Rule #1: Self-publishing is always a bad idea.
Rule #2: When self-publishing is making money, climb on board.
Those seem to be the rules Harlequin, Thomas Nelson, Hay House, and who knows how many others are playing by now. “Self-publishing is stupid! Self-publishing is evil! Self-publishing is lazy! Self-publishers haven’t paid their dues! Wait, what? Money is being made off of self-publishers? CHAAAAARGE!”
Isn’t self-publishing supposed to be about removing the middleman? About removing the layers of red tape between the artist and the art? Aren’t Author Solutions and their ilk part of the problem? Why would anyone add yet another layer of middlemen? Why be a middleman to the middleman?
Harlequin, listen up! Thomas Nelson, sit up straight and pay attention! Hay House, I’m talking to you, too! You want in on this avalanche? Solve a problem. Good design always stems from a problem, and there are plenty of problems in self-publishing today to solve. Rule Number One, life’s Standing Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.” Begin there.
What is the number one problem that is driving authors to self-publishing in droves?
Hint: It’s not the 18-24 month timeline. It’s not the 90% going to the employee (the publisher) and the 10% going to the artist. It’s not the attempt to gag authors by saying what they can and cannot blog about or tweet about. It’s not the power grab over ebook rights. It’s not even the ridiculous contracts that try to control what authors can and cannot write for the next X years.
It’s this: “You may have some input, but we have final say.”
That is exactly backward.
You wouldn’t hire a contractor who said “You may have some input as to countertop material, but we get final say.” You wouldn’t let the house painter decide what color to paint your house. You would listen to the input of these people, yes. Absolutely. But I can’t think of a single employee that you would let tell you how to run your business, and yet publishers (who should be employees of the authors) routinely treat authors as though they are simply providers of raw material to be shaped into something more worthy by the publisher.
Well, guess what? I’m making money. Not a lot, not yet, but I’m making money. Without you. You want in on this, get busy. Create a business model where the cover is my cover, maybe not because I designed it, but because you took my idea and made it work. Lose the attitude that says “The fastest way to insult your publisher is to say that you know what the cover should look like.” I do know what the cover should like. I know what the cover will look like. Help me achieve that.
Don’t tell me that it is irrelevant if my friends and family liked the book. My friends and family are all avid readers who have read tens of thousands of books between them. My friends and family are a microcosm of the market you want to sell my book to. Don’t tell me they’re irrelevant – mine them for ways to market the book to the thousands like them.
Don’t tell me that my book can’t succeed because it doesn’t appeal to the masses. In the internet age, appealing to the long tail is just as easy, just as profitable, and just as successful as writing pablum for the masses. Don’t tell me my appeal is too narrow – help me find the thousands more like them who’ve never heard of my book. So what if you can only sell my book to one percent of one percent of one percent of the Earth’s population? You think there’s not going to be enough to split? It’s nothing compared to Dan Brown’s hundreds of millions, but then, it didn’t cost you anywhere near as much, either.
Call me a control freak. You won’t be the first. But the entirety of the modern publishing industry, from the query/conform/requery mill of the agent level, to the “Oh, your book’s out, and here’s what the cover looks like” attitude of the marketing department, to the “Oh, yeah, here’s your royalty payment from those sales six months ago” of the financial side, is designed to wrest control of the book away from the author.
That may have flown in the days of block-long printing presses and fleets of trucks and trains and ships to get the books to the stores, but this is the internet age. This is the eBay age. This is the age when I can order bath soap four bars at a time from a tiny four-person company in Backwater, USA, and they can make money getting it to me. Me and the couple of thousand other people on Earth who’ve heard of them.
Don’t look at the sugar maple in my yard and try to figure a way to get that sap to drain into your own coffers – come over and offer to help tap the trees and boil the syrup, and I’ll give you some when we get done.
