A Brief Introduction To Self-Publishing – Part 1

Once upon a time, publishing was limited only to those who managed to write something really good, managed to get it typed out in a presentable format, and approached a publishing company with large gilded letters on a sign above their offices, who deigned to give their project favorable consideration. For a time, there was no other way to get published – at least not by a so-called “traditional” publisher.

You may have heard this term before, perhaps without knowing what it means or refers to, but “traditional” publishers are the ones people tend to think of first when they think about publishing their book.

Nobody finishes writing their book and thinks immediately about self-publishing. Absolutely no-one. We all first think – daydream even – about sending our manuscripts off to a big famous publisher in America, London, or – after a series of polite and impersonal rejection letters – even in Cape Town or Johannesburg.

We dream of that fantastic letter of acceptance, filled with praise for our literary skill and our story-telling prowess and insight into the dingy, rank and sordid depths of the human soul – and our skill at interpreting the emotions of our characters etc., etc. – accompanied of course with an offer to publish, and even a contract.

Excuse me just a moment – I need to wipe away the tears of laughter from my eyes! Oh, if only it were so easy, dear author, if only!

“Oh, I’ll send it to Penguin. Or Random House” they think somewhat optimistically. Experience is a good teacher – and as the budding young noob author quickly learns, “traditional” publishers (whether large or small presses) are often the jagged rocks that dash their wooden walls of hope, and are also the watery graveyard of optimism.

“Traditional” publishers these days come in different flavors: large corporations with lots of staff operating from formal offices, often around the world, and “small presses” which could be individually or family owned and run, even out of home offices, or operating only on the internet – often also having global reach. While the big, better-known publishing companies likely all have the same big business problems of overheads, staff woes, different departments to run and manage, salaries and benefits to pay, property rentals or debt payments, investors to satisfy etc. – the need to drive a larger profit becomes much more urgent and important than with a small press. Aside from that, larger companies often put more books out per year, precisely because they have a larger staff and can focus on more projects (and spend more time per individual stage of any project) at a time than do smaller presses.

While many probably maintain regular dedicated offices, most of the small presses I’ve had contact with try to look bigger than they are – perhaps because there is still the tendency for people to believe the lie that “bigger is better” and that they would not be taken as seriously if people knew they were operated from out of a 3×4 meter office at home, beside the laundry room in the basement, and likely only part-time since small presses tend to be run on the side by people who also work other jobs – and frequently in the plural. In that case, the need for profit – while still present and desirable – becomes less urgent, and there is less greed and more room (and time) for these to focus on the quality of content, creativity and individuality. Of course, this also means they tend to put out a lot less inventory per year in relation to the big companies.

This article is an excerpt from “A Guide To Self-Publishing In South Africa” by Christina Engela. If you like it, consider buying the book.

These days, all you really need to be a publisher is time, a PC, an internet connection, some software, online banking capacity, and a boat-load of talent and creativity. One person can do it all. One person can operate as a “traditional” but independent publisher – a small press – because the term “traditional” evokes the manner in which a publisher operates, not so much their façade, or their size.

In such a scenario, the “traditional” publisher holds all the cards – they determine the worth of the book, whether or not it is “publishable”, how much editing is necessary for the item to meet their expectations – and how much of the income from sales would be payable to the actual creator of the work…which as you might agree if you’ve any self-publishing experience, usually isn’t as much as the author had hoped!

In days gone by, the publisher had the final say on who or what got published, and this system – since it was entirely dominated by publishers (while there were no other publishing avenues) – was invariably stacked in their favor. No surprises there, right?

Ever since the common folk learned to read and write for themselves – rather than this basic educational right being reserved for the wealthy, clergy and nobles, there has always been an abundance of writers, poets and the like who have stories to tell, ideas to share, and the traditional publishers firmly entrenched themselves as the gate keepers of the flow of information – not for political or religious motive, but for profit. Controlling the market gave them security, and since they were the only way people could publish their books, they could determine what would sell and what would not – and what authors would receive in payment for their hard work.

So you see, in some ways this system set traditional publishers up as the dominant force in the publishing industry – and in a certain sense, also as censors. If a publisher didn’t like something in a book – or the book itself, or if they didn’t agree with whatever message it conveyed, it stayed unpublished – and there was little or nothing the author could to about it… except try another publisher… and then another, ad infinitum, until their patience, hope, finances failed them, or the pool of publishers dried up.

There is after all, a lot more to publishing a book than merely paying a printer to make a thousand copies of your book – you’d still have to market it and get bookshops to stock it – and people to buy it.

More about that next time, in part 2 of this series!

Read more:

• A Brief Introduction To Self-Publishing: A 5 part series of articles introducing the reader to the concept of self-publishing.
• Forewords, Prologues, Prefaces & Introductions Explained: this explains the differences and similarities and when it is appropriate to use them and for what.
• The Interrobang – What Is It?!: What is the interrobang, where and when should it be used? Should it be used at all?
• Asterism Or Dinkus – What’s In A Name?: Do you still write in actual chapters? For god’s sake – why?
• Afterwords & Epilogs Explained: this explains what afterwords and epilogs are for and when it is appropriate to use them.
• Word Length – When Is A Novel, A Novel?: This explains the word lengths for different categories of book or story.
• Which Self-Publishing Platform – Or All Of Them?: An article about experimenting with which self-publishing distribution platforms to  use concurrently. Also read the follow-up article: More Isn’t Always Better – My Self-publishing Platform Strategy Revisited.
• A Guide To Self-Publishing In South Africa – a guide to being an indie author in spite of being stuck in South Africa by Christina Engela.
• Some Great Resources For Writers: A collection of useful tools and articles giving advice to new writers trying to make their way in a minefield of obstacles.

Cheers!

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