Is There a Market for Your Vanity?

I recently wrote about "gatekeepers", the cadre of tastemakers (editors, bookstore buyers, reviewers, critics, etc.) that guard the bastions of popularity against the clamoring horde of would-be's and wannabe's. It's hard to pin down just who these king- and queenmakers are, and even harder to get a clear idea of their selection criteria. The process is maddening and often cruelly arbitrary, like being rejected by the bouncer at a club whose admission policy is not posted: Is it your race? Creed? Gender? Height? Hair? Shoes?

I thought about gatekeepers when I read Motoko Rich's New York Times's article on the thriving author-subsidized publishing industry. It answers the question, What do all those authors do who are bounced from the club? Rich's answer? They start their own club. That is, they take their rejected books and publish them themselves.

Until very recently the phrase most often used to describe this activity was "vanity" publishing, but like most politically incorrect opprobria used in modern parlance it was necessary to find a gentler way to express the concept. Everyone seems to have settled on "self-publishing". Not only does that term spare the self-esteem of its practitioners, but it is also probably more accurate. For, when you read the astonishing number of people who elect the self-publication option, you say to yourself, Surely there could not be that many vain authors, could there? Well...

In her article Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab Rich points out that one outfit, Author Solutions, published 19,000 titles in 2008, "nearly six times more than Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, released last year." And it sold 2.5 million copies of all the books on its list. Rich also cites Blurb, a print on demand outfit, that published more than 300,000 titles in 2008 (not all of them subsidized by authors, clearly). Blurb's revenue has soared from $1 million to $30 million.

About this phenomenon, she says,

"As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster bestsellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs."

Author-subsidized books have always been with us, but how did the phenomenon go from sidetrack to mainline in just a few years?

Every literary agent can testify to the anxiety level of authors eager - all too often desperate - to see their work in print. Even a small agency receives dozens of queries and submissions daily, meaning somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 a year. Publishers did some math and discovered that the odds of finding a gem in the slush were about 20,000 to 1. They then measured the cost of maintaining a staff of first readers and factored in the time invested by senior editors reviewing the recommendations of te preliminary readers, and concluded that that gem would have to be a major and sustained bestseller just to recoup the cost of the search. So the publishers closed the door to slush and dumped the problem on literary agents.

But that didn't lower the odds - it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one's vanity - er, excuse me: publishing one's own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.

Only one element was missing: readers. Aside from immediate friends and family, readers proved a scarce commodity. Very few self-published books found an audience (and it is likely that even those who received or bought them never read them) Even fewer broke out of the vanity ghetto, and almost all that did relied on establishment gatekeepers to boost them onto the main track. Jill Priluck, in Slate, draws a very important distinction between merely finding readers and branding yourself: "The proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands."

But there are exceptions, and here's a passage from Motoko Rich's Times piece that caught my attention:

Michelle L. Long, an accountant who advises small businesses, published “Successful QuickBooks Consulting,” a guide for others who want to help businesses use a software package made by Intuit through CreateSpace a little more than a year ago. She said she had earned 45 to 55 percent of the cover price on each sale and had made $22,000 in royalties on the sale of more than 2,000 copies.

“A lot of this niche content is doing fairly well relative to the rest of the economy because it’s very useful to people who have a very specific need,” Rich quotes Aaron Martin, director of self-publishing and manufacturing on demand at Amazon.

Long's book genuinely filled a niche, and if, as futurist and publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin predicts, "the current format-specific publishing model must give way to an audience-specific one," there may very well emerge a self-publication business model that serves a real need besides the one so aptly captured by poet Emily Dickinson:

How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell your name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!

Richard Curtis