Interesting article for those sick of agents and publishers, wanting to go it alone.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1710311,00.html

It's an interesting article, but I remain a traditionalist. I think the barrier of an agent/publisher is highly important to assess the actual market and literary quality of work being produced. Simply but, there is no similar standard in place in self-publishing. It has always struck me as vanity publishing by another, more acceptable name. Very few self-published books will be worth the writer's time, effort or money. Very few will hit the ground running, or be found in a bestseller list.

If I can't find an agent or publisher to represent and back my work in the entirety of the western world, I would surmise that the work was not good enough to be inflicted upon people. That is a true writer's discipline, in my opinion. I also do not think traditional agents and publishers will go the way of the dodo. A represented work, or a work financially backed by a professional institution, with a history of success and respect, will always beat the self-published effort hands down, commercially speaking.

JB

What about the story of Shadowmancer? Has anyone had any dealings with Grosvenor House? I think downloading books and internet publishing is the future of this industry - the publishers have had it good for too long.

Shadowmancer did well, yes. I agree there are exceptions. You may even be right that it is the future of the industry, but I sincerely hope not. Most people still prefer books they can hold in their hands.

JB

Tell that to the iPod generation. It took a few years for downloads to overtake CDs; books are not immune from this dynamic. Someone just needs to market an acceptably cheap terminal to read ebooks with and the whole market could be turned inside out...

smudger

I'll believe it when I see it. People have been proposing this for years. There really isn't that much interest in the industry. But I'll eat my hat if the 'industry is turned inside out' during my lifetime.

JB

JB,

Other than trying to put a stop to them, the mainstream music industry was distinctly uninterested in downloads for some years. In the end, they had to accept the changing nature of the music business and find ways of extracting value from downloads.

I'm not saying something equivalent will definitely happen in publishing, but I am saying that the net and related technical developments, combined with mass-market economics, can produce some very strange global phenomena (think texting, gaming, blogs...). These all came about in less time than it takes to say, "Oh, but this could never happen to publishing." Let's agree to watch this space...

smudger

I've always felt the same about self v traditional publishing JB, but recently I'm wondering. So many books published are dross and go direct to bargain bins anyway (did I read recently that figure was 30%?), huge advances on books that don't sell, massive-sellers they didn't see coming ... I'm unconvinced agents/publishers actually are particularly accurate assessors of a book's quality or even saleability. I'd prefer the traditional route ... partly because at least it is some stamp of approval (and I'm such a needy soul), but mainly because I am the world's most reluctant salesperson.

If self-publishing really does take off in the way that article suggests it might, the next niche in the market will be for enterprising salespeople to flog them for we retiring authors. However, then we'll find ourselves competing for the elite salespeople, who will select the cream of the self-published crop to pitch, and we'll be back where we started ... ah well, might just as well look for an agent then

Andrea

Perhaps we should start a Fairtrade movement for writers. You produce coffee or sugar or cotton, and there’s a worldwide movement to protect your investment. Not so for writers. We are expected to hand over our product to a broker and have to accept whatever they are generous enough to give back to us. Personally, I think I want out of that loop.

Dee

If I understand it correctly, there are already self-publishing companies that provide marketing services too. Another incentive is that by doing it this way you avoid the 15% royalty an agent enjoys for the lifetime sales of your book. Of course I think the quality of the book is everything and a poorly written book will not do well regardless of how it's introduced to the public. But it does seem that agents and publishers have a monopoly on the market - a small minority effectively choose which books to publish. And then the proportion of books which are actually in the public eye is so low anyway and heavily dependent on marketing. The whole industry needs shaking up; the Macmillan's new writing scheme seems to be a good business model - low overheads to get more writers published. Why should published books be the privilege of a few? If I've written a book, what's to stop me making it available on the internet and charging people to download it? Why do I need to go through cash-hungry middlemen to get my product read and bought? The industry is so slow - it can take years before anything happens! It can only be a question of time before people begin downloading novels. It's an analagous situation to when CDs replaced vinyl - nobody would have thought that CDs would overtake records. Just because we're used to reading novels on paper it doesn't mean that this is the future medium of the novel or how they should be read.

Someone just needs to market an acceptably cheap terminal to read ebooks with and the whole market could be turned inside out...

Smudger, out of interest, would this be a hand-held terminal?

Andrea

a small minority effectively choose which books to publish

Traveller, yes, a small and very homogenous minority (anyone ever speak to an agent/publisher who didn't have lovely round vowels? Okay, that's flippant, I'm sure there are loads ... but, oh, actually I genuinely never have ...) who are second-guessing what they thinkthe public wants to read ... perhaps it would be no bad thing to let the public decide for themselves.

Of course, that may very well not be my book, self-published or not.

Interesting what you say about SPs providing marketing services ... I'll bear that in mind.

Andrea

"Another incentive is that by doing it this way you avoid the 15% royalty an agent enjoys for the lifetime sales of your book."

Not a problem as I see it. A good agent who sells your book into a position where it's going to sell and keep selling (or at the very least get published by a good firm) is worth a percentage. Let's see: without an agent my book isn't published VERSUS with an agent my book sells 5 trillion copies.... hmmm

Okay, that was 'reductio ad absurdum' - but when I worked in the music business, an agent would get us/me a booking, and I'd pay 10% of the fee. Without the agent, I wouldn't have had the booking. What's the problem with agents? I haven't the skill, connections or the time to hustle. But I can play/entertain and I can write/entertain. Bit of a no-brainer for me.

Some literary agents only charge 10% That seems more than fair to me.

Jim

Anj,

Yes, sorry should have said 'mobile device'. This could even be clever folding stuff that behaves a bit like paper, but can store e-books, or just a conventional handlheld computer that doesn't cost too much.

I'm not saying it will happen next year, but the technology already exists, what doesn't, at the moment, is an industry that's geared up to use it. Imagine if it became cool for teenage girls to read e-chicklit...

smudger

A writer once said to me that getting an agent feels like winning the lottery, until you realise that all you’ve won is a ticket to another lottery.

I had an agent, and he didn’t get me published. Maybe he wasn’t a great agent, maybe the novel wasn’t good enough (I'm not talking about TWH here, but one which hasn’t been on this site), I don’t know. Eventually we parted company and with TWH, instead of trying for a new agent, I went straight to a small publisher who is happy to deal with me direct. It’s not costing me anything, and I get a lot of say in the cover, and the blurb and so on. I’ll have to do most of the marketing myself but, from the experience of the published writers I know, that doesn’t seem too different from mainstream.

Dee