Writer, Security Guy, Tinkerer

I see a steady stream of posts on the problems with indie/self publishing. Some are thoughtful and reasonable (e.g. The downside of the e-revolution in publishing). Some are much less so, and not worth a link. Good and bad, though, share a common trait: They identify problems faced by self publishing authors as indie problems when those same issues are faced by any publisher.

They tend to boil down to a set of completely valid issues:

• What to publish
• Quality control of the finished work (manuscript, formatting, cover art)
• Poor or unprofessional marketing, promotion and distribution

They get sliced and diced lots of ways, and I’ve seen them stretched into lists twenty items long. But these three are the main categories.

Every single one of them occurs in traditional publishing. Every single one of them is challenging. And, while they may be less wrong more often than most self publishers, traditional publishers are entirely capable of screwing up each and every step.

So what’s the real difference? Too many self publishers fail to treat the publishing process as different than the writing process or as a serious and important effort.

That piece of news should not be revelatory. Saying that the problem with self publishing is that too many people  don’t work hard enough at the publishing part is the same as saying that the problem with writing is too many people don’t work hard enough at the writing part. As a reader, you still have to avoid bad books.

So what do you do? For readers, pay attention. It’s no different than any other source of information these days. When the advent of blogging allowed millions of monkeys to connect their keyboards to your browser, how long did it take for you to filter out most of the garbage and find reliable, high quality sources of information you trust and enjoy? Self publishers are the same way. Many will be bad, many will be good, some will be great.  Pay attention to recommendations, reputation, and take advantage of opportunities to sample.

For self publishing writers, read every post by Dean Wesley Smith, grit your teeth, and put the same care into publishing as you put into writing. Make a good impression, because that’s what will bring your readers back.

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The debate between indie vs. traditional publishing often sounds like a Braveheart monolog. “You may take away my extraneous commas, but you’ll never take away my freedom!” Frequently, the discussion revolves around an author’s ability to retain control of his work. Freedom and control are important, but they mean something very different for established writers like Barry Eisler or Amanda Hocking than they do for newbies and aspirants. Eisler is a traditional publishing best seller, Hocking an indie/self publishing phenomenon. Both have demonstrated an ability to write what people want to buy and read. Both have received a lot of feedback from editors, readers and reviews on what works and what doesn’t. Their experience puts them in a better position to produce a better book each time they sit down to write.

An aspirant is more like someone auditioning for American Idol. We show up with the personal conviction that we have what it takes to channel Sam Cooke or Carole King. We’re dying to get in front of the judges and make it. We want everyone to hear us sing.

But, we’ve also seen the poor schlubs whose performances are so bad they give you chest pains. The people who sing like a cat in a clothes dryer. The people who keep singing even after a judge throws them a lifeline by telling them to stop.

The people who have no idea they shouldn’t impose their voices on the public.

Now, I’m sure you’re not one of those people. I’m doubly sure I’m not one of those people. Really. I’m certain, I think.

Traditional publishers can protect unprepared aspirants from themselves through guidance and validation. Anyone in a creative field needs to deal with rejection and at least temporary failures and setbacks. Even with that in mind, no one wants their failures to be any more public than necessary. Submitting a manuscript is a fairly private way to risk rejection. Privacy is helpful for the ego, but just as importantly, it’s helpful for you brand. Fail too publicly too often, that’s what people come to expect from you.

Guidance is essential. Writers, and creatives generally, can be blind to our own shortcomings and the weaknesses in our work. Editors put the shortcomings right in your face and get you to fix them.

Certainly, there are other places to get that kind of help. Critiques, beta readers, hired expertise. What a traditional publisher has that none of those has is a willingness to say “I believe in this, and I’m willing to take a financial risk on it being successful.” Anybody can deliver the first half of that, but the second half is important. Ultimately, most writers seeking publication also want commercial success. A willingness to take financial risk on a work is an excellent in-kind predictor.

Validation and guidance are by no means the only value traditional publishing can provide, and, as I said, they’re not unique to traditional publishing. But especially for the aspirant, I think those services are essential to get from somewhere. A unique advantage of traditional publishers vs. indie/self publishing is that it’s very hard to ignore their guidance. Publishers are gatekeepers. They can always not publish. Your critique group is great. If you’re lucky, they’re experienced, and their advice is sound. But you have to be willing to listen if they tell you that you sound like this guy:

I’m by no means telling you which way is right. I don’t know which path I want for myself. But I think the shift under way in publishing is going to demand a lot more maturity and self awareness from writers, particularly newer ones.

