January 31, 2012

Digital self-publishing might be a bubble, but the hordes of would-be authors will never run out

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Looks pretty easy! (From Smashwords "secrets to eBook publishing success")

“81% of Americans feel they have a book in them … And should write it,” wrote Joseph Epstein in a New York Times Op-Ed in 2002, citing a survey by the Jenkins Group. Yesterday at The Guardian Ewan Morrison mentions this fact while arguing that the recent excitement about digital self-publishing is nothing more than a classic investment bubble that preys on this widespread desire.

It’s a bubble, Morrison writes, spawned by the do-it-yourself get-rich-quick stories that fill newspapers—success stories like Karen McQuestion “the 49-year-old mother of three…[who] sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer” (The Wall Street Journal) and Amanda Hocking ”the writer who made millions by self-publishing online” (The Guardian). “It’s a gold rush,” writes USA Today, quoting a self-published author, and Morrison makes a convincing case that, as in other gold rushes, it’s not the prospectors who stand to make a fortune. For every Hocking or McQuestion, millions more will find that their self-published works, without editing, marketing, publicity, and, in many cases, quality, fail to find audiences or make money. More profitable, Morrison writes, is the “boom industry in ‘How to get rich writing ebooks‘ manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who’ll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your ebook into shape.” And finally, most profitable of all, are “Amazon and other epub platforms” who successfully wring a profit out of the long-tail of a few modest successes and a million mostly unread eBooks.

In the final stage of the bubble, the “Revulsion” stage, Morrison imagines that:

Disillusionment sets in as [self-published authors] realise that they were sold an idea of success which could, by definition, not possibly be extended to all who were willing to take part.

The now ex-self-epublished authors decide not to publish again (it was a strain anyway, and it was made harder by the fact that they weren’t paid for their work and had to work after hours while doing another job – and they realised that self-promoting online would have to be a full-time job.) They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be “creative”.

I agree with Morrison on many counts here. A few success stories does not a business model make. Beneath the breakout digital stars lies a great sea of mediocrity and untenable hope.

I disagree, however, with Morrison’s belief that the self-publishing boom will bring the publishing industry down with it. Instead, I see a more natural merging and changing of the two worlds. Already many self-published authors (most notably Hocking) have happily joined the traditional publishing world. Morrison reminds us that once blogs were considered a DIY way to make money, but a decade later nearly no one has turned a profit on a blog. Who did find success via blogging? Those who turned their blogs into books or TV shows and took their self-published products mainstream. Similarly, in the 1990s, as digital filmmaking became more affordable and indie filmmaking produced a few unexpected hits (like Robert Rodriguez‘s El Mariachi), people argued that cheaply made indie films could bring down Hollywood. Now the excitement over cheap filmmaking has mostly dissipated, and Rodriguez directs Spy Kids in 4D Aroma-Scope.

But my biggest disagreement with Morrison is this: I don’t believe the self-published authors will ever stop writing and publishing their books. These people didn’t start writing because they thought there was money in it. No, these hordes of would-be writers existed long before eBooks had been invented. If the 2002 survey holds true, some 250,000,000 people in The United States believe they could and should write a book. This belief goes much deeper than a desire for easy money. Which brings us back to Epstein’s Op-Ed:

”There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart,” wrote Samuel Johnson, ”a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself.” What better way to put that distinction on display than in a book?

His essay ends on a dissuasive note:

Misjudging one’s ability to knock out a book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, save the trees, save the high tax on your own vanity. Don’t write that book, my advice is, don’t even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.

Good advice, I think. But also futile. As if to prove it, below Epstein’s final line, my browser dumped the following heap of all-too-knowing ads:

8 Comments

  1. Ludo Totem at 11:13 am on January 31, 2012

    Hmm, I’m not really a self-published author, so I don’t feel targeted by the not so subtly disparaging tone (“hordes of would-be writers”) taken by the writer (a publicist) of this post, but I do publish work à compte de traducteur, as it were, so neither am I altogether out of range of the potshots being taken here. If I comment here, though, it’s just to say that it seems to me unwise, not to mention in extraordinarily bad taste, to make public mockery of those on whom your livelihood depends–surely Melville House will at some point publish the work of those who emerge from the “hordes of would-be writers.”

