Weekend Writing Forum

Last Updated on August 28, 2023

I attended, out of curiosity, an open forum on self-publishing on Sunday afternoon. I was alerted to this forum by an article about the self-publishing industry in the last week’s edition of Style Weekly, a free newspaper in Richmond. Three statements in this article jumped off the page at me.

Early into the piece, the writer gives a few hypothetical scenarios that others have used as excuses to self-publish their work, then writes a line that strikes me as being something right out of a vanity press’s sales pitch:

“These are a few of the reasons more writers are choosing to avoid waiting for a weary, cynical editor or agent to push their manuscript to the bottom of the slush pile and are publishing their books themselves.”

I don’t suppose it’s remotely possible that these stereotypical editors and agents are weary and cynical because the majority what they receive actually belongs in the slush pile, is it?

The article focuses on the fact that getting a self-published book on book store shelves is difficult because they pose a financial risk, in that they are not returnable and that they have not been screened by agents or editors. But it begins the paragraph that addresses these facts with this:

“We may not judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a book by its publisher?”

I, for one, do judge a book, in part, by its cover. In fact, if it’s an author I’m not familiar with, the cover will play a major role in whether I pick up the book to read a few pages. If the cover of a book wasn’t important, all books would have covers with nothing but the title and author’s name. There would be no cover art, no design at all. The title also plays a role in enticing me to pick up the book.

It’s not that people who refuse to carry a self-published book are judging a book by the publisher: they’re judging a book by its profitability. If they figure they can’t make money on the book, why would anyone expect them to carry it? Likewise, if the authors weren’t convinced they could be successful — one way or another — by self-publishing, why would they bother at all?

But put yourself in the place of the book stores.

Suppose you came up with a design for the next great American automobile. You sent your idea to Ford, GM, Chrysler and every other major manufacturer you could think of. None of them seemed interested. So you decide that you’d build the car yourself, hiring a small company to assemble your parts. Then you take the car to local car lots and try to get them to sell it. How many takers do you think you’d have? It isn’t that your creation is shabby. (It may be, and you might not realize it; but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s a great car.) The car lots know the reputation of the “major” automakers. They know good cars when they see them based on their prior records. They don’t know you from Adam. How can they trust you to have manufactured a car as reliable when you’ve never built one before? And without a lot of studying, certainty that their customers want a car just like the one you’ve delivered and a leap of faith, how can they buy your car from you when they’re sure they can get a bigger sale from someone else’s car, and when they might not be able to return your car if they can’t sell it? It doesn’t make financial sense.

The article mentions one local book store in particular that makes it a point to stock a “tremendous” number of self-published books. Good for them. But even so, there’s this:

“Some are awful,” the book store owner admits. “But some are really very good. The word ‘self-published’ should not be an immediate brick wall.”

I’d have to disagree with this. It should be a brick wall. Not high enough that an author can’t climb over it, but at least enough of an obstacle that any retailer should take an extra moment before blindly stocking the book.

Now that anyone can publish a book of any quality, which these writers acknowledge is a problem, there has to be some kind of standard to protect the consumers. At the forum, the book store owner acknowledged the fact that she and her co-workers do have to screen a self-published book very carefully before deciding whether they will sell it; they don’t accept everything that comes their way.

Somewhere down the line, if there is no accountability on the publishing side when it comes to quality control, there should be that much more accountability on the retailer side. Those of us who do write can usually spot bad writing when we see it, unless of course the writing is our own and then it’s harder. But a consumer who purchases a horribly-written book that happens to have been self-published won’t automatically know that it was self-published. They’ll just know that book sucks. And if that reader happens to be trying a new genre that you or I happen to write in, and their first and only exposure to it is that bad book, there may not be a second chance: the reader might stick to the “big names” or other genres, and that affects the rest of us, self-published or not.

The forum itself was attended by about 35 people. I was struck immediately by the fact that I was about the second-youngest person in the room. The majority of the people looked to be in their sixties, which leads me to believe that they have either waited to attempt to write their great American novel, or that they feel that at their age, self-publishing is their only chance of getting published in their lifetime.

To be expected, there was that brief mention of names of famous authors who started as self-published authors. No discussion of self-publishing enthusiasts can exist without that. I listened to people who had published a few books, shelling out thousands of dollars for as many as 1000 copies and as few as 20. I heard one writer say one of the books he self-published was a disaster because at the last minute the contract his publisher had with a distribution company (that would have gotten him into Amazon.com and others) was inexplicably broken, and he was stuck with no easy way to get his books sold.

Some feel that having a book make them appear more authoritative when they give talks to local groups. I’m sure it does, because the audience probably isn’t told that the only reason they have a book is because they published it themselves. If you can imagine an audience’s opinion on your “authority” changing if they were told you published the work yourself rather than a big publisher being so impressed with what you wrote that they sent you a check for the opportunity to publish it, then you can see that this marketing tactic might have some questionable ethics.

But then came the defining moment for this talk: someone else suggested that using friends and family as editors can be nicer, since professional editors can be “brutal.” She described the scene of an editor pulling out the red pen and marking up your manuscript, and then returning pages that “look like they’re bleeding.”

That got me thinking: How much of self-publishing is about avoiding reality? How much motive is there in pretending that your writing is a lot better than it is, and that those rejections you receive from traditional publishers must be because the publishers are the problem?

Sure, it would be unfair to portray all self-publishers this way, and there are valid reasons to self-publish.

But writers who seem to want only a “kid-gloves” edit don’t strike me as being all that concerned about growing in their craft. Either you want the truth, and all of the truth, when it comes to a critique, or you just want readers who’ll pat you on the head and congratulate you for just having tried.