. Why would someone who's won the old-boy-network lottery want to tear down that edifice?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

edanm 16y ago

My summary: Publishers do a lot of things authors need. They're like companies that "hire" programmers in a way - they give programmers a more direct route from "writing code" to "making money". Sure, some programmers could go and create a startup, but the vast majority prefer working for someone else. In a similar way, publishers provide authors with a few important things: * Editors * Fact-checkers * Marketing * A filter for the public against bad books * Legal help and protection * Most importantly, an advance. This means guaranteed money for the author, regardless of the book being a success. Publishers can afford this by "funding" lots of authors. Without this, a lot of authors could probably never keep working long enough to make a decent living. My biggest takeaway is that there are a lot of problems going from the old world of publishers, to the perhaps-inevitable future. Startups which attack any of the things above which publishers provide authors, but do so in an innovative way, could become huge and successful, and help define the future.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
It's suddenly struck me how important an advance is. It seems that there's lots of money to be made by giving people who aren't good with money a small slice of future income right now, see the music industry, publishing and payday loans. That last one just strips away all the pretence and is a usually fairly bad deal loan. The others build up a whole industry to justify the money they take. Maybe there's a future in VC for authors/musicians?

postfuturist 16y ago

Publishers are damn thieves, at least as far as educational textbooks go. A decent portion of a student's budget is in books. It's a waste of money and tree pulp. Full disclosure: I teach a programming course or two at a local university.

lsc 16y ago

eh, honestly, I think the publisher-hate is as much from non-authors than authors. Now, of course, if you are an author, and you don't need what a publisher provides, by all means, go at it without a publisher. Modern technology now means that many of the things that were the exclusive domain of the publishers are now available to even us little guys. But, speaking as an author, I /do/ need what the publisher provides, therefore I went with a publisher rather than going it alone. And this is common and valid as well. Now, in my field, Technical books, very few authors expect to more than pay for the pizza consumed while writing. Anyone remotely qualified to write a technical book can likely make a lot more money in less time consulting. You write a technical book to educate people, and to give yourself credibility. Really, trading away the bulk of the money in exchange for that credibility would be a good deal by itself; the fact that the publisher also takes care of all the minutia of actually manufacturing the books and getting them out to the stores is just gravy. Hell, in my case, the publisher talked me in to writing the book in the first place, and rode me until I actually finished it; something I almost certainly would not have done on my own. I mean, to give you some idea, "The book of Xen" took me and a guy who is better than I am three years to write. We've sold something like two thousand copies. Even if we kept $30 a pop (about what amazon sells the thing for) that's only $60,000; maybe half a year's pay for one of the two people doing it (counting benefits, etc...) Now, we wern't working three years full time, but it was more than 6 months full time, and this ate some of our best and most productive hours. Now, of course, in reality, my friend and I split 15 percent of the wholesale price, which is something like half the cover price, so we earned considerably less than we would have if we could have moved that many books on our own and paid zero for printing. Yeah, if you are Knuth, you move a lot more books than I can. But, if you are Knuth, you can also make a lot more money doing other things. Would you give Knuth a cut of equity to sit on your board? I would. So yeah; money (at least money directly from book sales) is not the reason why anyone writes a technical book, so it doesn't really matter that the publisher takes a cut. The number one thing a publisher brings is: Credibility. Next time you are at a cocktail party, mention you are working on a book. I guarantee, the first thing someone sizing you up will ask is "do you have a publisher?" I mean, there are many other useful things my publisher did for me, but the credibility is at the top of the list. Even assuming near superhuman levels of perseverance, enough to hire and supervise a good editor, etc... I still couldn't gain that credibility by myself. Figure out how to replace the credibility function of publishers, and you will have a reason for technical authors to publish indie.

jrockway 16y ago

Publishers are hit or miss. I wrote a tech book for Packt a few years ago, and while I wouldn't use the expression "disaster", I do have trouble finding any value they added. I got lots of complaints about the typesetting. I was required to write the book in Word, and that's what they used for typesetting. The book looks like a big Word doc printed out. If I had self-published, I would not have made such an elementary mistake. I got lots of complaints about various grammar/spelling issues. Guess what guys, those were "edited" into the final version without my approval. I don't use expressions like "do the needful". I got lots of complaints about the overall flow of the book. I had technical reviewers, but nobody commented on this part. The technical reviewers were not instructed to do anything but check that I spelled "sqlite3" as "sqlite3" and not "sqltie3". They did that, but some deeper insight would have been helpful. Finally, I noticed the book was up on TPB before it was actually published. Can we say, "leak"? So anyway, there are lots of publishers out there that are happy to take 95% of your income. This is a poor deal in most cases. (Best part is, there was a second edition of my book that came out not so long ago. I asked to have my name removed, and I'm glad it was. The new edition is basically my original text, with occasional mis-grammered boxes that say things like, "The above advice is wrong." It's like someone published their superficial notes, and called it a second edition. LOL.)

acabal 16y ago

My startup is a site for aspiring writers so I get to hear different sides of this argument a lot. I, for one, am completely certain that e-books and self-publishing will not sound the death-knell of big publishing houses. Once the publishers get used to the concept of digital, it'll just be another avenue of sales for them. I say this for most of the reasons Paul lists in this article, but the big one is this: Publishers act as gatekeepers to quality. If anyone with a pulse can publish an e-book and sell it online, it's impossible to tell if the book is good. The only way to find out is to read it, which to many is a huge time commitment. If you're going to commit a few days of your time to something that you hope will entertain or enlighten you, you sure as hell don't want to waste that time on a sub-par book. Buying a book from an established publisher guarantees that at least an objective third party has read this book and thinks it's worth other people's time, and that same third party has edited the book to ensure a certain level of quality in the writing, grammar, and spelling. On the other hand, spending $19.99 on a PDF file called "Eternal Moonlight: The Vampire Chronicles" that you downloaded from a random guy's blog has no guarantee that anybody but his mom signed off on it. Does anyone want to waste a weekend reading that when they could read something that at least a small committee (the publisher) has decided is worth your time and money? Finally, the marketing and legal aspect is huge as well. I interact with many authors every day. They don't understand that writing the book is only half the battle. As with any business venture, marketing is just as, if not more important than, the act of writing. You can write The Great American Novel but it'll die in a landfill if nobody knows they should read it. Writers assume that if they write something truly incredible that cherubs will descend from the heavens and magically lift their book into the hands of the slobbering masses without any effort on the author's part. This, of course, is a fantasy, and publishers provide the incredibly important marketing muscle to promote a great book to an already media-saturated public. So, in short, having spent the last few years surrounded by authors, publishers, and web 2.0 entrepreneurs, I'm totally confident in agreeing with this article because I've been making these exact same points for a while now myself :)

wccrawford 16y ago
I think your 'a committee approved this book' bit is completely wrong. I have seen a TON of really, really bad books that got published through large publishers. I've also ready really, really good books that got rejected for them. Publishers don't publish what they think is good. They publish what they think will -sell-. It's quite a bit different.