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Comments
Hmm. I guess I, personally, am not really worried about a decline. There'll always be decent stuff out there, and people who take care to better themselves and put out the best possible product. Hopefully I'm not being too defensive.
Worst comes to worst, I could imagine a dip in self-publishing if it becomes extraordinarily difficult to find the good stuff, but that's where another paradigm shift would be handy.
It's definitely a step forwards in terms of people being able to get their works out there.
It's just, with the decline of traditional publishing houses, you're missing out on a lot of the benefits they brought out- for example, advertising, or the large number of authors that agree to read works for publishing houses and add the weight of their opinion to them.
It's a step forwards in terms of aspiring authors getting their works out into the world, but it's verging on a step backwards for being able to inform people about their works.
Part of this is due to the sheer volume of works being produced online. Any single story is likely to just get lost in the noise unless steps are taken to ensure it isn't or the author gets very lucky.
Mm. I think we'll have to see how it turns out; as it is, I honestly haven't seen much to indicate that it's hugely different from traditional publishing, in the end. There are still the highly improbably success stories (see: Joe Konrath made $100,000 in three weeks off of Amazon, when he was very unsuccessful before that), and there are still people who seek assistance in putting out the most professional product, to the point where subsidy presses offer a plethora of extra features and services (maybe not well-priced, granted). At least, I've seen it posited that there's a notable difference between self-publishing and assisted self-publishing, with the latter being my personal ideal.
I think you should give this a read. And this.
Self-publishing is not bad, necessarily, but it's not a step forward in every respect- and there are many, many, many failures in the self-publishing market.
I pretty much already knew the gist of that stuff, though. I don't know how much I ended up covering in the ten links I put in my first post, but that's already stuff that I was aware of, that needs considering. Well, maybe not all the details about Paolini, but I don't exactly want to set him up as an exemplar of self-publishing, if it can be avoided.
The difficulties with financial compensation, I was aware of, especially. I phrased something poorly, in a previous post: I definitely don't think self-publishing has fixed that much as it is. I just think it has the potential to be a bigger step in the right direction than traditional publishing, and, as something new and exciting in its successes, it's more interesting to hope for it to succeed.
Out of curiosity, how did you come across those particular links? Was it just a Google search?
But Paolini is one of the biggest points to consider about self-publishing.
Paolini wrote Eragon and self-published it. It didn't exactly sell a lot when it was self-published, but then a publisher saw it and picked it up- and, with the publisher's backing, it became a huge success. It's important to note that this would never have happened if he had skipped either of these steps; if he had not self-published his book, he never would have been able to publish it at all, and if a publishing house had not picked it up, without the name of the publisher and the advertising of the book behind it, it would not have been the massive hit it is.
I understand that you don't want to use Paolini because his story is terrible, but he is an excellent example in both self-publishing and traditional-publishing, and to skip over him is to lose that aspect of it to consider.
It's something to consider, but there are definitely drawbacks.
In the end, the best way to go about it would be... well, actually, the balance we have now; both traditional publishing, allowing for editorial staff to ensure at least some quality and with a budget behind it, and self-publishing, allowing niche authors and otherwise unsuccessful authors to publish their works.
One of my assignments earlier in the year was to write an essay on the benefits of publishing versus self-publishing. On the discussion of it on the class forum, my teacher linked the first article, and I found the second one while surfing the internet.
That's definitely true. I'm not saying that he (or E.L. James, as another example) doesn't show a good example of the success that can be had from self-publishing, or later moving on. I was just kind of affecting my biases into that statement, yeah.