I’d love to hear what you have to say. Is it too easy to believe you’re Carrie Underwood when you’re really a dork with a power mullet and a voice like an asthmatic bulldog?

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I grew up watching This Old House with my dad. We’d watch Norm Abram (way back before he was a Master Carpenter) make an old wreck of a home look beautiful. One of the constants of the show was that the homes were always a frenzy of activity. Dozens of people were always framing, plumbing, roofing and finishing. The tools were amazing – I still remember seeing Norm’s laser-guided mitre saw for the first time. Houses were rebuilt to spectacular size and style, and an endless parade of specialists put their stamp on individual aspects of the home. A big, multi-team crew took a home with a lot of potential and turned it into something great.

After years of following This Old House, we stumbled across The Woodwright’s Shop (on a lower rent public television station). If you’ve never seen it, you need to go watch a few episodes now. Roy Underhill blew my mind. We had found the complete opposite of This Old House. Gone were the specialists, fancy tools, commercial plugs and ostentatious facades. Roy Underhill took tools that would have been old in 1750 and turned out some of the most beautiful woodwork I had ever seen. He’d cut down his own trees. He powered his lathe with his foot. Sometimes, during the show, he would make the tool he needed then turn around and use it – all in a single shot.

He did sometimes bring in experts. I remember the guy he brought in who built a violin with a pocket knife and a hand saw. But he wasn’t there to build a violin for Roy, he was there to teach Roy how to do it.

He didn’t use any tricks. He didn’t use anything your grandfather (or his neighbor) didn’t have in his garage.

But he did something Bob Vila and Norm Abram (whom I still think is fantastic) never did. He made himself personally responsible for the entire process start to finish. Nobody else could take the blame if the table turned out crooked or the door didn’t close correctly. A mistake was never due to a problem with a tool, because the tools were never expected to be smart enough to control themselves.

It was all Roy, his sweat, and the practice in his hands.

The difference between the two shows and the two approaches is exactly the difference between traditional publishing and indie publishing. Both showcased a ton of skill. Both could produce beautiful results. Both had a great market for what they built. And either would fully respect the quality of the other’s work. The difference was never about quality.

The difference was about reliance on experts vs. development of expertise.

Experts vs. expertise are both completely reasonable approaches. It’s not even about picking Norm’s way or Roy’s way. It’s about understanding the implications of a Norm approach or a Roy approach at each stage of your work.

Where do you want to do the hard work to develop expertise? Make no mistake, Roy always sweated more than Norm. Where do you want to allow yourself to specialize, and what are you willing to trade for that? How much are you willing to trust someone else’s expertise? Roy couldn’t build a brick wall as well or as fast as they did on This Old House.

So, are you a Norm or a Roy?

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Lately, I’ve immersed myself in the buzz around independent publishing, ebooks and the desire for some authors to shift away from big publishing. On the indie side, authors are breaking free from “the man”, going their own way, and some are doing very well. On the traditional publishing side, authors, agents and editors point out that with indie publishing, there’s no garbage filter, that publishers don’t just find authors and stories, they improve them, and that a huge amount of work goes into making a manuscript something worth printing (or downloading).

Both sides are right, as far as they take the discussion, but they’re both failing to put the difference between indie and self publishing in the right context. There’s a lot of talk of gatekeepers, quality control, marketing and distribution, dead trees and large vs. small royalties. All are fair points.

Nobody talks about risk management.

That’s the characteristic which unites all of the issues and differences. I’ll admit to being a bit biased here, since I do risk management for a living, but I think it gives me a different perspective than most people coming to the issue from the (aspiring) author’s side of the discussion.

Risk management, at its most basic, is finding the right balance between potential loss and potential reward. The most important thing to remember is that when evaluating risk, there’s no universal right answer to what an acceptable risk is. Potential returns or losses are often imprecise (what’s the personal value of being a published author? A best selling author?). In cases where they are precise – such as money gained or lost – the importance of that result varies depending on your goals. Seeing your name on a book may be more important that the possibility of losing money in the process. The perspective and priorities of each person or group making a decision influences risk evaluations.

