Confession: one of my bad habits is eavesdropping. If someone’s having an interesting conversation within earshot, so loud that you can’t help but listen, I’m inclined to tune in. It’s amazing what you hear.
The other evening I was sitting minding my own business when a bunch of people walked in and started discussing publishing. How could I not listen, huh? And my was it interesting indeed. Because one of these people wasn’t just very proud of himself because he was an author. He was full of it because he was a publisher too. A publisher of himself.
So how did he feel about the whole thing?
Well, pretty cool, to begin with anyway. They had the book there. It was non-fiction with lots of pictures and, from a distance, looked OK. Then one of the group started to talk.
‘I should have proof read it,’ she said. ‘It’s full of mistakes.’
‘But it looks nice,’ suggested one of the others.
‘The pages keep falling out,’ the man said. ‘I don’t think it was printed properly. And some of the photos stop on the page. And some of them go right off the edge.’
I thought of offering up the technical term ‘bleed’ here but it was pointless. Because by now it was apparent that these people had not the first clue what they were doing. Books were just simple things. Words and pictures on paper. They’d written theirs, passed on some photographs and some loose instructions ‘to someone we found in the web’ and waited for a masterpiece to turn up.
I was glad I hadn’t sidled my way into the conversation. If I had I suspect I’d have been tempted to ask, ‘What on earth did you expect?’
Apparently a hefty sum per copy from what they said. Though exactly where they were going to sell a book that was full of typos, grammatical errors, dodgy photos and with pages falling out I really don’t know.
This isn’t a diatribe against self publishing. That’s a complicated question and for my non-fiction book Saved I was happy to go that route myself. What really astonished me was that these poor bloody amateurs honestly thought there was nothing more to producing a commercial-quality book than writing a few words, taking a few photos, and then waiting for the coffee table-gracing masterpiece to come back from the printers.
If you’re really thinking of going down this route yourself please disabuse yourself of the notion that any of this is some way ‘easy’ or ‘unskilled’. Or that computers will somehow pick up your errors. Or that all those many companies wanting to bring your words to the world — for the right cash upfront from you — are the same as commercial publishers betting their own money on writers and trying to turn a profit in a highly competitive market.
I’m sure the self-publishing evangelists will howl when I say all this. But there are some gullible souls out there just crying out to be taken for a ride. And plenty of people willing to oblige (alongside some who are the genuine article, trying to create that mythical beast ‘the new business model for publishing’).
I never heard how much this little venture cost these innocents. Glancing at the book I expect it was a few thousand pounds. Maybe they could afford it. But this that all it takes to become an ‘author’ these days? A wad of money to flush down the pan?
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I have no pity for them.
W.C. Fields: Never give a sucker an even break. (And: You can’t cheat an honest man.)