Self-Publishing and You

Since e-books first started appearing in mainstream sources, I’ve been wondering when we’d see vanity publishing – or legitimate self-publishing – versions of these products arriving on the market. Vanity publishing seemed unlikely, since in most cases the whole point is to have a book you can show people, give people to read, and so on; a vanity-published e-book wouldn’t confer any more status than any other computer file. Self-publishing is another matter, though – in a world where more and more of the publishing industry seems to be devoted to sensationalist crap and ghostwritten autobiographies, an increasing number of serious authors have been arranging to have their own work printed and distributed for sale as the only means of ever getting it published. For that purpose, self-publication in electronic format would probably make sense, especially if there was some established on-line retailer who would handle the nuts and bolts for you – and especially if you had some prospect of actually getting paid for doing so…

I got an email about it this morning, but you can pick up the news story from the Gizmodo website if you want the details. Basically, if you had anything you think people might want to download and buy, you can post it as an e-book on the Barnes and Noble site, and they’ll split the proceeds with you (you get 65% of the sale price for anything under $10 and 40% of anything higher than that). It costs Barnes and Noble almost nothing to create a product page for you – since there’s no publisher information, Library of Congress information, trade journal notes, book reviews or cover art to post – and the only potential downside is having to process credit cards (and prosecute fraudulent ones). And it certainly could be used for vanity publishing, if you’re the sort of tech nerd who thinks having your own e-book is cool, and if there’s anyone who would pay for a copy of it. But I think the real potential here is probably for authors with small but real communities of readers…

Let’s suppose that you’re a blogger and you get a few hundred hits everyday, maybe a few thousand on days when your post is particularly funny, well-written, or risqué. Let’s also suppose that you have written a book that might be of interest to your readers, and you put it up on the new Barnes & Noble “Pubit” service, with a cover price of $9.99. If 200 people download it, you’ve netted a cool $130, which is probably a lot more than your getting from letting your web host put banner ads on your page. If your book is successful it will probably draw more interest to your blog; if the blog grows in popularity it could also create additional sales for your book. If the process cycles through enough times, you might even make enough doing this to quit your day job…

Of course, there’s a reason that most of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have fewer than two dozen readers each – it’s essentially the same reason that somewhere between 35% and 85% of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have given up on the project and stopped updating their blogs more than very occasionally, which is that most of these people have nothing of general interest to say, even on the rare occasions when they actually say it well. Amazon has had a similar service – called the 70/30 program for some time now, and it doesn’t seem to have created any new bestselling authors out of the blogosphere. Producing enough e-book sales to make a living at it is hard enough for established authors, let alone somebody whose total readership could hold their annual convention in my living room. On the other hand, all great changes begin with small ones; all fundamental shifts in a civilization begin with tiny ones. If this really is the trend that begins the information-based society predicted by Heinlein and Clarke – well, remember folks, you heard it here first…

Now where was that novel I was working on?