    For me, being able to e-publish some of my translations has been a great liberation. No more having to comply with Byzantine submission requirements (Melville House’s, for example), no more having to wait months on end, sometimes years, for answers that (such as those from Melville House) never come, above all, no more having to refrain, for fear of falling out of some publisher’s hypothetical good graces, from posting comments such as these! Comments I post for the delectation of one and all!

    For most people, there obviously won’t be a lot of money in self-publishing, and you certainly won’t be able to quit your day job (I wonder how many of its authors Melville House pays well enough for them to live by their pen alone), but if you do good work, and if you keep at it, you’ll find yourself selling more and more.

  2. Brandon McLeod at 12:03 pm on January 31, 2012

    In the first paragraph, it should be “preys”.

     ”[...]prays on this widespread desire. ”

  3. JMB at 12:20 pm on January 31, 2012

    Turn that schematic at the top 90 degrees clockwise and you’ve got a pyramid scheme.

  4. Melville House Publishing at 12:39 pm on January 31, 2012

    Oops! Thanks for the catch. Fixed.

  5. Book Man at 9:02 pm on January 31, 2012

    Nathan, good story but one thing that is important to note is that the movie option deal that the WSJ and other outlets hyped as part of Karen McQuestion’s book was merely pie in the sky and there never was a real movie option but someone did contact her and she fell for it and she blogged about it all over the net and on her blog and amazon link still says the book was optioned by a Hollywood firm. But, this never really really happened: and which parts do you believe and which parts do you not believe? see ***

    Ms McQuestion, her married name, tells me: “I’d be happy to tell you who optioned the book. It was an L.A. based production company called “Hiding in Bed.” The producer, Eric Lake, and his partner, Athena Gam, work for ***Vanguard Films (the studio that did the ****Shrek francise). Hiding in Bed does their own independent films ***on the side and they envisioned A Scattered Life, the film, to be a character-based film like Little Miss Sunshine. A screenplay was**** written and the ****project was ***shopped it around, but a movie wasn’t made and since then, the option has ****expired. I didn’t hear the ***details, but my guess is that they weren’t able to get ***studio backing. My understanding is that in film making, several different parties come together to make it happen–one handles distribution, another financing etc. If everything doesn’t line up, the project doesn’t get green-lighted.
     ”Still, it was a big deal for me, because the ***news it was ***optioned gave me ***exposure that ***opened other doors for me. At the time I was completely self-published and it was the first self-published Kindle novel optioned for film. Now I’m published by AmazonEncore and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Foreign rights and audio rights have been sold for two of my novels, and my two women’s fiction titles are available in Sam’s Club. And people are reading my books and sending me nice emails! So I can’t complain.”

    THIS STORY HAS LEGS. It’s not Karen’s fault. She was the naive and innocent one here, but the media and MSM took her story about an optiion at face value and never fact-checked. Yes or no?

  6. Mary & Andrea at 12:08 pm on February 1, 2012

    First, it’s a fallacy to think that traditional publishers handle the marketing. In today’s world, many won’t bother with a new author unless they’ve already created an audience, which can’t happen without publishing on your own. The other reason people choose to self publish is for control. There is no one telling them their story isn’t worthy of being shared, they have the control over their content and over the royalties they’ll earn. Like any entrepreneurial venture,  it takes a lot of hard work, and usually a large learning curve. And like starting your own business, most won’t succeed. But, it’s the freedom to know that you have the option, is what makes this an exciting time. ~ Andrea Bandle http://www.helpmeselfpublish.

  7. Walkinonnails at 2:52 pm on February 2, 2012

    You got it in one

  8. A Critic at 6:20 pm on February 11, 2012

    ”
    It’s a bubble, Morrison writes,”

    It’s not a bubble. He conflates no/low cost with easy credit. They aren’t the same thing.

    This is a boom. There’s some similarities but more differences between booms and bubbles. The gold rush in California is over but gold mining remains an industry. Tulips as currency are over and there is no tulip currency industry.

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