It’s been a mixed day. My regular coffee-and-internet wakeup routine included reading this post by Mur Lafferty – someone who’s positivity and ideas have always been inspiring to me – being mildly negative about self-publishing. One comment in particular caught my eye: that self-published books “won’t be in book stores”. If I were categorising her comments on her behalf, I’d put that one under “generalisation”.
Next up, the BBC News website offered comments by the author MG Harris off the back of this article on self-publishing. All of her comments were valid, but I’m worried that the general air of negativity was off-putting for anyone considering financing their own print run, particularly the following:
“However, author MG Harris believes that writers taking on the whole publishing process themselves can fail to give their work proper scrutiny.
“It’s all too easy to just end up writing whatever you feel like writing and then just say ‘it’s ready’ with a few minor superficial corrections,” she explained.
She added that real publishers have all the expertise needed to bring sheets of words into a marketable book.”
I’d hope “real” publishers do have the expertise to produce a marketable book, and I know that easier access to the market will allow a lot of unedited, rushed work into the wild, but it’s patronising to suggest there aren’t writers out there with the technical and marketing skills needed to produce a professional, polished product and market it.
It was with those words in my mind that I drove into town to take my first shipment of Make a Move to the Manchester Travelling Man store and sign the paperwork for the sale-or-return deal I’ve arranged with them. Abby, the co-manager, was impressed with the quality of the finished product, and put them out on display, and a colleague from work arrived to buy a copy while I was there having made the trip into the city just for that reason, so I signed the book at his request, thanking him for being my first “real” sale. It was a fun time for me, especially if you compare it to the enforced solitude of writing 100,000-or-so words.
And that, right there, is the whole point that people seem to be missing. There isn’t a lot of money to be made in self-publishing, but if you’re doing it just for the money, as in any endeavour, it’s going to be a soulless task. I’m doing it because it’s fun. It entertains me to do it. Okay – I’ll admit to 5, maybe 10% of ego in the equation, but primarily, I’m putting Make a Move out myself, because meeting people, talking about the story and writing in general, working with printers, working with my graphic-designer friend Sam – all of those things are infinitely more fun than leaving my book to rot on my hard disk while the “real” publishers work out whether the eSky is eFalling at all.
I’m not trying to be a positive voice amongst the doom mongers; I’m just offering my answer to the question that titles this post:
Hell yes.
Tags: Marketing, Sale-or-return, Self-publishing, Shops
At Year Zero, we self-publish in part because we think it’s best for our books, but most of all so we retain absolute control. And with taht goes freedom – the freedom to write what we want, and edit how we want, and have the cover art we want – and to try stupid daft things like touring an anthology as though it’s an album and priniting our own t-shirts and taking off on new exciting projects and caring about our art.
If you’re not having fun self-publishing, you’re not just doing it for the wrong reasons – you’re probably brain dead!
Add to that the freedom to work with who you want. Sam and I have been looking for a project to work on together for a long time, and it was as fun, creative and inspiring as we knew it would be. The idea of giving your concept to a staff designer who doesn’t care about your book is horrifying.
Touring an anthology: I love that idea.