As a follow-on from my last blog post, if you want to publish a book there are three possible routes you can follow. The first – commercial or mainstream publishing – is by far the most difficult because you need to convince a publisher, or more likely convince a literary agent to convince a publisher, that your work is good enough for publication. And the publisher must be convinced because money will have to change hands: the publishing house will have to pay you an advance as well as fork out for the editing, cover design, typesetting, printing, marketing and publicity, storage and distribution of the books and all the other stuff that goes with it. And that is a difficult and potentially long uphill path to follow.
It’s a path that may well have been made even more difficult if a survey recently reported in the Daily Mail is to be believed. This concluded that because most people in publishing are now young women with similar degrees from similar universities with similar outlooks on life who are looking for writers who also have similar backgrounds and similar points of view, and who are writing similar books that follow the same general philosophy of those similar women, it can be difficult to be accepted unless you are young, female and conformist.
Exactly how much truth there is in that contention I have no idea but certainly most of the people I’ve met in my career in publishing have been of the female persuasion. In fact, I’ve, only ever had three male publishers, and one of those batted for the other side, as my agent delicately phrased it.
This also implies that most new books will be non-contentious, anodyne, Woke and scrupulously politically correct, which is an astonishingly depressing prospect.
I’ve had personal experience of this. In one of my recent novels my publisher refused to go ahead unless I removed two slang words – or to be exact, the same slang word used twice – on the weak and feeble grounds that somebody somewhere might possibly be offended. The fact that the word was used in conversation by one of the characters and in an entirely appropriate context was apparently irrelevant. I refused to alter it and told the publisher he would have to change it himself. You will probably not be entirely surprised to learn that I’m no longer under contract with that particular publishing house.
The advantages of being commercially published are obvious: all you have to do as an author is write books, attend the occasional launch party and other events and let the publishing house handle everything else. That’s the theory, anyway. Realistically, with the financial pressures being felt throughout the industry and the general uncertainty about the future, a commercially published author who is not prepared to get down and dirty to help out with the marketing and promotions – assuming the publishing house can be bothered to do any, which most aren’t – is unlikely to be successful. But that is certainly the preferred route for most aspiring authors
The second option is to do it yourself. You write the book, find and pay for an editor to weed out the typos and other bits that don’t work, commission a cover, then bung it out on Amazon or Kobo and spend the rest of your time advertising the thing. Taking the Kindle route, in fact. The obvious downside is that there’s a very steep learning curve and you have to either do everything yourself or pay somebody else to do it for you. And make no mistake about this: writing the book is the easy bit. Marketing is very hard and continuous work.
But the upside is that if you sell one thousand copies through Amazon your royalty return will be about the same as selling ten thousand copies through a commercial publishing house. That’s the difference between a 7% royalty and a 70% royalty and not paying an agent, and that’s why so many successful self-published authors have not the slightest interest in going the traditional commercial route because they simply can’t afford to.
I’ve done both, having been commercially published by four of the biggest UK publishing houses and well over a dozen abroad, and I’ve also gone the self-publishing route when whatever I was writing either didn’t appeal to a mainstream publisher or was simply too difficult to try to sell to them. These days, I find self-publishing rather more appealing, for several predictable reasons.
But there is a third option for those people who want to see their name on the cover of a book. It’s been called different things, including ‘hybrid,’ ‘partnership’ and ‘subsidy’ publication but is most commonly referred to as vanity publishing. Basically, instead of the publishing house paying the author, the author pays the publishing house. I had hoped that with the advent of the Kindle most of these companies would have fallen by the wayside but in fact many of them still seem to be flourishing, for reasons that I don’t really understand.
This was the subject of an article in the autumn edition of The Author, the trade magazine for professional writers, and it made for interesting, if depressing, reading. Briefly, people who had tried this option were asked to respond to a survey requesting details of their experiences. Customer service was assessed as poor or very poor by 37% of respondents, 36% said they were dissatisfied overall and 48% stated that they would not recommend their publisher to other authors.
The market leader in this somewhat murky field is Austin Macauley, which also led the field in overall negative reviews, with only 16% of respondents reporting a positive experience and 79% claiming the service they received was poor or very poor.
And this is not a cheap option by any means. The cost of vanity publishing a book ranges from about £800 to over £10,000 with the average being a little over £3,000. Some people might think those prices are not too exorbitant, as long as the company delivers what it claims it will, which obviously includes marketing the book. Unfortunately this doesn’t work either. Over 52% of respondents also said that they weren’t satisfied with the advertising and promotion efforts from these companies. Some 69% of authors who paid for publication claimed that their book was not available for sale in any of the normal retail outlets including bookshops and supermarkets, which is kind of the point: why pay to have a book published if the general public can’t buy it?
The problem really is that publishing is a very small world and everyone from the man running the bookshop on the corner to the team handling supermarket book ordering will know the names of all the vanity imprints and won’t buy from them. They won’t buy their books on the reasonable grounds that the only reason anyone would use a vanity publisher is if no commercial publishing house would accept the book, which by implication means that it’s not of a publishable standard.
So in reality there are really only two possible routes to publication, or routes to successful publication: get seriously in touch with your feminine side, go Woke and go commercial, or do everything yourself through Kindle. This is subject I’ll be coming back to shortly.
