Actually, I Like My Traditional Publisher or “You Leave My Dill Pickle Alone!”

[ursulav]

This will be long. I may ramble. Sideways. Through walls. You’ve been warned.

So in the last few weeks, I have found myself, for whatever reason, tripping repeatedly over things on the interwebs about self-publishing. I didn’t do it deliberately, at least at first, but Google+ makes it easy to fall over this stuff, and then you chase links or read

Comments

[shatterstripes]

> you can dismiss me as a hopelessly inept dweeb who wants to make no decisions and be the literary equivalent of a kept woman

Hell yeah. I did not have to do the layout on my Tarot deck's book. I did not have to contract with a printer in China to get it printed. I did not have to store umpty-thousand copies of it. I did not have to try to get it in stores all across the world. I did not have to get it in the hands of reviewers. I did not have to advertise it. All I did was (1) draw the thing, (2) write the book, and (3) lay out the box and book's cover. (And yeah, my publisher and I did a few back and forth rounds on the box cover. I'm glad as the final piece is much stronger and eye-catching than my first attempts.)

If you like doing all those other things, awesome. But hell, even the indy webcomics people, who have this myth of ULTRA SELF RELIANCE, have accumulated a few businesses like Dumbrella that deal with all the mechanics of making and stocking the physical items.

The traditional publishing model is not dying. The bookstores are getting their lunch eaten by online stores and I am sad to see this happen. And eventually the physical book will become a rarer thing. But there will still be a need for editors, publicists, and people to manage all the other parts of the process of getting the work from the creator's studio into the hands of thousands of eager fans across the world for a long time to come.

[kaypendragon]

"eventually the physical book will become a rarer thing."

I am not convinced of this. At the very least, it will not be TOMOROW! as everyone has been claiming since Border's downfall. I'm pretty sure there will always be a demand for "I need that book NOW" which online stores can not fulfill, and I know for a fact that our locally owned bookshop has gotten bigger in the past few years due to a good marketing campaign (not due to Border's silly decisions).

[funwithrage]

The Kindle desktop has actually gotten me to buy more stuff on impulse: due to a minor phobia of having physical stuff (moved sixteen times in ten years) actually purchasing physical books for keeps is a serious decision for me, but downloading them to a desktop? Sure!

That said, until they invent a waterproof, coffeeproof e-reader that is fine with being dropped down staircases and attaches itself to your wrist so you don't leave it on the train, I will probably always do a significant portion of my reading physically.

[archangelbeth]

You can liquid-proof most e-readers by putting them in a ziploc bag or two! The wrist-attachment could probably be done with a bit of crochet or knitting talent. But the dropping part, not so much, alas.

Also, I can't clone my tablet when I want to lend someone a book, so paper books always win there. And in re-sale/re-gifting value.

[ursulav]

But how do you turn the page? Does the finger-drag still work through plastic?

[halfpastfish]

My kindle is not a touch screen (yay buttons, as I am touch screen incapable), so the giant ziplock bag works for it :D

[enigmaticfox]

Actually, yes! I routinely bring my iPad into the kitchen as my cookbook reference; just put it in a big gallon Ziploc bag, seal it up, and use it just as normal. Great not to have to worry about accidentally dumping flour on it while baking... :)

[archangelbeth]

For the iPad? Should do. It works when I stick my iPhone into a plastic baggie, such as when chaperoning kids at the pool. Not sure how well it'd work if you stuck it in two bags, or a freezer-weight bag, mind.

[wren_chan]

A quart freezer bag does quite well for both my ipod and my android, as long as I fold it up so that the plastic is flush against the touchscreen. At that point my only problem is my glasses fogging up.

[archangelbeth]

Excellent to hear, thanks! I'd been worried the thicker plastic would mess with the touch-screens.

[irishelflinwe]

Actually (just found this out today), you can loan people books from your Kindle now. I just looked at the form, and it's an e-mail form, so I'd imagine they'd open if you just had the Kindle reader app. I'll have to try it to be sure.

Not that I'm advocating the loss of paper books, as I would be a hypocrite if I was; I need another bookshelf for mine, since I can't stop buying them. Just sharing shiny new tech. :P

[ursulav]

There's some weird and squicky stuff goin' on with the Amazon "borrowing" thing on the Kindle, though. If it's the thing I'm thinking of, the Big Six publishers won't sign on with it because the contracts involve handing all price controls to Amazon, which they absolutely refuse to do.

[irishelflinwe]

They've tied it into Prime membership, which means it probably is the thing you're thinking of. I couldn't swear to it, but I'd bet Prime is where Amazon really makes their money.

[archangelbeth]

The publisher has to make "lending" available on the Kindle (all my self-published short stories enable it), and I believe there are some restrictions on the default version, such as "can only do it for X days, and only once ever." It also presumes you have a Kindle or a Nook, and not, say, a Sony e-reader! (DRM can be very evil.)

The Kindle Prime borrowing things is a different kettle of fish that I don't know much about yet.

[irishelflinwe]

Thanks for the additional info! My mother is going to get a Kindle Fire, and my mother-in-law has an iPad, which has the Kindle reader app on it, so I was contemplating trying to share stuff with them. It's apparently, like most things, more complicated than it looks.

And, yes, a lot of DRM is one of those "bailing out the sea with a bucket" ideas. I understand that purveyors of digital media have to at least TRY to prevent piracy, but some of the ways they go about doing so are... well, we'll just call them "obtuse" to be polite. I've been a PC gamer for at least fifteen years, so I've watched the evolution of the arms race between publishers (of either books or software) and pirates with interest.

[archangelbeth]

Sharing books is one of the places where physical media just trumps digital all hollow. DRM-based sharing stuff, such as Nook and Kindle have, is cumbersome and usually annoyingly limited. Non-DRMed material (such as can be bought from, say, Smashwords (mobi format)) can be lent pretty freely -- but there's no mechanism to un-lend it except the reader noticing boilerplate at the front that asks people to purchase their own copy.

I'm with Baen books and Steve Jackson Games, personally; with few exceptions, DRM is a minor to major inconvenience to consumers, and only a minor hurdle for the real pirates. I'm generally negative towards it whenever I notice it.

(Smashwords.com, if you've not encountered it, is a kind of clunky self-publishing site -- but for self-publishers, it's often the easiest way to get anything onto the Apple iBookstore, B&N's Nook store, Sony's ebook store, Diesel's ebook store, and Kobo's. And, clunky though it is, it will sell non-DRMed stuff in every format from HTML to epub to PDF to mobi, and probably a few I'm forgetting. Just watch out for all the pr0n (unless, y'know, that's what you're going there to look for).)