I sorta kind of agree, though I think traditional publishing needs some serious re-tooling. This blog on the matter was pretty eye-opening, for me. I guess, what I would consider ideal is a merger of the successful aspects of each publishing style: take the efficiency and accessibility of self-publishing/e-booking, and staff self-publishing presses with the editorial staffs that have ensured quality in the literary world for so long, up to this point, or even just workshops comprised of the writers who have already submitted things for publishing. Essentially, don't outright reject a manuscript (unless its writer clearly doesn't know the craft in the slightest), because someone out there will pay to read it, but make sure it's at its best. Although this level of impediment could counteract the ease of online publishing . . . but there really should be a definite screening process in place, there, so I wouldn't feel too bad.
Ah. I found all of my links either through Google or by clicking onto sources from those articles, to get primary sources.
That article is strange.
It purports to be about traditional publishing versus self-publishing, but it is not- it is about the production of printed books versus the production of electronic books.
They may seem to be the same thing, but they are not, and it is puzzling that the article treats them as if they are.
Traditional publishing companies have been slow to catch on, but they do, indeed, sell E-books, even if their primary product is still printed books. And many companies that specialize in self-publishing produce printed books as well as e-books (and calendars and the like, too).
I just don't know what point that article is trying to make.
Maybe it is just the article's self-aggrandizing tone that is disagreeing with me, though. It just rubs me the wrong way, I think the author of the piece is very full of themselves.
That would solve some problems, but it would not solve others.
For example, we already have publishers who will publish most books sent their way, because they know some people will buy them. They make sure the books are readable, and then send them on to be published.
They are called Harlequin romance novels.
I think this image is also worth noting:
I was mostly in it for insights into the industry by someone who's apparently somewhat successful. I was surprised at the practices that apparently go on, and I didn't pay as much attention to the author herself. I couldn't care less about the FightWinBrave stuff.
I don't read romance novels, but are you saying that this would be bad if applied to other literature?
What other problems would that idea not solve?
That image seems like a non-sequitur, here. I wasn't going to dispute statistical data or anything.
man, fuck that post
Ah. Could be because this was the first link I had found to that effect, since I've just gotten in on this whole debate in the last couple of days. :V
I guess I figured that's what it is. Yeah, I admit that I wouldn't want that to happen to the other genres. But I don't know if it's inherent to self-publishing as a whole, just because it's been accurate so far. I guess, the way I figure it, in light of your comments (and my recollection that my paper didn't actually involve me advocating for one outcome or the other (I think; I wrote it this morning, so I can barely remember it, you understand), so much as me arguing that this could be a very big change in the literary market, provided the movement moves in the right direction): the rise of self-publishing will hopefully force the literary market to shapeshift into something that is just not stagnant. That means filtering for quality, yes, but it also means that traditional publishing needs to continue to follow trends (such as e-booking catching on, and social media altering the way authors advertise), in order to get out of the stagnancy and complacency that it had developed, by giving bestselling authors priority over up-and-comers who might actually have more talent, and who might simply require dedicated advertisement and acknowledgement via review spots. Ultimately, I'll defend the assertion that the industries need to continue to work with each other, and hopefully get better about that, rather than having each side continue being skeptical of the other.
No worries. I was posting on no sleep before (still am, technically), so I'm probably making less sense, and you'll notice that I'm having to adjust my views frequently, since you have more experience with this subject than I do.
Definitely. I was just confused by the way that it was brought up, since it was mentioned directly after debate.
You need to stop being so hard on yourself, that was entirely understandable.
Okay, let me ramble on here for a little while, please.
At the moment, the single biggest crisis befalling traditional publishing is the rise of e-books.
There's a variety of reasons for this. E-books are more accessible, in that they are cheaper and easy to get hold of; they are often more convenient when you are on a train or on a long car ride or something like that; and so on, so forth. The many reasons why a lot of people like e-books are commonly known at this point.
This is affecting traditional publishing companies in big ways, because they rely upon the normal way in order to... make their money, I guess. And with a lot of authors moving to publishing e-books, they are losing this.
This ties into the traditional publishing debate versus the self-publishing debate earlier, because many of the authors turning to e-books are self-publishing them online, rather than going through traditional publishers.
