Self-Epublishing

Ran across an interesting, if gloomy article yesterday on the peril that cheap/easy self-epublishing has brought to the entire publishing field.

While it is a very interesting article, which attempts to map the concept of bubbles onto the phenomenon of ebooks, I think the effort shows a bit of strain at the edges, and discounts a couple of pretty critical factors. On the plus side, the article points out some things that maybe should have been obvious: Amazon doesn’t care if it pushes 500 million units of crap, they’re just pushing units. I think that’s a little short-sighted of them (if true), for reasons I’ll get into, but it seems like something they might do. The article also posits a possible bursting of the bubble, which probably isn’t such a bad thing, as most of those trying to cash in on the boom get bored and wander away.

But I think the bursting of such a bubble is potentially more problematic for the likes of Amazon than it is for readers or authors, and here’s why: there’s never been a shortage of self-published crap, especially since the internet flourished. What there has always been a shortage of is good stuff, and curated stuff. There are only so many authors who have invested time and talent into their craft, only so many editors who have had the ability to separate wheat from chaff, so many copyeditors and book layout designers and proofreaders and so on that can help elevate a text. And whether or not it looks like it right now, most readers can appreciate the “value add” that brings to a book.

True story: a college buddy of mine recently bought a Kindle and has been raving about rediscovering books. Recently, he read Ready Player One and started complaining about the author not having it all together because of the typos and such present in the text, and I had to tell him that was probably due to a bad transfer from the original text. Point is, people do notice that kind of thing, even non-readers such as my college buddy, and that colors the experience for them. I can imagine all too well what his response would be if he read some poorly edited self-published monstrosity. And that’s where publishers can and do offer more than $0.99 per book’s worth of value.

To put it another way, has the proliferation of community theatre programs hurt Broadway’s bottom line, despite the much cheaper tickets? Probably not. People go to see professional productions, expecting not only professional-grade acting and directing, but also all that other stuff, like the orchestration, lighting, even the atmosphere and seating. There’s something more there that they are expecting to pay for, and the same is almost certainly true of books. Once the initial rush to publish has passed (and I haven’t seen it anything like what Ewan Morrison describes, even though most of my friends are professional or aspiring writers), I think the market will come to appreciate that there is a certain dollar value for professionally edited and produced fiction.

And as a last point: just as Morrison argues that self-epublishing has produced a huge crop of new writers, ebooks in general have brought along a lot of new readers, such as my college buddy mentioned above. He was (and remains to some extent) the sort of dude who buys a new video game every week. But he’s gotten excited about reading again, and is buying books, and good books like Ready Player One and American Gods. And if the pool of self-epubbing writers starts to dry up, there may well be more people ready (and willing) to buy the good stuff.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.