The Populist Publisher

10. You don’t have to spend months or years composing and sending out queries that you hope will interest an agent or a publisher. Instead you can focus on polishing your book.

9. You don’t have to write synopses, books proposals, and marketing plans that meet the specifications of agents and publishers. Instead you can create your own marketing plan that fits your book and your preferred way of promoting it. And you don’t have to write a synopsis or book proposal at all.

8. You can choose the title and cover design that you think best represents your book—instead of having a sales team choose the title and cover design they think will sell best.

7. You can decide what time of year your book comes out. (The one book I had published by a major publisher was released during the Christmas holidays, right before the publisher’s PR team took two weeks vacation).

6. You can maintain the integrity of your book. While editing is important for any book, there is editing that improves the writing and/or the content, and then there is editing that changes your book so much you feel like someone else wrote it. And they sorta did.

5. You can get your book out there in the marketplace quickly. People will read and respond to your book. Isn’t that why you wrote it? Keeping a manuscript in your desk drawer for years while you shop it around to agents and publishers is discouraging, and it doesn’t get you reader feedback or the satisfaction of having people read what you wrote.

4. Your book will stay in print as long as you want it to be out there. Mainstream publishers don’t give books much time to catch on with readers. If the book doesn’t sell well in the first few months, bookstores will return it to the publisher. Soon it will be remaindered and then out of print.

3. You can control the cover price of your book and whether it is hardcover or trade paper. Personally, I don’t see any reason to release fiction in hardcover, except for libraries. I don’t want to pay $25 for a novel and I don’t want readers to have to pay $25 for a novel I wrote. And if you publish your own book, you can buy copies inexpensively enough that you can offer good discounts to small local stores, book clubs, or other bulk purchasers

2. You retain all the rights to your book. If you want to put a sample chapter on your website or give a newsletter permission to publish an excerpt, you can. If you sell a chapter to a magazine, you get all the money. If you decide later to offer the book as an e-book or spin off parts of it into short booklets, you can.

1. You can make more money. You’re going to need to do most of the promotion for your book anyway, so why not get more reward for your efforts? You make very little money per book with a traditional publishing contract. If you are your own publisher, you can, and usually do, make more per book. If you are good at promoting your book, you can do well because you get all the profits.

* Note: These advantages apply to true self-publishers—which is where the author sets up a publishing business, purchases ISBN numbers, outsources tasks like editing, layout, cover design, and printing, and takes charge of the marketing and distribution of the book.

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Here’s an inspiring story that should encourage all of us authors published by non-traditional publishers. I recently heard from Texas author Tony Eldridge, who published his action-adventure thriller, The Samson Effect, through iUniverse in 2007, that he has sold the film rights for the book to a major Los Angeles film producer. Interestingly, the film producer’s name is also Tony Eldridge.

Here’s what happened. Author Tony Eldridge had gotten some good pre-publication reviews for his book, which apparently resulted in producer Tony Eldridge getting some emails congratulating him on his soon-to-be-published novel. The producer, who hadn’t written a novel, did some research, discovered his namesake author, and requested a copy of the book. He got the book, couldn’t put it down, read it cover to cover in one evening and the next morning made a deal for the film rights.

Author Tony Eldridge is justifiably proud and excited about the film-rights sale. Producer Tony Eldridge is also pleased. He said, “Finding great material is what it’s all about. It’s like panning for gold. You just never know when you’re going to get lucky or where that nugget is going to come from.”

Probably most of us don’t have the good fortune to share a name with a major Hollywood producer. So why should we be inspired and encouraged by this story?

Because it’s all about the book! The author’s name may have opened the door, but once inside the book spoke for itself. The producer bought the book because he thought it was a great book that would make a great movie. He didn’t care who published the book. He only cared about the book itself.

Author Tony Eldridge had some good luck in getting his book noticed. But if the book hadn’t been good, nothing would have come of it. Producer Tony Eldridge was open-minded enough to go ahead and read the book, even though it wasn’t published by a mainstream publisher. His reward was finding some great material.

I’m delighted to be able to pass on this story that reinforces a point that I’ve been making over and over on this blog: A good book is a good book regardless of how it’s published. Tony’s success can help all of us who don’t follow the traditional path to publishing hold our heads a bit higher.

