I've been following Penelope Trunk's adventure with self publishing her own book with great interest. Apparently, she done really well with it. Trunk just wrote an excellent post about lessons that she learned from self publishing.
She's totally right about a number of things, including the fact that publishers don't promote authors. Authors must promote authors and use social media to do that.
One of the problems with e-book and self published books is that people do need editors. They need outside eyes to look for inconsistencies and typos. (Actually, traditional publishers are doing a terrible job with that now.)
If you are thinking about self-publishing or e-publishing a book and would like to hire an experienced editor, send me an e-mail. I'll hook you up with the right people.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t have a book so much as several spiral-bound notebooks of things that annoy me. Unfortunately, people who correct my grammar are mentioned several times.
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Trunk: Self-publishing books should be about making money, not credibility. You don’t need publishers to get an audience, you can use a blog.
Me: Why am I paying money for a book from a person I can read for free, and whom I read 1 out of 10-20 posts that I find interesting, and only then because other people are discussing it online? Without a publisher, I don’t have an initial indication that your book is any good — only that you are more interested in making money that gaining credibility.
All the reasons Trunk gives for self-publishing are the identical reasons I give for not buying self-published books.
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Yeah, I have never bought a self published book and would never buy Trunk’s, but a lot of people are doing it. I’m not sure if there’s any money in writing these books, but there might be money in helping people self publish their books. She’s also right about the problems with traditional publishing companies.
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There probably is money in it now, but I’m guessing a lot of that is first-mover benefits. There are currently about 10 people who are doing quality self-publishing,and 7 of them are making good money. When there are 1,000 people doing it and 7 of them are making money, it won’t look like such a good deal.
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I looked at her post and her page about the book. You know? I’m not convinced — her talk about having a great starter page? Maybe that works if she had one but the landing page sucked. The lack of title sucked. For someone who’s all about social media, she seems to miss a lot of the appeal. (I might read an online sample if I could even figure out what it was about but I couldn’t even do that.)
I’d say that Wil Wheaton, the actor, author & SF geek icon, has a much better grasp on self-publishing: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/books/ where he promotes and sells a range of ebooks and hard copies. Some are “souvenirs” that you can buy at cons, and you can order as PoD books or ebooks. Flexible and, I suspect, a better self-publishing model.
(I agree about the need for editors. No one should be published without an editor!)
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Wil Wheaton needs an editor. He can’t even spell his name.
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I’d think that with ebooks, a new publishing model could undercut traditional publishing by a huge amount but still perform some editing and gate-keeping functions and still make money.
I just don’t know who could do that. I’d guess that the current publishers can’t shed old cost structures fast enough to be successful. iBooks are stupid expensive and mostly seems to exist to get people to say, “I’ll go buy a real book.” Same with Kindle. The only ebooks I have a free classics. I’d be happy to pay $5 for a paperback that I now get for $10, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.
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I would buy a self-published book. I haven’t (I think), but there are a few I’ve considered. I’d buy it for the same reason I’d buy a standard-published book, because I’d heard good things about it, because I’d gotten to see enough of it to think that I’d enjoy it.
I don’t actually see why those goals couldn’t be met with a self-published book, if self-published authors networked to give each other the same kind of reviews they give published books, if bloggers looked at and wrote about the, all the same things I now rely on.
Now, I do think that most self-published books are very very poorly edited (including the one that I edited for my daughter — there was a kid based nanowrimo promotion in which the kids “published” books). I’m a terrible editor. There’s a typo in the first sentence of the book.
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I’m like MH about eBooks. They cost too much. I don’t know what the discount should be for not printing the book, but I know that it should be less than $0. I’m willing to give them the trade off of I can’t read in the bathtub in return for the other conveniences (it doesn’t way anything). But, until they give me a way to resell/give away the book, I want a discount for that, too.
In the mean time, I’ve been using our library’s extensive ebook collection. It’s very cool. I can download the books, read them, and then they automatically return themselves (so I don’t rack up late fees). I don’t know how long this will last — publishers are worrying about ebooks at libraries. But, in the meantime, it’s great.
But, if they started selling books for $5, I’d probably buy ebooks, too. Right now, they’re driving me away from buying at all.
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Last year, at a local book fair, a guy was selling a self-published children’s book about a magic telescope. He had brought a real telescope with him and let Medium Raggirl look through it. She was really excited about it, and so we bought the guy’s book.
It was O.K.
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See, I’m proving my point about being a bad editor.
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Her business model seems a bit messed up. It looks like she’s writing a self-help book, but marketing it as a “limited edition” collector’s item coffee table book? People buy coffee table books because they’re filled with pretty pictures of something considered classy or exotic.
Plus, she says it’s about the landing page, not the cover. If a book is a luxury item that says something about you, you can bet it’s almost all about the cover. Finally, if you’re marketing a book as an aspirational luxury item, a self-help book is possibly the worst genre. People want to imagine themselves as wealthy, erudite, or put-together, not as disorganized or as a type of person who reads self-help books.
