Misconceptions About Self-Publishing — Part I

In an effort to keep this a) short and b) G-rated, I’m going to limit myself to just one misconception at a time.

(Well, maybe two.)

Today’s misconception: Self-published books are garbage. All of them.

This misconception comes in two basic flavors:

• Self-published books were not subjected to the query process, which keeps garbage off the streets.
• Self-published books are not professionally edited, and are therefore garbage.

I’d like to address the logical fallacies in these positions, but I’m going to refrain, and instead simply discuss the actual claims that are being made.

The Query Process:

The assumption behind the belief that the query process keeps the quality of published works high is the assumption that the query process is somehow magically related to the quality of the work for which the query was written. It’s difficult to conceive how this could be any further from the truth.

I follow many agents on Twitter, and I subscribe to the blogs of many more. I’m not going to give references for these following points, because enough agents are going to block me after this post as it is, without the public shaming such finger-pointing would cause, but here’s a short list of some of the things I hear agents saying virtually every day (given that “hear,” in this case, means “read”):

• Query addressed to the wrong agent: automatic rejection.
• Query addressed to the correct agent, but with the wrong honorific: automatic rejection.
• Query was four paragraphs, when the submission rules “guidelines” said three: automatic rejection.
• Query that was sent six months ago and rejected, along with a note from the naive, misguided writer who thought that revision would better his chances: automatic rejection.
• Query that the agent discovers was also sent to another agent: automatic rejection (by both agents).

Don’t misunderstand me. Agents have a perfect right to reject a query, any query, for any reason or for no reason at all. But let’s not pretend these “reasons” have anything to do with the quality of the writing. The query process not only is not selecting for quality, but, by its very design, it cannot. Most decisions on queries are made without the agent ever even seeing any of the writing in question. How on Earth could it be about the quality of writing it does not examine?

Fifty years ago, publishers were still saying that they wouldn’t work with agents. Now, an agent is required by essentially every publisher. Why? Because the publishers discovered that agents perform a valuable service for them, but it has nothing to do with quality. It’s partly because it simply cuts the quantity of submissions down. Partly, though, it is because it selects, by its very nature, for the type of books and authors that publishers want: a book that can be described in one pithy paragraph, and an author who is willing to jump through irrelevant hoops in an effort to appease the king.

Make no mistake about it, regardless of who pays them, and regardless of their protests to the contrary, agents do not work for the authors, and the query process is not intended to select for quality. The agents work for the publishers, as attested to by the simple fact that everything they do is something a publisher needs done, and the query process is intended partly to cut down the agents’ workloads, and partly to ensure that the books selected can be described in a one-paragraph catalog listing and that the author can do so, as well as being meek and compliant in such matters as signings, tours, etc (if he’s lucky).

There nothing about the query process that touches on quality of writing.

Editing:

The assumption (very frequently stated in just exactly such a bald fashion) is that self-published books are garbage because they have not been “professionally edited.”

This assertion can be refuted on at least two grounds (saying nothing at all of the quality of editing that does come through the gates of the corporate publishers):

• First, how would the person making that claim know whether or not my book has been “professionally edited,” when they are unwilling to read or review the book? What was there that prevented me from simply hiring an editor?
• Second (this is where I start to get angry — ok, I started a while back): You’ve just told me, without reading a single word of my writing, that I’m such a bad writer that any random person who decides to call himself an “editor” can make my book better. That anything that random person does will make it better. Frequently, the claims made include such doozies that every book should be cut by ten percent, or that deleting all adverbs will make the book better, or that half the adjectives need to go, or that you should always use active voice and always use nouns and verbs. Period.

Does anyone besides me see the elitism of claiming that agents and editors and acquisitions managers and so on and so forth should all be given carte blanche to alter an author’s work, and that until such blessings have taken place that the manuscript “isn’t good enough to publish”?

Let me give you, in no particular order, the three key features of self-publishing:

1. Control
2. Control
3. Control

I’m not “shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars” to self-publish. I pay thirty-nine bucks per title for the so-called “Pro Plan,” because it gets me a better net, but I get paid for every book that sells, and I get paid a lot more than a corporate publisher pays per book.

I didn’t “turn to self-publishing as ‘Plan B’ ” because I got turned down by all the “real publishers.” I have three books on the market, two of which were never submitted to “real publishers” at all, and one of which was never once requested even as a partial, so how could the quality of any of them have been judged by the corporate publishing world?

I didn’t self-publish because I am desperate to see my name in print. I chose self-publishing because it gives me control of my book. No spoilers on the back cover (and, yes, I have seen spoilers on the back covers of books, which is why I never read them until I’ve either read the book or decided I’m not going to). No covers with nonsensical photos (can anyone say Liar, by Justine Larbalestier?). No titles changed. No renamed characters. No settings moved across the country.

I self-publish because it is MY book, MY way. Period.

Related posts:

1. Arguments Against Self-Publishing, Round N
2. Self-Publishing and the Persistence of Bias
3. Why I Chose Independent Publishing

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