Traditional publishers take an author’s manuscript and lead the author thorough revision cycles, multiple editing phases, produce cover art, market, distribute, and so on. All of those steps are time consuming and expensive. They don’t spend that time and money for fun – they spend it to make the book more likely to sell. Please note I didn’t say to make the book better or more successful. Those may be true, but they’re not important here. Publishing, especially traditional publishing, is a business and the goal is to earn money. Adding expensive effort to a book means they have to sell more to recover that investment. They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t believe the return was worth the investment, i.e. the risk of net loss was lower with the investment than without it.

From an author’s perspective, the situation is different. Authors have a host of motivations which may include return on investment, but include many intangibles, too. I’m going to over-simplify and put them into three categories:

I Want To Make Money With My Books: Authors going the traditional publishing route are highly insulated from financial risk. They need to do the work of writing, and there are certainly no financial guarantees in that work. But the work of writing happens in all scenarios, so it doesn’t change the risk assessment.

Authors bear no direct cost from the traditional publishing process (“Money flows from publishers to authors, never the other way”, is the standard shorthand to identify publishing scams). So, traditional publishers reduce an author’s financial risk.

I Want To See My Name In Print: Here, the revenue goals of traditional publishers increase the risk of an author failing to meet this goal. The world has a lot more manuscripts than it has good manuscripts, and a publisher is much less likely to be financially successful with a bad one. This goal is most of what gives rise to authors’ perception of publishers as gatekeepers. With respect to this goal, that perspective is well founded.

I Want Lots Of People To Read My Books: Quality control/ improvement efforts from traditional publishers and marketing and distribution capabilities insulate authors from financial and outright failure risks here. When all independent publishing was through a vanity press, authors would be left with no money and a garage full of thousands of books they had no practical way to sell.

Leaving aside the question of the final product’s quality for now, the risk difference in indie publishing is clear.

An author’s risk of failing in the “see my name in print” goal moves to zero.

The likelihood of and author losing money was already zero in traditional publishing. It can be low for indies as well, but the likelihood of actually making money is probably lower as well. There are no advances paid in indie publishing and the great majority of indie published books sell many fewer copies than the great majority of traditionally published books.

I freely admit that this is a very contentious area, though. Dean Wesley Smith and Kristin Kathryn Rusch are must-reads on this topic. They do the actual math. They don’t go so far (correctly) as to tell you that indie publishing will be successful, but they do show you exactly what you have to do to make the finances work. They also highlight financial opportunities that simply don’t exist in traditional publishing for all but the most successful authors. I also suggest following Joanna Penn, who pulls together the best indie publishing articles on a daily basis.

The risk of failure at “having lots of people read my book” is higher in indie publishing. Exceptions like Amanda Hocking are both wonderful and important, but even she acknowledges that she’s a very unusual case. Traditionally published books sell more copies than indie published books. Individual titles may differ, but on the whole, this is true.

Evaluating this risk is more complicated, though, as it’s weighed against the “see my name in print” goal. Most authors want both, but you can’t be widely read until you’re published. In the traditional world, most authors won’t be published. The importance of these two goals varies among all authors, but I think it’s safe to say that being published is a prerequisite to being widely read. So, I’ll give the risk reduction edge to traditional publishing. By the time you’re published, you’re more likely to be widely read with a traditional publisher than as an indie.

Following the traditional publishing route, then, increases an author’s risk of failing to get published at all, but reduces financial risk and risk of not being read.

Expense and being widely read are clearly connected, as product quality can be improved through editing, art work, etc. Sales are improved through marketing. So the more important it is to an author to be widely read, the more a traditional publisher insulates the author from financial loss, as an indie author has to pay for those services.

Most often the traditional vs. indie discussion is in terms of quality, income, freedom. Those are the right issues. Without putting it in terms of risk management and the differences between an author’s risks and a traditional publisher’s, it’s much harder to see where the benefits and pitfalls of the different approaches lie.

It’s also harder to understand the fundamental implication of indie books: The author is the publisher, so the author has all of the risks. That’s not necessarily bad, but you ignore it at your peril.

In my next post on this subject, I’ll dig deeper into publisher vs. author goals, talk about how technology is changing roles, and what that does to the risk analysis.

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