bad publishers and one of the advantages of self-publishing

Self-publishing ebooks, you are much less likely to have an unpleasant experience like this one.

Small publishers are pretty popular among writers, but small presses are a lot like small towns. There are small towns where people keep their doors unlocked at night, where your neighbors will shovel your walk free of charge when you’re out of town, and where everyone gathers for hearty potlucks in the church basement on Easter and Christmas.

And then there are small towns where travelers (preferably attractive virgins) are regularly kidnapped and sacrificed on a bloody altar to Cthulhu or Demogorgon in the secret Temple of the Snake People hidden below the gas station.

So small publishers/presses resemble small towns – how effective, competent, and ethical they are depends very strongly on the people running them.

I’ve written short stories for a bunch of small presses, many of which no longer exist, and I’ve had many good experiences. And some bad ones, and a few downright ugly ones – for a few years, I occasionally got letters from lawyers inviting me to join the case against the bankrupt proprietor of one of those small presses. (I stayed out of it – litigation is a deathtrap.)

It’s understandable why a writer would put a story with a dubious publisher. Writers have this deep, deep psychological need to !!!be PUBLISHED!!!, and even if that means publishing with a publisher of dubious reliability, well, so be it. Especially for newer writers, in whom the need to !!!be PUBLISHED!!! is keen indeed.

However, that paradigm is broken beyond repair. The purpose of publishing is distribution, and technology has turned publishing into a button in a web browser. That means if you have a book, you don’t actually need a publisher to get your work in front of readers. And that means you don’t need to take a risk with a publisher of dubious reputation or reliability.

Granted, you might self-publish your book and sell a grand total of five copies – one to your mom, three to your Livejournal Star Trek fanfiction group, and one to a guy who thought it was a repair manual for a Chevy Corsica. But which is better – to sell five copies yourself, or to sell seven copies with a flaky small publisher that might go out of business when the owner’s cat dies?

The thing is, if a small publisher goes down, it will take your book with it. But if you self-publish, you keep the rights to the book. And you can grow your audience in a way you can’t with a small publisher, who may or may not be inclined to take your next book. If you write a sequel, you could pull in those five people who bought your first book. Building an audience for your work is like assembling a beach one grain of sand at a time – but you can do that with self-published ebooks in a way that you cannot with a small publisher (especially a small publisher that goes out of business when his cat dies).

So should you sign with a small publisher? Sure! But only if the small publisher has a good reputation, an actual business model, and is known for paying his writers on time (this one is important).   But there are only so many competent small presses, and they have room for only so many books. If the choice is between self-publishing or going with a small publisher that’s only been around a year or two and has a bad reputation, go with self-publishing.

I think one of the many benefits of the self-publishing ebook revolution is that incompetent and abusive small publishers are going to get eaten alive – to stay relevant and competitive, a small press will actually have to provide demonstrable value to his writers. Simply providing distribution is not enough – now that distribution is a button in a web browser, mere distribution is not enough of a reason to justify a publisher’s existence.

-JM