Also—I read an excerpt of The Samson Effect on Tony’s website http://www.samsoneffect.com and found it well-written and engaging. You might want to check it out.

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When I look at the book publishing industry today, I see fear and an inability to adapt to new technology. I see walls that have been put up by authors’ organizations, book reviewers, award panels, and bookstores to keep out the flood of self-published books print-on-demand printing technology has generated. I see attacks on online book review sites and book awards that are open to independently-published books.

This unfortunate reaction to change was described in depth nearly 40 years ago by futurist Alvin Toffler, who put forth the idea that people find the accelerating pace of change overwhelming. His book, Future Shock, published in 1970 described a feeling of dread connected to rapid technological change, and a difficulty in adapting to it.

Today, even though self-published books, books published by family-owned publishers, and books printed using print-on-demand (POD) technology make up a large share of the new books published each year, this change is not welcomed in much of the publishing industry. We are the wave of the future, and we are making inroads. But attitudes don’t change as quickly as technology.

For example, a respected nonprofit website named Preditors and Editors, which bills itself as “a guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers,” offers some general rules for spotting a scam publisher. They have a long list, which includes the following:
• The publisher gives no or very low advances.
• The publisher’s books are rarely in any bookstores, particularly the large chain stores that carry books from just about all reputable commercial publishers.
• The publisher’s books have never been seen on a bestseller list published by a reputable source such as the New York Times.
• The publisher’s books rarely sell more than 5,000 books to readers in individual purchases.

Unfortunately, such outdated criteria put most self-publishers and many indie publishers in the scam category. The criteria show an inability to adapt to the new publishing world. They are based in fear and they scare authors away from today’s new publishing opportunities.

I’d like to be able to shake writers loose from the belief that if they can’t get their book published by a major publisher, they might as well keep it in a drawer. I’ve seen some very good manuscripts that have been sent out to agents and publishers for years but never picked up. I think that’s too bad. I encourage these writers to self-publish, but they fear they wouldn’t be seen as “real” authors if they did.

I know how scary it can be to step out onto the cutting edge. Self-published authors are disparaged, stigmatized, and ridiculed by the old guard. My hope and mission here is to change this marginalizing of authors who don’t follow the traditional path to publishing. A good book is a good book regardless of how it’s published. Authors who rise above their fears can get the books out there to readers. Isn’t that why we write books?

Note: Regular readers of this blog have no doubt noticed that I have posted a new entry every Thursday since I began writing it. I’ve covered much of what I initially wanted to discuss and I’m finding that a weekly writing schedule takes more time than I have at this point. So, in the future I plan to post whenever an important topic comes up, rather than on a regular schedule. If you’re not a subscriber, you might want to sign up so you’ll know when the posts go up.

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The names that come to mind tend to be famous authors whose books have been published by a traditional publisher, been favorably reviewed by major publications, won prestigious awards, and sold millions of books. A small minority of all the published authors out there. But is this the best or only definition of success for an author?

Success is tricky to define. We seem to have some agreed-upon criteria in our society, mostly involving the acquisition of power and material wealth. But not everyone accepts these definitions. Some people actively reject such worldly notions of success, preferring more personal bench marks.

I became very aware of the difficulty in defining success several years ago when, as part of my day job at Boulder County Aging Services, I conducted a major literature search on factors associated with successful aging. This turned up a major controversy as to what constitutes “successful aging.” One popular model used objective criteria, defining successful aging as the avoidance of disease and disability, maintenance of high cognitive and physical function, and active engagement with life.

But others challenged the use of an objective definition of successful aging, pointing out that it omits older persons’ own views of what aging successfully means. To explore this, another group of researchers asked hundreds of older people to classify themselves as either aging successfully or not. Then they compared people’s own beliefs about whether they were aging successfully to the objective standards of the popular measure.

The researchers found that lots of older people who didn’t measure up to the popular definition of successful aging thought they were aging successfully—50% of them believed they were aging successfully, but only 18% met the objective criteria for successful aging. And more than a third of those who the popular measure judged as aging successfully disagreed with their rating. They didn’t rate themselves as aging successfully.

Furthermore, nearly half (47%) of those the popular measure classified as not aging successfully disagreed with that rating. They rated themselves as aging successfully.

