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Self-publishing: Doing it yourself & doing it better

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More from Mark Medley | @itsmarkmedley

This is the 10th instalment in our Ecology of Books series, examining the complex interrelationships that comprise Canada’s publishing industry — from small-press proprietors to the country’s biggest houses, from booksellers to book bloggers to book reviewers. Today, Mark Medley explores the changing face of self-publishing.

When Terry Fallis sits down at his desk, he’s reminded of how far he’s come. Four of his book covers are tacked to a nearby bulletin board. In the top right is the mock-up cover for his novel, The Best Laid Plans, which never saw the light of day. To its left is the cover of his self-published version, which Fallis released in September 2007. Below it is the paperback edition published by McClelland & Stewart after the book won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And to its right is the cover of his forthcoming novel, The High Road, which will hit stores this fall.

“It’s kind of like you’re playing in the minor leagues,” he says, “and you get called up to the Stanley Cup finals.”

In 2006, Fallis began his search for a publisher the traditional way, sending sample chapters to agents and publishers across Canada. He was “greeted with a deafening silence.”

“It was a pretty easy decision — although a last resort — to move down to self-publishing,” he says.

After researching his options, he signed on with iUniverse, where a publishing package currently costs $599 and $4,200. He spent $3,500, which paid for cover-design advice, an editorial review of the manuscript, a publishing assistant whom he worked with by phone and e-mail, copy editing, proofreading, 10 paperback copies and one hardcover — as well as a listing with online book retailers. Because it was an iUniverse Publisher’s Choice, hard copies were placed in one Indigo store for eight weeks.

“It was a positive experience for me,” he says — though he later adds, “I still consider it to be a spasm of self-indulgence to publish your own novel.”

For writers who can’t find publishers, going it alone has long been a last resort. Hundreds of thousands of authors self-publish each year (the Association of Canadian Publishers doesn’t keep track). But what was once called “vanity” publishing is seeing a pronounced up-tick these days that is threatening publishing’s longstanding business model. And why not: An author can now go from manuscript to book in a matter of minutes — easily and more lucratively than has hitherto been possible.

***

Steve Almond describes himself as a cult writer. He’s the author of six books, the most recent of which, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, was just published by Random House, the world’s biggest publisher. This is all well and good, but for Almond there are drawbacks. He gives one example: In 2002 he wanted to call his first short-story collection The Body In Extremis, the title of the final story; his publisher, Grove Atlantic, insisted on My Life In Heavy Metal, the title of the first story. Grove won.

“Any time that you enter into an agreement that you’re not in control of,” he says on the phone from outside Boston, “you have to make certain compromises. And that can be kind of tough.”

Not long ago, he had an idea for a new book: a collection of very short stories paired with brief essays about writing, published in a flip book with two covers, but he couldn’t generate any interest among editors (“I don’t blame them for one second” he concedes).

Around the same time, he did a couple of readings with other authors who were on a rather unstructured book tour and found himself embracing the DIY mentality. He got a friend to design a book cover, then availed himself of the Espresso Book Machine at the bookstore at Harvard University. “I’m used to waiting 18 months,” he says, but after feeding a PDF into Espresso he watched his book “pop” out of the machine — “literally fall like a gumball down the chute. And I picked it up: It’s wet, its warm. I wanted to swaddle it; it was like a newborn.”

Almond struck an agreement with the bookstore to print copies of This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey for about $5 apiece, which he sells at readings for $10. It isn’t in bookstores: “I don’t want this book everywhere. I want it at readings that I do where it becomes an artifact that I hand to the person who I know is going to read it, not some commodity that’s renting shelf space in a Barnes & Noble.”

Since then, he’s gone back and added new covers, updated some of the stories, experimented with size, added lists of recommended books and music. Thus, each edition is unlike the one before. He’s so pleased with the result that he self-published a second book, Letters From People Who Hate Me. And he’s placed his next short-story collection with a small press with whom he will split production costs and revenue 50:50.

“Traditional publishers will continue to exist,” he says, “but increasingly they are going for books that have a premade audience. Celebrity memoirs, celebrity dog memoirs, political books, books that pretty much have a built-in platform. And the world of traditional literary work is going to have to find new and innovative ways to make its way into the world. And that’s something that can be a cause for despair, but it’s also a cause for celebration. We’re at the beginning of a new era.”

***

Bob Young is a busy man. He is the owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. He is vice-chairman of the Canadian Football League. And he is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, whose raison d’être is to “turn authors into publishers.”

In 1999, Young wrote Under the Radar and published it the traditional way. It sold more than 20,000 copies at $25 each, for sales of around $500,000. He got the princely sum of $2,311 — what was left over after the costs of production, marketing, returns and all the costs his contract deducted before calculating his royalties. His takeaway: “What I understood as a business guy is that publishing is a really hard business.”

When he set up Lulu 2002, his focus was on the 19 out of 20 writers who can’t get their books published rather than competing for the one out of 20 authors whose books will go on to be successful. When he began, he recalls, “The general reaction back then was one of indifference.” But today Lulu.com, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is just one in a crowded electronic-publishing marketplace that includes iUniverse, Smashwords, Amazon’s Digital Text Platform and Scribd. Last year, Lulu.com published more than 400,000 books.

Until now, Canadian orders have been filled in the States but Young lets it slip that in August Lulu will partner with a Mississauga printing company to establish a Canadian footprint.

“That’s hot off the press news,” he says. We literally signed the contracts yesterday.”

***

Step foot inside the McMaster University Bookstore and you’ll likely spot something even hotter off the press. The store is home to one of six Espresso Book Machines across Canada, which they purchased in November 2008 for US$174,000.

