Was 2010 as Good as it Got for the Self-Published?

Fifteen years ago, in the wake of the arrival of the e-reader as we know it on the market, and the advent of new e-book and print-on-demand services that permitted one to, at zero up-front cost, convert a manuscript into a book on sale globally within a span of day, the hope emerged that "anyone" could become a published author--with this fed by the aspirationalism-hawking "success story" fetishists of the media fussing over how Amanda Hocking had sold a "million copies" of her paranormal romances.

Amid all the hype I suspect the more intelligent of those who entered the self-publishing market knew that the playing field had not been leveled between them and those who published traditionally. Still, especially as they had learned the hard way that for all the stupid Establishment protestations and the grifting of the "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too" industry, the path to traditional publication is all but barred for 99 percent+ of the public, they may have seen room to hope that putting out a worthy book in this fashion they would have some sort of chance. That the low cost of the e-book, the chance of online discovery, the book blogs, social media, the long tail all provided some hope of reaching an audience.

I suspect they also hoped that the situation would get better for them. That e-book readers would become not just more popular but significantly handier--ameliorating the disadvantages they still had in relation to print books, especially where long reading and close reading were concerned. That Internet search would get better at connecting the searcher with exactly what they are looking for, with all this would mean for niche interests. That the promotional ecosystem on which self-published authors could rely would develop. Instead Big Publishing crushed any e-book revolution. Internet search was enshittified, often quite deliberately, making the chances of discovery remote, with all that implied for niche interests. (Consider, for example, how on Google Books books are much less previewable and searchable than they used to be--a thing which suits the copyright Nazis just fine, but has arguably cost those really reliant on people finding their way to their book and getting interested to sell any copies.) Amid the decay of book blogging, the evolution of social media, the waning of confidence in the long tail as the world of media just went on getting more crowded and cluttered and the means for cutting through it to what we really want less satisfactory, and said ecosystem died--all as, let us not forget, all the evidence points to people reading fewer books, with all that would have meant were the situation standing still, never mind deteriorating as it has in every respect.

The result is that the essentially lousy situation of 2010 was about as good as it has ever been for the self-published author, with what we have seen since a falling away from that not very great height. And if you haven't heard that view before, that just reflects how marginal the whole matter of the self-published has become since that time as, indeed, the realities of publishing have become ever more marginal to the concerns of the media universe--such that, if never very critically minded, the media is prone to simply pass on a failing industry's boosterism to the public, even as it looks ever more disconnected from reality. Of course, for all that it doesn't look as if the number of self-published books has vanished, but I personally chalk this up to so many being unwilling to simply walk away from the game after all they have sunk into it, the more in as it is not as if some other path to realizing the hopes that led them into self-publishing has come their way--and the turn to artificial intelligence to do the hard work of whipping up the content they hope will make their dreams come true. (With enough monkeys hammering away at enough typewriters . . .) Irrational as this all is something has to give eventually, but it does not seem that we are quite there yet--though given the media that we have I don't trust them to tell the story when we do arrive at that point, such things outside the ken of the illiterates of our commentariat.