- Read on: This could save you years of heartache and frustration…
- So you’ve written a book; now what? Or, how best to get it published?
- Shifting literary landscape: Just how useful are major publishers nowadays?
- Their bulk-printed runs of thousands of physical copies may not be best
- Digital revolution has largely changed the way we access information
- Nothing can replace feel of a physical book but digital also essential
- Internet: Most total daily time online is spent on mobile devices
In a slight digression from this site’s usual content, I get asked quite a lot about publishing so to save continually repeating myself decided it was time to dump my thoughts here to easier direct folk towards them. Though this information applies to all literary genres, it’s especially slanted towards nonfiction and academic authors – particularly those concerned with cinema, natch.
My thinking on conventional print publishing has evolved over the years, from initially considering it superior to self-publishing in every way, and ahead of digital in most regards. Now though, I believe it to be almost the complete opposite: the big companies and physical-only books were indispensable once but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Here’s why:
Received wisdom is that major publishers confer an air of respectability; after all, if your book wasn’t any good, they wouldn’t touch it, would they? But having the name or logo of a major publisher on the spine is no guarantee of quality. Without naming and shaming, the news is littered with countless examples of “respectably” printed books, both major and minor, which turned out to be deeply flawed in some way, resulting in great embarrassment and mea culpas all round. Consider the stigma attached to dating agencies and websites up until just a few years ago – Carry On Loving, anyone? – not only are they now considered the norm and totally acceptable, folk are often surprised when they hear couples met via the “old fashioned” real-world method. Well, the same has also happened with publishing.
Perhaps major publishers can theoretically distribute your work more widely and, due to their contact networks and general influence, ensure copies end up in many libraries and learning institutions. But far more frequently the opposite seems to be the case. Some publishers will add your book to a recommended list of titles for organisations to buy but beyond that, all too often they do little or nothing to promote it. Time and again, I’m asked by authors to help publicise their books as seemingly nothing is being done, only to find that my mentions or social media posts are the only ones they’ve had. There’s not much point in your publisher of choice having a huge online following if they’re not prepared to use it in service of their own product. And let’s not get into the myriad threats posed by encroaching AI; suffice it to say you can’t count on major publishers to have your back.
Note that on those occasions when you do see a book being plugged relentlessly, with articles, reviews, interviews etc, it’s usually the author themselves or an agency they’ve hired doing all the donkey work and nothing whatsoever to do with the publisher.
Beyond an initial gratuity, authors often find further royalty payments are not forthcoming and sales have seemingly flatlined, with no way to know whether their work is actually selling or not. And it’s only going to get worse. And worse. With traditional publishers, royalty rates are anywhere between 7-25%; unless your name is J. K. Rowling or Stephen King, guess which end you’ll be at. Conversely, with self-publishing, depending on the method you choose, returns are 70-100% and you have direct, copy-by-copy access to sales figures.
With a traditional publisher, however dissatisfied an author becomes with their experience they’re not free to move their work elsewhere. Even if they retain copyright in their text and, perhaps, images, the publisher is the default “owner” in terms of overall layout, design etc. Possession really is nine-tenths of the law.
I have first-hand knowledge of several globally respected, bestselling non-fiction authors whose books, much to their embarrassment and frustration, are now decades out of date. Yet despite them having fully updated versions containing the latest research ready to go, the books are still being sold in their original form or even completely out of print, with their authors’ repeated pleas to update or simply just reprint them falling on deaf ears. And there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it. Some of them are reaching the end of long, illustrious lives and careers, and their dearest wish to see the most fully realised visions of their magnum opuses made publicly available seems likely to be thwarted. This is truly heartbreaking stuff.
The whole sorry state of affairs is also analogous to musicians who don’t own their publishing or mechanical (actual recordings) rights, or filmmakers who don’t control their own films. This has led to the biggest issues of the professional careers of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Prince, George Michael and Taylor Swift, among countless others. Long after their work has made untold fortunes for the companies who originally funded it and repaid them many times over, the actual creators have no say in what happens to it, and little or no share in the ongoing profits. Or there are works that have been locked away for years gathering dust, with no one able to compel the keyholders to release them for public consumption and enjoyment. I honestly don’t know which scenario is worse.