“The machine is pretty much paying for itself,” says Mark Lefebvre, who besides working as operations manager at the bookstore is also president of the Canadian Booksellers Association. The print-on-demand machine can produce a 300-page, perfect bound book complete with colour cover in as little as five minutes. On average, a book will set you back $12 to $15 per copy.

Lefebvre says the store bought it to compete with Amazon. At one time, they were the biggest bookstore in Hamilton. Then Chapters opened up in 1996. Then, with the advent of online retailing, customers could either order a book from the store and wait two weeks, or order it from Amazon and have it mailed the same day. Now it can be argued the McMaster book store has a leg up on Amazon, because the Espresso has a database of more than a million books that can be printed on the spot.

“We’re really just a bookstore who happens to be able to make the book in our store for you,” he says.

But what’s really surprised Lefebvre is that most of the money generated from Espresso has been from self-publishing. “The demand for people who want to tell their own stories is absolutely phenomenal. Overwhelming, even.”

***

At the 2008 Book Expo Canada, Key Porter publisher Jordan Fenn was approached by a middle-aged woman who gave him a copy of her self-published childhood memoir, which she claimed had sold 15,000 copies. He found it “a charming book,” but didn’t bite.

“I think they didn’t believe my numbers,” Mary-Ann Kirkby says today.

But she wasn’t surprised. During the seven years she spent writing I Am Hutterite, she submitted it to and was rejected by “every major publisher, sometimes twice.” Most of those who responded said it was a fascinating read but there was no market for such a book (though Canada has the highest concentrate of Hutterites on earth, with 35,000 people).

Kirkby persisted. And after bookseller Paul McNally, of Winnipeg-based McNally Robinson, said he’d launch the book, she borrowed $30,000 from the bank and self-published it on her own Polka Dot Press in June 2007, with an initial print run of 3,000 copies. It became a chainwide bestseller, and within weeks Chapters was calling to see if they could stock the book, too.

The book has now sold more than 75,000 copies, and Kirkby recently signed a distribution deal with Key Porter, which is handling the book’s marketing, publicity, warehousing, selling and shipping. She’s also snagged an American publisher, Thomas Nelson.

Key Porter’s Fenn acknowledges Kirkby could make more doing it herself, but points out the upside: “She no longer has to worry about selling the book. She doesn’t have to worry about warehousing the book and arranging shipments of her book. She can just focus solely on promoting her book and writing new books.”

And that’s the rub. Self-publishing isn’t just about paying someone to print your book. If you want to find a readership, you have to hustle: market the book, get it into bookstores, sell the book, get it reviewed. You end up spending as much energy getting people to read it as you did writing it.

“It takes a certain kind of person to self-publish well,” says Nancy Wise, president of Kelowna, B.C.’s Sandhill Book Marketing, and co-author of How To Self Publish and Make Money. Founded in 1984, Sandhill is now one of the largest distributors of independently published books in Canada, with 450 titles. “It’s not for the feint of heart or the light of wallet. It takes time and it takes money.”

***

Perhaps the biggest strike against self-publishing isn’t the cost or the time or the effort, but the sense that if a book is self-published it can’t be very good.

“It was never far from my mind that I had self-published the novel, that it was not what I had wanted,” admits Fallis. “Had I known then what a stigma surrounds self-publishing, I may never have done it.”

The stigma spreads across the entire industry: the Writers Union of Canada’s website warns against vanity publishers: “the Union does not advise or encourage a writer to pay any fee to a publisher to produce his or her book.” With the exception of the Leacock Medal and the Trillium Book Awards, self-published books are usually ineligible for major prizes. (“I’m not sure what a literary award can catch that a publisher’s slush pile misses,” says James Davies, the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s senior program manager). And magazines and newspapers — including this one — rarely if ever review them.

“Even here in Saskatchewan, I had to sell a phenomenal amount of books before somebody like the StarPhoenix would pay me attention,” says Kirkby.

“It’s not that I have a philosophical objection to self-published books, but the reality is that most of them don’t cleave to the same editorial or production standards as books that come from reputable publishing houses,” says Steven Beattie, Quill & Quire’s review editor. “If I get a self-published book that looks interesting to me, I’ll definitely have it reviewed. I’ve been in this job for two years now, however, and that has yet to happen.”

Bookstores don’t have the shelf space either. “We do accept some, but there are so many out there you just open the flood gates,” said one bookseller who didn’t wish to be identified.”

There’s no doubt that the line between publishers and writers is blurring. But even though it’s easy to self-publish today doesn’t mean you necessarily should: “Self-publishing has allowed people to put lots of books into the world, but it doesn’t mean that it’s good art,” says Steve Almond. “Your job as a writer isn’t to figure out how your book’s going to get in the world, it’s to figure out how to write well enough that your book deserves to get into the world.”

Let’s give the last word to Terry Fallis, who sold about 1500 copies of The Best Laid Plans before M&S took him on as one of its authors. Two days after the book was republished, Fallis found himself on stage at an Authors at Harbourfront event in Toronto with Fred Stenson (The Great Karoo) and Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle), and soon went from reading by himself to reading with Joseph Boyden (Through Black Spruce) and Paul Quarrington (The Ravine). His book was recently chosen by Waterloo for their One Book, One Community initiative, following in the footsteps of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. His new novel, The High Road, is prominently featured in M&S’s fall 2010 catalogue, with promises of a multi-city author tour, national media and national print advertising, among other perks.

“In all humility, I think I’m probably the exception to the rule in self-publishing,” he says. “I consider it to be a lightning strike.”

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