The
greatest upheaval in very recent years for the publishing industry has been the
advent of self-publishing. This has been made possible largely through the
facility to produce books in electronic format.
Self-publishing
isn't the same as vanity publishing, which typically involves paying for the
printing of a small number of copies of a book and then distributing them to
close contacts. Self-publishing can lead to dissemination to as wide an
audience as any traditional form of publishing; the difference is that the
author takes the gamble of 'cost versus gain' themselves and shoulders the
burden of promotion without the help of a publishing company.
What,
then, is the value of a publishing company?
Like in any
other area of life, practice makes perfect and expertise is valuable.
Publishing companies know the ropes. They have contacts and they've done it all
before.
Traditional
publishing houses whose primary output is printed books are nowadays highly
selective, typically have their eye out for a potential bestseller or prize
winner, have high overheads, and accord comparatively low royalties to their
authors. While in the past they did all the promotion for a book themselves,
they now often insist that the author share the work with them. Their outlets
are bookshops over which they have no control. If a book isn't selling well, it
will be taken off display; if it never goes on display, it may not sell well.
But
traditional publishers are not the only ones. Today things are becoming leaner
and meaner. Authors aren't willing to accept 10% royalties and have no say in
the appearance of their book. A new style of publishing company has been
ushered in by the phenomenon of self-publishing.
The days
when an author could not possibly publish his or her book without traipsing
round the publishers and hoping against hope that they would be one of the
lucky ones, are gone. Strictly speaking, a publishing company isn't vital any
more for the act of publishing.
Not
every member of society, however, can be their own car mechanic, dry cleaner,
gardener, etc. Society functions through the efficient pooling of resources,
both in terms of equipment and knowledge. A publishing company which prepares
books for the internet does for the author what he could in theory have done
for himself, but it does so more expertly and without the wasteful agony of
learning everything from scratch. After that the joint venture in which
publishing company and author share in the lottery of sales is ideally more
transparent and more balanced than it ever is or could be in the world of the
traditional publishing company.
