Self-Publishers
A guest blog by Norma Lehmeier Hartie
When I published my first book, Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify & Energize Your Life, Your Home & Your Planet, I dreamt that The New York Times Book Review would review it. They didn’t. They did not review the book because Stan Tanenhaus, chief editor of the Book Review, does not review self-published books.
In the April 27, 2008 The New York Times Book Review, writer and editor Rachel Donadio wrote an essay, “You’re an Author? Me too!”. In it, she cites the staggering figure of 400,000 books published in 2007. (Compare this to 47,000 books published in 1990.) The industry tracker, Bowker attributes the increase in books published to reprints of out-of-print titles and print-on-demand books.
Print-on-demand, POD, is a type of printing—a book at a time can be produced using advanced technology. It is not, as some people assume, a type of publishing. Off-set printing is the standard type of printing. It takes weeks to print a book and is cost prohibitive unless printing at least several thousand copies of a book.
While Donadio does not say that self-published books are of poor quality, she certainly hints of it. She explains that the Book Review receives dozens of self-published books a week and quotes several ridiculous sentences from a couple books. She writes: “iUniverse, a self-publishing company founded in 1999, has grown 30 percent a year in recent years…While most [books] are by ordinary people who want to get their work in print.”
She also says that most bookstores won’t carry self-published books.
While I don’t dispute that many self-published books are of poor quality, I resent that Donadio does not differentiate between “self-publishing companies” and self-published books. She probably doesn’t even know the difference.
The phrase “self-publishing company” is an oxymoron; it is a vanity/subsidy press; they own the author’s book and they are the publishers—not the authors. The phrase was coined by some clever marketing person/team to help sell subsidy presses to naïve wannabe authors. By definition, a company that publishes author’s books can’t be “self-publishers.”
I wrote an article for The Independent Book Publishers Association (PMA) on the impact that the subsidy publishers are having on the entire publishing industry.
The average subsidy published book sells 40 to 100 copies. The president of iUniverse admitted in an interview that out of 17,000 titles they've published, only 86 books have sold more than 500 copies. Subsidy presses don’t care about the quality of the books they publish, because they make their money upfront—by charging authors to print their books.
Conversely, a true self-published author (one who owns a publishing company) may hire professionals to help create a book on par with that of the traditional publishers. They chose to print their books offset or by print-on-demand. Some self-published authors get excellent book reviews and sell thousands of books. Many win book awards for their works.
However, The New York Times Book Review chooses not to make the distinction between subsidy and self-publishers. While I can understand that they would not review books from subsidy presses, they ought to at least look at quality self-published books.
Norma Lehmeier Hartie is author of the award winning book, Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify & Energize Your Life, Your Home & Your Planet. The book was The Grand Prize Winner of the 15th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards, Finalist in ForeWord magazine’s Book Awards and Nautilus Book Awards.
Weirding Word®, a division of G.L. Honeycutt Consulting, LLC, is a virtual publication department that provides editing, freelance writing, and publication and web design services.
The key phrase in your article for me was "quality self-published books" and the fact that so many people tar them all with the same brush. The only way to identify a quality book is to get a hold of it and spend some time with it. Companies like Xlibris, iUniverse and Lulu have done a lot to tarnish the notion of self publishing as something to be respected.
Especially in the early days anything got through and so the market was flooded with a lot of inferior products so that now expressions like "self published" and especially "POD" have become disparaging terms and bad press is a hard thing to recover from.
It is with great regret that I left it so long to publish my own book because in the last ten years things have changed so much; they should be for the better but they're not. It's like the World Wide Web – a really good idea in principle but just look what people have done with it.
Posted by: Jim Murdoch | May 30, 2008 at 01:59 PM