Those Who Didn't Walk Away From Self-Publishing

Those authors who elected to self-publish their books using such services as Kindle Direct Publishing these past two decades placed their hopes in certain possibilities--of particular note among them the possibilities of the e-book and e-book reader for low cost distribution of books and this amounting to something from a supply and demand and sales perspective, the Internet working in a fashion affording an author's book a chance of its "discovery" by readers, book bloggers creating a connection between the self-published author and potential readers, the highly touted promotional possibilities of social media, the "long tail."

All of these hopes have died brutally, horribly. The self-published learned the hard way that not only did retailing their e-book at 99 cents a copy mean making very, very little money per unit, but that doing so didn't move very many "units"; that they couldn't even give their books away, especially when e-book reader owners were a minority who got only so much use out of their devices, and there were so many other people trying the same thing. As if that were not bad enough there was also the fact that for all the market theologians' smarmy talk of INNOVATION! "disrupting" business what usually happens is that in the face of INNOVATION! Established business usually fights back and wins, with publishing no more an exception to this rule than energy, the automotive sector or computing. Thus with the help of their stooges in government, the media and other institutions, Big Publishing went on the counterattack against the low-priced e-book such a selling point for the e-book reader, and in the process crushed the e-book revolution out of existence, with one consequence the fact that those readers, far from becoming the ubiquitous consumer good they seemed destined to be when Amazon first introduced the Kindle to the world, have since become a niche item (hence the price of the e-reader going up, not down, the way we are accustomed to see with electronic devices).

Still, even had that not been the case the fact remained that, as noted above, authors were having a very hard time before that, with factoring significantly into that how online discovery was never a very good prospect for anyone because of the vastness of the web, and the competition for eyeballs on it, and the way that all the relevant technology actually works. If the promise of the web was that it would efficiently connect people with the objects of their interest, even when these were niche--as those likely to be interested in a work on offer by an author outside traditional publishing's channels were likely to be--then that promise was not only unkept, but increasingly broken as rather than getting better search became the overwhelmed, endlessly manipulated, crassly sold thing that it is today. Discovered? The Internet was a place to get lost, especially if what you were offering was a book, to which even those quadrants of the web devoted to books specifically became increasingly inhospitable. (The shrinkage of the portion of the books on Google Books accessible to previewing delighted corporate copyright Nazis, but those small-time authors who got some benefit out of Internet search leading web users to previews of their books took still another hit here, with no compensation whatsoever.)

Of course, those book blogs were supposed to offer something stronger than mere "presence on the Internet." Alas, blogging of every kind was always the chase of a great many content creators after a relatively small pool of potential readers, all as the small number of book blogs any one author was likely to regard as plausible venues for reviews of their particular work meant a great many would-be authors chasing spots on a relatively small number of blogs, such that those who decided to self-publish because they hated the soul-killing process of sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejection letters or silence, in trying to get their book reviewed by bloggers found themselves . . . sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejections or silence once again. Moreover, those book bloggers, on those rare occasions when they did agree to review their book some time, tended not to give them what they hoped or needed. Simply put, self-published authors, precisely because of their inexperience (and the sheer mendacity of those who write of the business) unaware of the "ugly" preparations that lie behind the "success" of a book, thought they needed reviews. But what they really needed to get their books looked at by the public was claquing, not reviewing, because that's what so much of the competition, not least that competition they got from the trad-published, had--all as in their reviewing-instead-of-claquing, far from showing the underdog sympathy were prone to be gratuitously brutal as they punitively applied a double standard to the self-published. (Don't judge a book by its cover, goes the adage. Well, if they didn't like the cover they certainly made an issue of it, all as typos they would have shrugged off in a book put out by one of the Big Five became occasions for hysterical denunciation.) In fact it is likely the case that the bad reviews hurt far more than the good reviews helped, such that to the extent that the self-published managed to extract any publicity at all from the book bloggers it all was likely not to their benefit. Still, even that fairly miserable option became less plausible, as the desperate chase after eyeballs went on getting more desperate still as the web shifted to a more audiovisual mode of content creation and sharing (itself, of course, not an auspicious sign for those who have bet on the public's appetite for long-form reading)--and the Internet gatekeepers went to war against the independently produced content in any medium as certain Silicon Valley executives compared it with the contents of a cesspool.

