Self-Publishing: A Bad Rap Overturned

By Yvonne DiVita - Aug 06 , 2007

Self-publishing – the act of paying to have your book produced and printed, after you’ve written it – gets a bad rap.

Offer self-publishing to a writer and most of them immediately think, “vanity press.” Vanity pres is an old, Twentieth Century way of getting a book published by hiring a printer to take care of production. It involved buying a large quantity of books – to make it worth the printer’s time to set up the plates for the offset press and to pay for the other printing costs. Authors who chose to publish this way were required to pay for 5,000 to 10,000 books at a general cost of $2-5 per book.

That’s a big investment. And, of course, in the end, the author was awarded boxes and boxes of books to store in garage, basement or car trunk, with the idea of convincing book stores to stock the book. In other words, “Ms. Author, here are your books, all 10,000 of them. Happy sales!”

Since most new authors are not salespeople, and since most new authors still have stars in their eyes (believing the world will beat a path to their door, to purchase this exciting, outstanding new book they’ve written), most new authors who chose vanity publishing got what they paid for: a whole lot of books, but no marketing and sales help. And, it was very likely the book itself would be of inferior quality as most vanity press printers did not produce book covers, or offer editing and proofreading or page layout. You had to do that yourself, or pay a professional. Therefore, what got printed was exactly what you delivered. Some on demand companies do that today, but we’ll talk about them another time.

Enter the new millennium.

Enter a new and successful way to self-publish: print-on-demand. When I talk to writers about print-on-demand, they get that sour, distasteful grimace on their face that tells me they’ve always been told “self-publishing is for losers.” I expect it’s because self-publishing, to many people, means vanity press. There is, also, that ‘stigma’ from the traditional publishing world, which still frowns on self-published books. This is directly related to the inferior quality of books that come out of many vanity press operations. That inferior quality means most self-published authors will not get their books into the big chain bookstores that serve the traditional publishers.

This past weekend I was watching Book TV on CSPAN. The focus was the Harlem Book Fair, which hosted a numbered of black authors. One young woman talked about her experience as a novelist: “Let me encourage you,” she said to the crowd of attentive listeners, “to consider self-publishing when you think of getting your book published.”

I did not write her name down, and I did not see the rest of the show, but I remember the pride in her voice as she talked about publishing on her own terms. I do know that if she used print on demand, she was well served because print on demand comes with a number of advantages over traditional publishing–advantages such as packages that include cover design, editing, page layout, and all the traditional tasks associated with creating a dynamite book.

Another big advantage to using print on demand publishing is time to print. Traditional publishing can take upwards of 2-3 years. There are so many people involved in the creation of a book at a traditional publishing house that time passes very slowly. Sometimes it’s hard to know whose hands your book is in–and when you will see it in print.

With print on demand, it’s possible to see a printed, professional copy of your work in as little as–well, we did a book in just over 3 weeks two years ago. Granted, it was a complete manuscript with editing and proofreading complete before it came to us. But, we created the cover and the page layout, and we turned it around in time for the author to sell books at a conference where he was the keynote speaker.

I’ll get into more detail on the print on demand process and its other advantages, another time.

Today, I wanted to introduce the idea that self-publishing in the new millennium is a good choice–because it is. If you’re writing a book, or thinking of writing a book, I recommend that you keep that door open – and explore your options before signing any papers with any publisher. As you consider how to get your book into print, consider this: readers do not buy a book based on who is listed as the publisher. They buy it because the cover attracts them, the title is compelling, and the story, fact or fiction, interests them.

Does your book stand up to those criteria? It has to, in order to succeed, regardless of your choice of publisher. Print on demand publishers understand that better than most. Working with a POD publisher is mostly a partnership. POD publishers want to create a professional book their authors can show off to friends and family–and that they can sell to the right audience. Also, it costs less, in most cases, than what those old-fashioned vanity press publishers used to charge.