I concluded that the concept of success is multidimensional, and I have come to believe that people’s success is best measured by whether or not they achieve their goals. This view of success is the same one I use in my work as an evaluator of the outcomes of social programs. Start with the program’s goals, then assess whether or not they have been achieved.

Similarly, it is far too simplistic to decide whether or not an author is successful by applying objective criteria like numbers of books sold, awards, numbers of positive reviews by prestigious reviewers, or whether their book has been published by a traditional publisher. If these benchmarks are the author’s goals, then achieving or not achieving them is a measure of that author’s success. But for authors who have other goals, and who are satisfied with their progress, it is presumptuous to tell them that they are not successful based on the number of books they’ve sold, and/or the profit they’ve made on their books.

Authors who self publish often have goals other than profit and fame. Some of these include:
• Getting the satisfaction of having their book printed and bound for themselves, and perhaps friends and family.
• Testing the waters to see whether there are buyers for a book. It’s hard to do that when all you have is a manuscript that you’re spending your time sending out to agents and publishers.
• Making specialized or technical information available to a small niche market.
• Speaking out on a controversial topic.
• Learning about publishing and marketing a book by actually doing it.

My view is that it’s up to me as an author to decide whether or not I’m successful. Outside evaluators may judge me by their own criteria such as how many books I’ve sold. But I don’t have to accept their judgement.

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So why do people self-publish, given the stigma associated with it and the difficulties it creates in marketing books? In my own case, I got into self-publishing in 1984, with the demise of a small publishing company that had published a stress-management book, Stress? Find Your Balance, that my husband and I co-authored. The original publisher had printed an initial run of 10,000 books, but was doing no marketing and selling no books. Meanwhile we had developed a computerized stress assessment that we were selling to medical centers, hospitals, and businesses, and that referenced the book. We had the opportunity to sell books in bulk to the purchasers of the stress assessment, but the publisher refused to discount the book price sufficiently for bulk sales.

When we had the opportunity we bought the 10,000 books and the publication rights back, sold those 10,000 copies and then revised the book in 1988 and printed another 10,000 copies through our own business, Preventive Measures, Inc. To date, we have sold 50,000+ copies of Stress? Find Your Balance in this country, and we sold the rights to an Australian edition to Queensland Teacher’s Health Society in 1994. (Interesting side note: That Australian insurance company selected our book and stress assessment for their members because we owned the rights to our book and could negotiate more favorable terms than a traditional publisher would. This was a lucrative contract for us that we would not have gotten had our book been traditionally published.)

Through the mid-1980s and 1990s we were happily selling our self-published book through bulk sales and taking the profits to the bank, without ever thinking about the stigma of self-publishing. We got lots of good comments on the book from health, mental health, and wellness professionals who gave it to their clients and from readers themselves who said it had changed their lives. They didn’t care who published the book, only that it got results.

Eventually we got to the point where we no longer wanted to have 10,000 books printed and delivered to our doorstep, although we wanted to keep the book in print. In April 2005, I read with much interest an article in the NYT Book Review entitled, “How to Be Your Own Publisher,” which described the new print-on-demand (POD) technology. The article inaccurately equated POD with subsidy publishing, but oddly-enough gave a mostly favorable review of what they called “self-publishing.”

This was the first I’d heard of POD technology. I began to investigate and soon found that the companies described in the NYT article had control of both ISBN numbers and cover price for the books they “published,” and that their prices for the books were so high that selling many copies would be difficult. I kept looking and eventually found Lulu and then Lightning Source, which we eventually used to print out revised (4th) edition.

Even though the printing costs are higher with POD, we are delighted to have found a way to keep the book available without having to print and store another 10,000 copies. And being able to have boxes of books shipped directly to our customers though a simple online order is a luxury we definitely appreciate.

I was still naïve about the stigma of self-publishing, probably because it wasn’t relevant to the sales of that book. It was only when I created an imprint—PMI Books—and published my novel Too Near the Edge and my daughter’s novel Following My Toes that I discovered the bias and the problems self-publishing creates for fiction, which is dependent on reviews, awards, signings and other author appearances for its sales.

Even so, I would have made the same choice for my novel, based on my experience with my other nonfiction book, which was published by a big New York publisher, had limited sales and is now out of print. I like having control over the book’s title, price, look, when it comes out, and most of all how long it will be available. But I don’t like the stigma, which is why I started this blog.

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