Slush, it's never pretty.

[andpuff]

Terrific article by Laura Miller in Salon on the future of publishing. Or, more accurately, the future of reading.

When anyone can be a published author -- How do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world?

Comments

[sixteenbynine]

Full disclosure: Self-published author here. I don't expect to ever make a living doing it, but so far it's been a lot of fun and I've sold a couple hundred books so far.

That said ...

I don't believe self-publishing is going to completely displace conventional publishing, because the latter brings with it the force of marketing and publicity. It is extremely difficult to bring more than marginal attention to bear on your own work without those things.

My main way of drawing attention to my work has been to do the con circuit and promote face-to-face to the people most likely to buy the book. It works -- in the sense that most of the time I sell out and go home emptyhanded -- but it hasn't created an underground wildfire word-of-mouth sensation out of me.

Self-publishing gives you great freedom and flexibility. It also gives you absolutely no way to automatically distinguish yourself. If anything, it does the opposite: it forces you to bust twice as much hump top be noticed, because you're generally not on store shelves.

I'm getting really tired of the generic rejoinder that "my book is now on Amazon" -- yes, but nobody's going to know about it unless they look for it. Mine are up there, too; I don't assume that means people are going to magically discover me that way (and by and large, they haven't). The bookstores -- and publishers -- serve the function of filtering out and drawing attention to material that for whatever reason deserves some notice.

Until there's some adjunct to self-publishing that replaces the convenience these things provide, I'm stuck hustling one-to-one. And yes, it's fun and rewarding -- I wouldn't do it if it wasn't. It's also an economy of scale that's at least one to two orders of magnitude smaller than what someone like you or Jim Hines is dealing with.

In short, self-publishing serves authors far more than readers -- but I'd like to find a way to make it serve both parties without tarring self-publishing any more than it needs to be. (Because, yes, there is an astonishing amount of such material out there, and the vast majority of it is indeed junk on toast.)

[sixteenbynine]

addendum: "so far" meaning "in the last two years". Which only further emphasizes my point about economy of scale.