Social media was at least as bad a disappointment from the start. The prospect of individuals interacting with strangers and "building up followers" by way of whom publicity materials might be shared and reshared and that way getting an appreciable number of people to look at their book was just as desperate as anything else I describe here. After all, the sort of "attention economy" realities that made blogging of all kinds such a bitter disappointment were operative here too. (Indeed, looking at the stats on their own social media accounts authors could see in a way they could not with those book blogs whose owners they begged for attention just how low engagement rates were with anything put out there.) Besides, it was the case that where one could expect people who look at book blogs to have at least some interest in books the general audience for social media doesn't, all as this scene really was a cesspool in its saturation with the kind of brain-dead bullying scum who are the last people in the world that an artist struggling to keep up the nerve to personally present their book to an uninterested world (a job their having to do themselves is itself exceedingly cruel) needs to meet. Contrary to the glib and stupid boosterism surrounding social media as a sales vehicle very few people ever sold very many books this way, all as the time and energy and passion that the addicting and traumatizing sites sucked up doubtless added to the toll of the thankless task of "publicity." And as it happened, social media too changed, as its users withdrew from the crassness and chaos and viciousness into more private spaces, social media actually becoming about interacting socially with people they knew because they had been so much brutalized exposing themselves to encounters with people they didn't.

In short, the experience was just one letdown after another. Still, even after having one door slammed in their face after another as what they quickly learned were lousy options increasingly proved to really be no options at all they may have thought, okay, I haven't sold much, maybe scarcely sold anything at all, but that can change. Because of the LONG TAIL--the idea that in contrast with the way that physical products compete for a limited shelf space so that what doesn't sell today isn't going to still be on sale there tomorrow their material could stay up on their authors' pages on the book retail sites forever, such that the chance that people could still find it remained. Yesterday's flop, tomorrow's bestseller--or at least tomorrow's cult hit, or failing that the hope of a small but steady stream of sales which would see the (literal) pennies add up, and maybe even synergize with later efforts that would find a warmer welcome. Alas, if there ever was anything to it (and there probably wasn't) this prospect also waned as the amount of material out there just went on piling up, making the field ever more crowded so that whatever chance there was of an interested person coming across their books on the Internet shrank . . .

Amid it all I imagine many consoled themselves with the thought that "something will come up," something give the self-published writer a chance, something real unlike those earlier flashes-in-the-pan. Alas, it never did, as indeed the market for books generally went into freefall (e-book readers never took off, yet paperbacks disappeared), while "generative artificial intelligence" got in on the game . . . as a result of which it was probably the case that many a self-published writer going over their sales reports probably thought the depressingly poor results of their earlier years looked pretty good next to what they were getting for their trouble now. And today there seems no chance whatsoever of things getting any better as the written word becomes more and more marginal within contemporary culture, as the Internet becomes even less hospitable to the small content creator and the niche interest than they were before, with whatever signs there may have been of a "democratization" of content creation giving way to something more centralized and punitive and repressive than anything that had ever been in the fever dreams of "totalitarianism"-obsessed Cold Warriors (courtesy not of that system they spent their lives hysterically demonizing, but the capitalism they so loyally defended, and indeed the very technologies and firms that they have so relentlessly championed as the glory of the system for which they stood).

Still, so far as I can tell a great many people remain at the business of self-publishing, and it does not seem unreasonable to ask why. The obvious answer would seem to be the extent to which they had become invested in the activity, such that, much as the purveyors of pithy self-help advice criticize sticking with a course of action because of "sunk costs," they can't bear to walk away from all they put into it with nothing to show for it. Besides, there is why so many went down this path in the first place--the all too rarely admitted hope of a career where they have some independence, some control over their lives; where maybe, just maybe, they could go from being a nobody to being a somebody. After all, it isn't as if other possibilities are beckoning to them that way (indeed, the reason so many become writers, or try to become writers, is because this looks like the best shot most of us will ever have at it), or the need to do so any smaller than before. Quite the contrary, these last twenty, fifteen, ten, five years have seen the situation of the "nobody" grow only more desperate in a way that would seem summed up by how, amid a pandemic that made the morning commute not merely wretched but potentially deadly as Authority chose to leave the members of what it so delicately termed the "herd" to their fates, sneered at them for being fearful of death and disability ("Suck it up" said the billionaire), and, taking the extreme opposite of their attitude toward those describable as killed by the violence of designated enemies of the state, treated them as "unworthy" victims when they met those fates (even the deaths of the rich and famous didn't get the publicity that such events ordinarily got when they died of COVID-19), escaping the lot of a nobody in this society came more than ever before to seem a matter of life and death. And so, like a certain someone, believing in "the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us," they told themselves that they only had to "run faster, stretch out" their "arms further" until that "one fine morning" they would finally reach it, only to find themselves "borne back ceaselessly into the past," like so many pursuers of the cruel and destructive lie of that Dream before them.