Navigating the Many Roads of Alternate Publishing

Which Publishing Path
Should I Take?

In numerous previous posts I often said something to the affect that traditional publishing wasn't dying or dead but merely wasn't the only kid on the block anymore.

Publishing has indeed been changing --- BUT, it has always been changing --- since the beginning of parchment and quill (you get my drift; by the way the history of paper is interesting as well as writing instruments).

We have just been caught up in (experiencing) a link of time in the long chain of publishing change. Call it the digital link, if you will.

So, in this particular publishing link (change-cycle) we call digital publishing alternate publishing. Simply because it's new.

The new, faster and cheaper paths to publishing has caused confusion among writers.

What should a writer do? How should s/he publish? Traditional, digital, self-publish or otherwise?

Well, it depends on who your audience is and what purpose your writing serves.

You see, publishing has grown more hands and legs to shake hands with or dance with :)

This interesting insight is from Sharon Short and David Braughler writing in the Dayton Daily News :

Alternate publishing: What should a writer do?

Many writers wonder about the various paths to publication. Is pursuing a traditional publisher the best route for their work, or should they consider the alternate paths that have become seemingly more accessible with the digital age?

Those alternate paths include publishing e-books (electronic books) or self-publishing print books with a company like Amazon.com or with a more traditional printer. I’ve received numerous e-mails about this subject and thought it was time to pursue the answer on behalf of interested Literary Life readers.

Well, the answer depends … on the work, the writer, the writer’s goals and interests, say two alternate publishing experts. They spoke at Books & Co. on Nov. 18 as part of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop’s (www.antiochwritersworkshop.com) on-going free mini-workshop series.

“The most important questions we ask writers are ‘why do you write’ and ‘who did you write this for,’ ” says David Braughler, publishing advisor for Greyden Press (www.greydenpress.com) in Dayton. “Truly thinking about honestly answering those questions helps writers focus on their goals.”

For example, a writer who has a specific target audience, or a specific goal, such as capturing expertise in a book that would be made available at speaking engagements, might do well with self-publishing. “Not every solution is right for every writer,” Braughler says.

His company helps authors with their work, from editing to cover design to printing; the cost to the author varies by project. Although Greyden also helps authors find distribution through online vendors such as Amazon.com, and finds “grassroots” opportunities for promotion such as signing booths for authors at local festivals, the bulk of marketing and distribution rests with the writers. That’s why, Braughler says, it’s so important to embark on this path with clear answer to those two all-important questions.

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Dissecting the Publishing Industry - A Revealing Autopsy

Dissecting publishing
old and new

The old, so-called literary gatekeepers have fallen on the trail of progression (or is that the 'trail of tears'?); book critics or reviewers have morphed into thousands of social networking bloggers; agent, editor and marketing duties have been taken over by the necessarily more entrepreneurial writer --- and, guess what?

The writer has, indeed, become the publisher!

Hell, the newbie writer did most of the publishers' work under the old TP system of publishing anyway. It's just a whole lot easier today thanks to technology.

This publishing industry upheaval has created many new self-publishing support services niches --- and, oddly enough, has not been totally negative to the traditional publishing industry.

Warren Adler, published author (War of the Roses), gives this intriguing insight in the HuffPost:

Decoding the Self-Published Author

Every author knows that producing a book requires an extreme act of concentration, discipline, organization and stamina. It is an achievement requiring enormous effort, time and isolation rarely matched by other forms of artistic creation.

Despite all the revolutionary changes that roil the publishing industry and are currently upending the old methods of presenting books to the public, the bedrock fact remains that a published book, whether presented on paper or on screen, still carries with it a measure of prestige and achievement.

Despite the difficulties involved in a book's creation, there is no shortage of people determined to produce works that reflect their own vision, whether they are motivated by chasing the false gods of fame and fortune or simply satisfying their overwhelming need to be heard and their views, talents and interests projected beyond the confines of their own minds and imagination. There are perhaps millions of people worldwide currently bent over their desks composing works they hope to share with others.

A few short years ago, the pipeline for these endeavors was strictly regulated by time-honored methods of filtering. A band of business-minded publishers, fed by a gaggle of first look agents, would submit choices to publishing houses whose editors and marketers filtered out their own choices. These choices were then cataloged seasonally, and an army of salespeople was dispatched to book buyers of independent and chain stores who subsequently made their own choices based upon past sales, and perhaps a few gut choices of their own.