Also, maybe it’s because I’m not a famous self-published author, but I fail to see how you can get very far without a title, especially if you want your book to spread by word of mouth and google searches. It’s much easier to say, “have you read X?” (or to google a title) and not “have you read that self-published book by so and so?”
Like others, I am not inherently biased against self-publishing, but I would have to know that the book (like any book I buy) was worth owning before buying it. If it’s something I would read more than once, or want to refer to, then I would buy it, so a self-published book would have to convince me of that, just like any other book.
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I’ve been enjoying e-books. I read them on my iPod Touch via the Kindle app. Mostly I pick up romance novels, usually under $5 each. Now and then I splurge on a more expensive e-book by a favorite author, like Carla Kelly or Suzanne Brockmann.
I would buy self-published books if they had good buzz (i.e., romance novels). But I don’t really read much non-fiction that’s not online stuff.
A friend of mine sells self-published e-books on personal organizing.
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(this is not about self publishing, but I didn’t want it to get lost in the earlier bacon posts: breaking news, Denny’s has come out with a bacon ice cream sunday)
http://adage.com/article/news/maple-bacon-sundae-denny-s-serves-baconalia-menu/149629/
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I’m working on a self-published (ebook) mystery as a project for this year, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
What convinced me to go for it, besides wanting to get past my own demons, was this piece I caught about John Locke’s thoughts, which pretty much boils down to “I can write a book that’s better than 1/10th as good as a $9.99 book and sell it for 99 cents.”
Sometimes, even most of the time, I do want a well-edited, well-written book curated by expert acquiring editors. And sometimes I honestly just want something to read in the hospital waiting room/on the plane/etc. My “eureka” moment has been that I myself have started picking up $0.00 classics and $0.99 books for those times. Sometimes the quality is poor (for the self-published stuff), but I don’t feel cheated at that price.
As a web editor I totally get the value of editing. I’m just increasingly unsure that there isn’t space in the market for a less-polished product.
I think to pay for an editor you’d probably have to start charging more for the book, which is definitely a factor in how I’m opting to do things (I have a friend who is semi-pro doing it for love and glory, but I know then it will be a semi-pro job). As it is I’ll have to sell about 3,000 copies to break even, which I may not do.
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I think editing for typos is pretty vital — but JennG, you might be imagining that as an automatic baseline. I’m terrible at editing my own typos, and yet, they scream at me when they’re in a book I’m reading. So, I’d be unwilling to pay for works with typos in them (and, I think I mean more than 4-5 errors in the entire book, including misspellings).
The more sophisticated editing, for content and flow, perhaps I’d be willing to do without. I read a lot of blogs, and they’re written without that kind of editing. But, I don’t read blogs that have significant numbers of typos (do I mean copy editing errors?).
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“I can write a book that’s better than 1/10th as good as a $9.99 book and sell it for 99 cents.”
You could write about a vampire named Bedward and his romance of a girl named Ella.
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As I’ve mentioned before, I have a couple of relatives who are very successful at self-publishing physical books and I talk a lot to them about the business. So far, people have had some good points, but I’ll take a whack at PT, too.
1. “Mainstream publishers help very few people. And probably not you.”
Amen.
2. “Self-publishing should be about making money.” “A self-published book does not get you credibility.”
Yes and no. Making money is a sign that your book launch was successful. Also, a successful self-published book can get you credibility and improve your career (depending on the material).
3. “So a print book needs to be like candy in your hand, an interior design choice, an extension of who you are, just like how you have Nike shoes and a Marc Jacobs skirt.”
OK.
4. “You don’t need a title.”
No. No. No. It’s essential to have a title that explains what the book is about.
5. “Forget about the book cover — have a great landing page instead.”
No. As people have mentioned, this conflicts with #3. A lot of my current book purchases are design books, and if an author doesn’t have enough taste to choose an effective book cover, it’s unlikely the inside of the book will be more interesting.
6. “Do the printing in China.”
That’s definitely good advice for a coffee table book.
7. “Print books should be limited editions.”
No. If it’s good, you don’t need to generate enthusiasm with that gimmick, which I mainly associate with movie tie-in tumblers from MacDonald’s.
PT’s unbounce page is bland and uninformative and doesn’t sell the book:
http://unbouncepages.com/penelope-trunk/
As long-time readers of PT know, the essential question about the book is, “How crazy is Penelope Trunk in this book?
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I’m terrible at my own typos too and I’m an editor (and know copy editors save everyone’s rear ends on a daily basis). So yes, automatic baseline.
MH – a feminist vampire novel was tempting until I remembered Buffy. Who’s going to outdo that? 🙂
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This discussion is topical.
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MH: That link was a bit like Charlie Sheen–funny, until it was sad.
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It isn’t sad if you consider that it might be performance art.
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