With the DIY approach, none of this need happen; you retain complete control over every single aspect of your own work – for ever.
Now, a brief word on just one of the ways in which self-publishing works. Film historian Gary Chapman, author of this site’s London’s Hollywood: The Gainsborough Film Studio’s Silent Years article, as of the time of writing has self-published nine books with several others in the pipeline. He has an account with a typical site which provides a simple dashboard similar to WordPress, where you can upload your completed book or edit it in situ. Of course, if you wish it’s easy to engage someone else to take care of editing, proofreading, formatting, cover design, etc. Once completed, you can sell it from there via any site or platform you choose and in any quantity or format such as hardback (with or without dust jacket), paperback, PDF or ebook. Depending on your presentation choices, physical copies are every bit the equal of those printed by anyone else and can include an ISBN or ISSN (archived) for formal recognition.
Here’s the best part: because you can update your book as and when you choose, and it’s print-on-demand, each and every copy sold is the latest, best version possible. This effectively makes errata a thing of the past, although you can always maintain a list of them online for any buyers of earlier fixed print or PDF editions. Of course, as with streaming films and programmes, ebooks always display the latest version linked to your account.
There are many sites offering a wealth of information demystifying the entire process; it’s certainly worthwhile thoroughly exploring all the options before deciding on the best one for you. Publishing expert Jane Friedman has provided the best resources available, and here are a few more:
Something else I’m often asked is why on earth I haven’t published some of my long form, multi-part articles as books. Good question. For me, it’s most important to get the information out there and disseminated as widely as possible. Often, I’m trying to correct longstanding fallacies and misapprehensions, and that simply isn’t possible with a single book, however well it sells – and there’s no guarantee of that. On the other hand, in a world where discourse is most commonly seen and shared online, my site hits are now running into the millions. And I’m just getting started. Of course, if someone wants to make an offer I can’t refuse to produce a book as well, I may have to reconsider!
By the way, there are hybrid options too, whereby it’s possible to both have your book sold and distributed by a major publisher, and give it away for free. For instance, Michael Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs (2005) was initially issued by Amsterdam University Press then nine years later made available for free via the OAPEN Library and various other scholarly websites. More recently, Victoria Duckett’s first book, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt (2015), is only sold via the University of Illinois Press but not so for its follow-up. With Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema (2023), she opted to simultaneously publish and sell it with the University of California Press and for free via their Luminos Open Access scheme, OAPEN and others. This is specifically because she’s keen for it to read by as many people as possible. You’ll find these and thousands of others on OAPEN’s Directory of Open Access Books, a valuable resource for would-be publishers and researchers alike.
Try to be realistic about the size of the potential market for your work. Unless you’ve a guaranteed number one bestseller on your hands, bear in mind even the more “popular” titles, such as those weighty film star biographies that regularly appear, seldom sell in anything like enough quantities to allow their authors to rely on churning them out full-time for a living. Back in December 2000, much-missed film preservationist David Shepard said in an interview:
“The Lost World (1925) disc will have a second track commentary by Roy Pilot, who did a book that he spent ten years on, called The Annotated Lost World. You’ve seen annotated Bibles, where there’s a page of text and a page of notes? He did that with The Lost World—it’s amazing. Ten years of work, and they printed a thousand copies of the book, and the first edition isn’t sold out in four years. So, it wasn’t hard for Roy to see that a lot more people would hear what he had to say than would ever find his book.”
Of course, with virtual publishing you can multiply those commentary-listening figures by an order of magnitude. Lastly, there’s the issue of online permanence, as opposed to physical books. The internet has been around long enough now, and is so deeply embedded in every aspect of the functioning of humankind in general, that I’m pretty sure it isn’t going anywhere unless or until we do. (Mind you, at the current rate that may be sooner rather than later.) Further, thanks to sites like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, archive.today and others, most web pages generating a healthy amount of traffic over time, and many that don’t, are assured of being preserved for posterity in the event the original domain disappears.
There you have it: several potential routes to getting your words out into the world. I’ve nothing against traditional print publishing in general but many of us have grown up with it being the de facto choice and know exactly how it works. Or at least we think we do. I hope this alternative viewpoint will prompt some to consider your options more carefully and potentially save yourselves untold disappointment and heartache.