On a regular book, authors generally earn two forms of pay; they get an advance, which is an amount of money given to the author before the book is sold (J.K. Rowling got an advance of $4,000 when she sent in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; Stephanie Meyers got an advance of $750,000 on Twilight.) Then, they get royalties, which is generally somewhere around the 10% mark of the RRP of the book (the price quoted on the back of the book). The royalties must pay off the advance first (e.g. $4,000 of those royalties went back to Rowling's publisher before she started receiving any).
Self-publishing allows authors to bypass this immediately. This is good for both the authors and the consumers- the author is able to sell the book for $2.50 a pop, which is the same amount they would have earned on a $25 book, and the customer receives the book for a tenth of the usual price.
This is also terrible for many publishers, though, because they are losing out on the money that allowed them to become successful in the first place.
This might seem like a "Too bad, so sad" thing, and I guess it might be, as that does seem like a bit of a rip off. However, much of that money goes towards- well, the printing, and the hiring of the editors that ensure consistent quality, and all that stuff. They don't always earn a lot of money.
I've kind of lost my point.
No, I found it again.
The current market trend is pushing towards collapsing traditional publishing entirely. While this might not seem like such a bad thing considering what I mentioned, consider the things I mentioned earlier- about how publishers did maintain a certain level of quality.
I guess my point is that, with the rise of self-publishing, the decline of traditional publishing is also coming towards us. And this sucks, because quite honestly, traditional publishing is a good thing in many aspects in terms of the quality of the material we receive.
That's a fair argument. Given that we have yet to see more intricate interactions between the two publishing forms, let alone the fall of one or the other, I think time will tell. I'm just holding out faith that the outcome will be for the better, even if my particular hypothesis turns out to be wrong. I have faith in the triumvirate of authors, publishers, and consumers, to create a better industry than what was had before, whatever form it may take.
In the end, it is not as if good books will disappear entirely. That would never happen- there are too many talented authors out there.
It is just... that refinement and unspoken promise of quality implied by the publisher's logo that will be missing, I guess.
And that sucks, because I like that stuff.
I think if traditional publishers were currently doing a good job of maintaining quality standards, they wouldn't be in as much danger of declining.
But...frankly, while all else being equal, I'd see a book from a traditional publisher as slightly more likely to be good, the difference isn't that huge. Decades of being the only game in town have sapped them of much of their competence.
No, I do not think so.
The biggest issue with traditional publishers is not the quality of the books they are selling; rather, it is the consumers moving on to a different set of wants.
You will notice that the venue the consumers are moving on to (e-books on sites such as Amazon) are still doing a fantastic trade, even though they are not ensuring a more consistent quality within their products than traditional publishers.
It may be that if they had enforced a higher standard of quality over their range of books, then perhaps they would be currently doing better. I doubt that, however; while it would have improved the perception of books in the public's eye, it also would have led to a lot less books being produced overall, which is bad for the publishing houses in general.
Many of the books which are published due to lowering standards have their problems, but many people still like them, after all. Most authors don't earn a whole lot of money for their books, but it's not uncommon for them to sell several thousand.
That is a fair point, but I would point you towards Wattpad as an example of the quality within the self-publishing market.
Just browsing the newest fantasy section, on the front page, we have this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
Of the stories that are of decent quality, you have this, this and this.
I would say that even traditional publishing's falling standards of quality are still consistently higher than that of self-published works.
Dammit, I typed a reply and my computer crashed T_T
True. However, traditional publishers do release ebooks, so if their names and logos served as a solid guarantee of quality, they'd still be the better choice for ebook authors.
Yes, absolutely. I just think they need to strive to broaden that gap.
There's a variety of reasons authors choose not to go to publishers for the release of e-books.
Publishers do have finite resources, for one; they can only have their editors go over so many books a year. The end result is that many books which are decent but mediocre get pushed to the wayside; thus, these authors, who have books that a fair amount of people would buy and in other years might have been picked up by publishing companies, turn to self-publishing to get their books out.
