Ask any bookseller about self-published books and they will groan. Depending on how many self-published books they are asked to stock they will groan and bang their heads on the table. If they are given as many as we are they will groan, bang their heads on the table and demand a stiff drink.
It’s not that we look down on self-published authors, it’s just that generally speaking if someone is a good writer and professional in their approach and believes in what they’re writing and listens to constructive feedback their work will find a home with a ‘traditional’ publisher (ie one which doesn’t expect the writer to pick up the tab and which spends time and money editing, typesetting, designing and marketing the book). There is no great conspiracy that stops people becoming published authors. Really – agents and publishers need to turn a profit and are looking for great books and if no-one wants yours then you need to look at the reasons you’re getting knocked back and address them.
The perils of self-publishing is something I’ve written about before about a year ago: here, here and here and other people who are much more authoriative than me such as Nicola “crabbit old bat” Morgan and the marvellous Jane Smith at How Publishing Really Works have written lots on the subject. But despite the increasing number of people warning against self-publishing – even if you don’t get ripped off it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with anything a bookshop wants on their shelves – the number of self-pubbed titles arriving on our desk is increasing exponentially.
In the last few weeks we’ve received children’s picture books with illustrations described as ‘naive’ but which were actually just dreadful; books with grammatical errors in the blurb*; memoirs of people that no-one – barely even Google – has heard of; soft porn which managed to be neither erotic or literary despite the enthusiastic claims in the blurb; books with covers so ugly only their creators could love them; books with glowing endorsements from the people who run the self-publishing outfit (to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies ‘well, they would say that, that wouldn’t they?); poetry which wasn’t even emo-6th form level and there seems to be a never-ending supply of would-be literary fiction, YA books about vampires and children’s books about anthropomorphic toys, including a bear named after a domestic airport (I mean, WTF?). And there’s one libellous joy which wasn’t sent directly to me by the author but which the temptation to rip apart here is almost too great… for the moment I’ll wait until his on-line rantings get too personal and then the gloves will be off.
So, if you have self-published your book and want to send it to us do make sure that it will stand up to our (very) critical scrutiny, that there’s nothing on the outside which will make us chuck it straight in the recycling box and that you accept that the chances of us stocking it, based on past experience, is about 1 in 75. We’re so short of space that we don’t have room for the complete canon of Jane Austen so your book is going to have to be seriously good for me to shoehorn it onto our shelves instead of finding space for Mansfield Park.
* and please don’t jump in here to criticise any grammatical or punctuation errors I may have made – this is a blog post, not a book I’m publishing and which I expect to stand on its own merits alongside professional published titles.
