A Brief Introduction To Self-Publishing – Part 5

EBooks, or electronic book reading formats (Adobe Acrobat “.pdf”, Kindle and epub etc.) began to emerge in the 1990’s – proliferated of course, by the internet. At first scorned by the mainstream – just as the concept of “electronic post” (email) was rejected back in the early 1970’s – electronic books have revolutionized the industry in several very important ways – and some would argue, not necessarily for the better!

Nowadays, books are available in paperback format on a bookshelf (in South Africa, at your nearest CNA or Exclusive Books) but more easily so online. You can pop onto Amazon or other international supplier’s websites using your PC, notebook or smart phone and buy, order, download and start reading your favorite book in just a matter of minutes!

While the access to reading matter has been improved tenfold and simplified thusly, it has also meant that those companies whose business it is to create and supply physical books has taken a serious knock for several reasons! Let’s take a quick look at a few:

• eBooks are generally far cheaper to obtain (some are even provided FREE!),
• eBooks are easier to download than it is to travel to a book store,
• eBooks can be downloaded immediately, while it takes comparatively much longer to order a physical book online, wait for it to be delivered, or to fetch one from a book store or library.
• eBooks also create a whole new market for wares which the physical book publishing industry simply wasn’t geared for – which also led to a vast array of problems relating to supply and demand… but we’ll get to that later.

Fans of eBooks and e-readers (i.e. Kindle) argue that reading a book from their tablet or smartphone means they can do so wherever they go, and the self-lit screen also means that lighting and reading in the dark or in poor lighting is not as much of a problem as it would be with a physical book. Aficionados of real paper books on the other hand prefer the feel and even the smell of real books. Whatever the individual preference, the impact of the introduction of eBooks on the market and associated industry is certainly hard to deny! On the downside of eBooks, piracy also thrives in the eBook platform – after all, it’s a heck of a lot easier to copy, paste, and email an eBook file to a friend than it is to scan or copy and send a printed pirated book! (Does anyone still do that?)

For more than a decade now, the production of physical books has been periodically reported as dropping worldwide. This has been blamed on the reduction in sales of physical books, which in turn appears to be caused by a corresponding decrease in demand for physical books – which also in turn, appears to correspond to the growth of the eBook market. The knock-on effect is undeniable – with fewer paperback books being bought, fewer are being produced, which also impacted the cost of buying books, which has increased correspondingly.

I recall a few years ago, this whole mess resulted in a global book industry panic! In a mass-production world, the more things are made and sold, often the cheaper they become – and in this case, the opposite applies, which – so I’m told – accounts for the dramatic rise in the cost of printed books!

On the plus side, the creation of an eBook market has in turn forced even “traditional” publishers to finally join the rest of us in the 21st century and provide their products in both paperback AND in eBook formats. Some publishers also provide eBook-only versions of certain books, and some publishers or self-publishing platforms (such as Smashwords.com) ONLY deal with eBooks.

In the early stages of the eBook phenomenon, writers were already distributing their own works in PDF format online, mostly for free, but sometimes via email on a proof of payment basis.

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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.

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Oh yes, I can remember a lot of the early eBooks I read on my PC – they were little more than scanned-in actual paperback books in PDF format – full of grainy patterns and strange flecks and marks! Many were freely distributed (albeit illegally) from forums and chat groups. Later on, some were Word documents converted into PDF’s. Most were full of formatting inconsistencies, bad grammar, and loads of spelling errors and typos! Nobody could today be expected to actually pay money to download something like that! No author – indie, or tied to a traditional publishing contract – should expect anyone to want to read their work, should they present it like that to the eBook market today!

By the early 2000’s the first digital publishing companies began to appear on the internet, offering platforms from which self-publishing authors could market and sell their books. Some of them offered free services, but also charged for any extras such as for editing or cover design or assistance with creating their PDF files etc. – which I suppose is fair. Various names in this specialized field came and went, but a few (like Lulu and Streetlib) have been around from the beginning and are still going strong today.

Companies sprang up almost overnight to offer digital publishing platforms from where a creator or author could upload their material – formatted according to set specifications – and could choose from a variety of templates, and publish – and sell their creations internationally via the internet! For the first time ever, ANYONE could write their own book – and format it, design their own cover, set their pricing, then publish it themselves – and all for FREE! In a world where I wonder when we’re going to have to start paying our respective governments for the air we breathe, I think that’s pretty damned awesome, don’t you?

Back in 2004, when I discovered publish on demand self-publishing, it was completely by accident – I was spending my then sparse and costly internet time looking for more “traditional” publishers to email submissions to. “What’s this?” I thought. And then I read more, and the more I read, the better it looked.

It wasn’t “vanity press”, because I wasn’t paying them vast sums of money – or in fact anything – for the “privilege” of publishing my own book! Better yet, I didn’t HAVE TO pay anyone to edit it for me, or design a cover, or do anything – I could if I wanted to, if I was lazy – but as I was able to do all those things myself, it didn’t cost me a cent!

How did that service provider make its money then? Well, they took a modest cut of every individual sale – in those days, a fifth (i.e. $1 from a $5 sale) – and of course, they also offered paid services to authors – editing, formatting, cover design etc. – if an author needed it. I’m sure some did, but I always did everything myself, so that didn’t bother me. There are few things that can make me turn pale than to work out what “only $100” equates to in Souf Efrikin ronts! Regardless, that discovery opened a whole new horizon to me – as well as to many authors around the world!

The arrival of the “print on demand” (P.O.D.) phenomenon resulted in the growth of the independent author as a serious contender in the new publishing market, and over a number of years, self-publishing has opened up the whole market to people who are fed-up with begging “traditional” publishers to look at their manuscripts in the hope of getting published!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of articles – my goal is to show other writers, especially indie writers from South Africa – how to avoid the inordinate number of pitfalls and obstacles that we as writers from South Africa face! I truly hope this helps!

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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