"Traditional vs. Self-Publishing"

Back when there was more talk about the phenomenon of self-publishing than we hear now due to the comparative novelty of e-book readers, print-on-demand and services like Createspace and Kindle Direct, established, traditionally-published writers made characteristically pompous statements about why an aspiring writers should forgo the seemingly quick and easy path of publishing themselves in favor of the route of getting a publishing firm to take them and their book on.

I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.

The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.

The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.

Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.