The road to marketing and publicity channels was well rutted. Mass media outlets had their own filtering process to determine which books they would feature in their review columns, and advertising sections of books were well established. A few well-respected critics could be relied upon to filter their own choices to public scrutiny.

Media outlets hit upon the idea to record book sales as a kind of horse race of popularity, which helped them with their advertising, and kept the sales pot boiling for those authors lucky enough to be included.

Roughly, this is the way the system worked for many decades. Publishers supported their prolific authors with advances based on projected sales and future royalties, and those books that didn't sell went back to the publishers in an arcane system of consignment.

For those authors who didn't make the filtering cut, the only solution was "vanity" publishing, which meant that an author could pay to have his book published, and for the most part, try to get his book into the system. A camel through the eye of the needle is a good analogy. While there is no real statistic on author rejections by agents and publishers, the real figure based on the amount of self-published books being shoe-horned into the current offerings on e-readers indicates that those numbers must have been staggering.

That publishing system has been completely overturned by time, taste and most of all, technology. The industry itself has been sliced and diced into categories and sub-categories and sub, sub categories. In fiction, hundreds of genres and sub-genres have been created and built around categories to appeal to specific tastes; categories such as romance, mystery, fantasy, zombies, vampires, graphic novels, erotic, young adults, children, etc. with new categories emerging like ever thin slices of salami.

In non-fiction, the slicing and dicing has reached epic proportions in areas such as politics, religion, popular culture, race, memoirs, exposés, diatribes, self-help, pop psychology, nutrition, diet, health, and sex -- especially sex. On that latter subject the recent Fifty Shades of Grey category has jumped the fiction and non-fiction categories by building a kind of story around a 'how to' guide to sado-masochism performance.

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Book Substance vs Book Packaging

I, and really most folks associated in any way with the publishing (and by extension writing) industry, have understood for many years the deep inequities in that industry.

Traditional publishing (TP) has always stood on a foundation of pure jelly, sinking little by little from it's very birth. TP's survival was sustained, not by any inherent brilliance, but by a lack of any alternate, competent competition.

TP's jelly foundation really turned into liquid juice back when the main consideration turned away from the written words on the pages of a book to the eye candy of packaging and the celebrity of the authors.

Simply put, traditional publishing lost it's soul.

Dan Agin (Author/Neuroscientist), writing a blog for HuffPost, has an interesting take on the demise of publishing...A little oversimplified RE the eReader technology being the core cause...but, he nailed the shallowness of the so-called publishing business pros in the writer-to- reader chain RE not reading and just packaging books.

Dan Agin:

American Publishing: A Lesson From Tolstoy's Inkwell

My first published literary effort, an article about New York City, appeared in 1945 in a magazine called Gotham, the house organ of the New Yorker Hotel. Since this is 2011, I claim 66 years as both a participant and observer of American publishing.

The magazine Gotham folded.

The New Yorker Hotel eventually also folded.

Traditional American publishing is in the process of folding.

From the standpoint of philosophy, everything folds eventually, so what's the big deal?

Well, the fact of folding is usually not as important as the reasons for folding. Looking at reasons, causes, provoking events, often helps us understand how the world works.

For the folding of traditional American publishing, the most provoking recent event is the appearance of the new technology of hand-held E-readers, especially the Kindle, which at present outclasses them all.

But aside from this new technology and its consequences now apparent to almost everyone, there are other reasons for the present collapse of traditional American publishing.

I say "collapse" because the collapse of Borders is akin to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Wall Street, and like that collapse the collapse of Borders suggests that too many people in American publishing don't know what the hell they're doing.

Why is that?

After 66 years of watching the American publishing circus and publishing as an "author," my personal views are as follows:

•Most publishers don't read books, they just display them on shelves in their offices.
•Most acquiring editors don't read books, they just acquire them and negotiate contracts.
•Most copy editors don't read books, they use software to locate possible grammar and punctuation problems.
•Most literary agents don't read books, they just read opening chapters or proposals for books and sell books to editors based on the book's apparent "handle", its "take-away", its "feel-good" score.
•Most marketing and publicity people in publishing don't read books, they read blurbs and look at book jackets and attach a book to market demographics.
•Most publishing accountants don't read books, they just add up the profits and losses of the various imprints of a conglomerate.
•Most booksellers don't read books, they sell books the way most people in publishing acquire books -- as physical objects with "handles."

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