Other reasons include wanting to get their books out there much cheaper than publishers release them, not liking the deal the publisher cuts with them, and not having to go through rigamarole with editors and agents to get their books to the publishers.
The guarantee of quality, whatever it is worth nowadays, is a reason many people look to traditionally published books as a venue for publishing their works, but by no means is it the only factor in the decision.
I think it is not even close to that easy, though.
Editors need to be paid a lot of money, and a publishing house requires a lot of editors. I believe Random House alone publishes something like more than 11,000 new books a year. Assuming a single editor can do one a week (they can't), that requires the company to have more than 200 editors constantly on call to do work for them. (I do believe they hire more than 500 to do this for them.)
The more they want to be able to ensure a standard of quality, the less books they have to pick up, and the more editors and such they have to hire.
This does two things- it lowers the number of books being published a year (as many of the mediocre books being published now stop going into print), and it ups the cost of producing the better books.
As do a lot of ones that are just good. There's an element of luck.
Indeed. But aside from price, it's the one that publishers have the most control over.
Fair points.
I think the biggest problem is the difficulty of editing something as long as a book.
Hmmm...I suppose one way to handle it would be to put more of the editing burden on the author -- different types of major grammatical errors could have different point values, and once an editor gets to fifty or a hundred points, he could just stop there and send it back to the author with a note saying to improve the grammar before submitting it.
I figured that would be implied, so I didn't extend the post by adding that in.
That is already done.
Before a publisher agrees to pick up a book, there are people picking them up and going through X amount of them. They check to see if the grammar is decent, they check the sentence structure, the flow, the use of said bookisms and such.
A book already has to meet certain standards in order to lighten the load on editors.
The issue is that editors have to go through every page with a fine-tooth comb. This burden is already made as light as possible, but it's something that cannot be lightened very much further.
Fair enough.
As for the other stuff...I guess it all comes down to one thing: publishing books is hard.
Publishing them professionally is hard.
Well, yeah.
Don't forget that the debate was about professional/traditional publishing versus self-publishing. :P
Yeah. I sort of intended the use of the plural to imply "in large quantities," but...that didn't actually work >.>
That's sort of why I suggested that self-publishers should be inclined to gather into unpaid workshops, or something (or workshops that entail rewards from the subsidy press, if it's CreateSpace, or Lulu, or whatever); if you get five-nine other people looking through a work, cleaning grammar and offering points of contention, without necessarily investing a huge amount of time into it, self-publishing might be able to clean itself up a bit, provided it screens for people who are at least solid, in terms of technical skill.
The efficiency, if not the quality, of self-publishing (or at least e-booking) can't be matched by traditional publishing, and so it now needs to ensure that it has a decent ratio of good to bad, so that there's meaning in the fact that it's slightly less of a burden on the author now, in terms of time and money. It's good that writers have both options, too, though, with one being more selective, but there's probably a number of ways in which the styles can improve in consideration of the strengths of the others.
Now that I think about it, self-publishing seems sort of like the literary minor leagues now, and people who self-publish or publish online still strive to get their works physically onto shelves, or sometimes under bigger names, like HarperCollins or Random House, or whatever.
I think that the concept of beta readers is probably the best way to go about it.
The author of the article that All Nines posted seems to be under a number of impressions that I find questionable. To name a few: That the fuel efficiency of engines for transporting goods will not increase significantly in the next few decades; that a person that purchases e-books will automatically be less likely to buy physical books; that economic rules of elasticity are somehow absolute when applied to art (which literature is); and that big publishing is the only kind of traditional publishing.
The last one, while minor, bugs the crap out of me. As a big fan of the small press, it puzzles me that old-school independent publishing is never touched upon in those sorts of articles.
Isn't that another form of self-publishing, or are you talking about something else?
I mean small publishing houses, with actual editorial and printing staff.