Why I Hate Self-Publishing

By Steven Womack

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Some time ago, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters-In-Crime. A week or so before that, I’d read an installment of Clay Stafford’s writing blog that put forth the proposition that writers should not give their work away. A writer’s work has meaning, Clay wrote. It has value and to give it away for free sends the wrong message to readers and to the world in general.

I’ve known Clay Stafford a good couple of decades now and have always regarded him as a wise and successful friend. When he speaks, I listen—and usually take notes.

This time, however, I had to disagree.

It’s not that I disagree with his notion that a writer’s work has value. It does, even if sometimes it’s only to the writer him/herself. All writers put an enormous amount of work and heart in to getting those words onto a page. But that doesn’t always automatically translate into value, especially value measured in sales/dollars. When there are roughly 2.2 million new books published every year (according to UNESCO), the competition is pretty rough out there and it’s hard to convince an audience that your book has value; in other words, it’s worth reading.

So I put forth the notion—based on my own experience—that the best way to get attention for your book was to give it away. In February, I had my first BookBub Featured Deal and in a four-day period gave away 24,897 eBook copies of the latest installment in my Music City Murders Harry James Denton series, Fade Up From Black. Through the rest of the month, that resulted in over 200,000 page reads. And since Amazon’s policy is to pay page reads on book giveaways if the book’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I made money giving stuff away.

Enough to pay for the BookBub Featured Deal, anyway.

While I’ve given up predicting the future, I feel confident that at least a few of the people who downloaded those nearly 25,000 copies will like the book well enough to actually go out and buy the other installments.

It’s a whole new world out there, marketing-wise. Marketing in the internet age has a  very long tail, and to riff on my old pal Larry Beinhart, sometimes the tail wags the dog.

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After my talk, Clay wrote me a very complimentary note and asked if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Killer Nashville Magazine on self-publishing. I was very flattered, but the first obstacle to overcome was my loathing of the term self-publishing. Loathing? Seems kind of harsh. Why would anyone loathe a term like self-publishing, especially since some of the greatest writers in history published their own work? 

Disgusted with his usual publisher, Mark Twain formed a publishing company to publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Dickens’s regular publisher showed little interest in A Christmas Carol, so Dickens hired artists and editors and paid for the printing himself. Beatrix Potter literally couldn’t interest anyone in publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she borrowed the money to print 250 copies. At latest count, there are some 45 million copies of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT in print. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. The rest, as they say, is history.

In our lifetimes, the stories of self-published books that sold gazillions are apocryphal. Amanda Hocking, Andy Weir, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Adams… all have, at some point in their careers, published their own work. And let’s not forget that whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

So why such distaste for the term?

I confess here that I’m an old guy. I began seriously writing in 1970, fresh out of boarding school and working on my first novel. There was no Internet then, no such thing as an eBook, and everything was old school; no respectable publisher would consider an unrepresented book, so you queried one agent at a time and if they took six months or a year to get back to you, tough noogies. They were the gatekeepers and they made the rules.

Then, like now, it seemed that every sumbitch who knew how to type thought they could be an arthur (a term coined by the wonderful Molly Ivins, when someone introduced me to her as a mystery writer—Great to meet you, we arthurs gotta stick together…)

Then, as now, there were dozens of predators out there preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. Self-publishing then was a synonym for vanity publishing, and the vanity presses were raking it in from the naïve rubes. Vantage Press, Pageant Press, and Exposition were three leading vanity presses that were, by the 1950s, “publishing” over 100 titles a year each. 

Even I got roped in myself when I paid $400 to have the legendary Scott Meredith Agency read a novel of mine. Meredith, being one smart cookie, had created a whole separate company to sucker in aspiring writers like moi. I got notes back from some office drone, supposedly signed by Meredith, who needless to say, didn’t take me on as a client.

Not one of those books published by a vanity press had a chance of being reviewed by anybody, let alone a respectable press like the New York Times. No bookstore would carry them.

Writers have always been easy pickings for predators. The most egregious case in history was The Famous Writer’s School, founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and regular panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? There isn’t enough space here to go into that con job, but it made millions by paying writers as diverse as Mignon Eberhart, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and Faith Baldwin to join their “faculty.” The suckers thought their stuff was being read and critiqued by Rod Serling, when in reality the work was being done by unknown copy editors. There’s not room enough here to really relate the history of this scam, but Google it. It’s an object lesson for us all.

If not self-publishing, then what?

The world of publishing today bears no resemblance to the publishing world I came of age in, and that’s a good thing. I’m already over my word allotment that Clay gave me for this column, so over the next few months (or however long this little adventure goes on), I’m going to talk about these changes and how my own experience in This Crazy Writing Life have shaped me and my career. To me, it’s not self-publishing. Self-publishing means your stuff’s so bad, you’re the only who’ll touch it.

I prefer the term independent publishing. Going forward, I’m going to talk about how we, as writers, can take control of our work and careers, take back the power from the gatekeepers, and become the kinds of writers we want to be, with the kinds of careers and lives we want to have.

This’ll be a journey we’ll share. After all, as Molly Ivins once said: We arthurs gotta stick together…